Scout-specific and general EV thoughts from my weekend with a Hummer, as an ICE enthusiast

[J Alynn]

As long as youre doing it in the right lane, thats fine with me!

Absolutely. Trust me, when I’m in my daughters IS I’m tailgating in the left lane to clear the way. PA can fine you for riding left lane if not passing and I wish they’d patrol daily to get those people out of the fun lane

 

[theonetruestripes]

[...]

First off, nobody that I’ve seen here talks about how much better one pedal driving is for any sort of city driving. We spent a solid 10 hours just driving around neighborhoods, and it took all of 5 minutes to adapt. It’s smoother, more intuitive, and (obviously) more efficient than any ICE driving.

A lot of people do, you probably missed it ;-)

I also find it dramatically better for highway stop n go rush hour type BS drives. Granted that is also when adaptive cruise control and lane guidance (i.e. the Level 3 self drive type stuff) come in handy as well.

With purely city driving, range seemed to drop at about half the rate I expected based on miles traveled (purely subjective).

Lower speed driving strongly favors range in my EV. I’m in rural VT and can drive to the only big city in VT and back and that costs me about 120% of my battery, and involves some highway driving. I can drive the same distance & more west and cross a big bridge and go a tad north no interstate highway (or, only like 5 miles of it) & run the HVAC during lunch and come home for 85% of my battery. The speed makes all the difference. I also ended up doing it once and got stuck behind some sort of unusual traffic for most of the distance and made it back home having used maybe 60% of the battery (same route, much much lower speeds, like I don’t think I ever made it past 35MPH on the way home!)

Driving up into the passes, range dropped fast, as one would expect hauling 9000 pounds of American Excellence up a few thousand feet of incline. That said, of the three passes we went through, we recouped about half of the range burned as we came back down, thanks to regenerative braking.

Hummer EV also lets you use the regen paddle as extra braking if you overcook it coming to a stoplight, rather than burning brake pads. This was handy and a nice touch, note to Scout engineers…

An EV can also map part of the brake pedal to “more regen!”. My Rivian does sort of the opposite the top bit of the accelerator travel that is normally regen is friction brake when the battery is too full to accept power from the regen system (Tesla also does this, and I know it didn’t always do it, my old Bolt didn’t do it, if you had a near full battery and were in 1-pedal mode listing the accelerator even all the way did nothing)

Second, charging really is easy and simple, but for my purposes I don’t think I’d buy an EV without a Level 2 home charger. Ditto for World’s Best Wife, who probably has a Rivian R2 in her future once her Subaru gives up.

Home charging is dramatically easier and cheaper than even DC Fast charging. I don’t think you would find any argument about that, while you might face a little about it being “needed"

Does something prevent you from installing charging at home? Like not owning a house? In some states a landlord can’t stop you from having a lienced electrician install one. In most states a landlord is fine with you having one installed (by someone competent) as long as it is staying after you leave.

It can be pretty inexpensive. I had the “best case” in a rental I was at in CA, and in the home I now own in VT. In both cases the breaker box had room for another 240V breaker pair so I was just paying for a new 50A breaker, and a cable run and a NEMA 14-50 outlet (aka RV or welding outlet) that I plugged the “home charger” (aka EVSE) into. In CA it was about $350, and in VT it was about $800. The EV “charger” was another $300 or so in the first case, and came with the vehicle in the second case. Many people don’t like the NEMA 14-50 approach because they claim it has a higher risk of fire, I’m going to claim if you avoid plug-unplug cycles (i.e. plug the EV charger in, and never unplug it, don’t take it on trips with you “just in case”!) it is fine. Or have the electrician hardwire an EV charger, as long as you don’t later want to change chargers you are also fine, it isn’t like hard wiring one is hard for an electrician.

You can also save money here by going with something less then 50A. A normal 15A 120V circuit is actually enough for the average commute, so something like 16A 240V gets you back a LOT of range overnight, enough that if you drive say half again the normal commute, and occasionally go someplace like the airport and get back at a few percent, you can still “catch back up” over a few days.

If you have 2 EVs you can buy EVSEs designed to share (they either have two charger tips on the one box, or you daisy chain the boxes and they
negate together to keep the toal power use under a limit you set). If one EV happens to have gone on a long trip it can share halves with the other until the one that wasn’t on a long trip finishes and then the long trip one will get full rate charging for the rest of the night.

The Hummer is an exception and a glorious abomination with its huge battery pack, but having to sit for 30 minutes to gain 120 miles of range (150>270; 66kwh) was something I wouldn’t want to have to deal with all the time, personally.

The Hummer has 800v charging, so I think you should have been able to charge way faster then that, except finding a charger that can manage to charge it at full speed isn’t going to “just happen”, in a lot of areas you can’t find any, and where you can it teds to only be a few.

My Rivian has a similar problem, 400V charging, not super efficient (more then the Hummer, but that is a low bar indeed!). Places and distances I was use to stopping for “about 15 minutes” become “not much shy of a half hour” with my big beast of a truck. Fortunately I don’t do that kind of trip super frequently, and many of the stops are near some great food.

That’s equivalent to charging the Harvester variant fully from zero (minus shenanigans with charging rates for the last 20% capacity, which I guess isn’t actually that bad) or the full BEV Scouts halfway.

Maybe if Costco had chargers in every spot I’d use my 1x a week trip to charge, but for my current lifestyle, without a home charger this isn’t a compromise we’d make. That said - as little as I drive weekly, charging the Harvester’s 60-70kwh battery off a level 1 outlet would probably suffice for me. I probably wouldn’t put off my Scout purchase if my slot came up over this, due to Harvester. If my commute changes a lot, that would be a no-go, and for her it’s a hard no. My goal is to EV-only for daily life and on the trails, and use Harvester to keep me out on the trails or for long trips where there aren’t chargers near trailheads.

If you want to be EV only except on long trips, yeah you are really going to want a home charger of some sort. The first six months at my new home (with a smaller EV) I was able to use level 1 with a battery only EV, and only finely decided it was important to get a L2 charger when we ended up wanting to go to a particular location about 200 miles away multiple days back to back (game convention, and we wanted to be home in the evening for our dogs).

I dunno, maybe I’ve talked myself into not worrying about it.

Maybe rather then worry, get some quotes to see what installing a L2 charger would cost you? How far from your breaker box is your garage? How many walls are involved? What outlets are in your garage already? Do you have an electric drier in the garage? Also how full is your breaker box?

Third - EV driving experience is superb for torque and power delivery and responsiveness. Probably preaching to the choir in this forum, but coming from a performance background there really is no comparison. I think the wizards at Scout have probably thought of this, but a low speed offroad mode with a gentler throttle tip-in would be great. I’d hate to be negotiating something tricky and hit a bump that jars my foot halfway down the throttle with 1000ft-lbs on tap, but maybe that’s just a skill issue.

Scout has access to (at least) the lower layers of Rivian’s software stack, which already has multiple driving modes, including some for dedicated off-road use which has a gentler “go pedal” response, and in the Rivian at least locks it into all wheel drive as opposed to it disengaging the permanent magnet motors in the rear (on the R1) or front (R2). Snow mode is similar (when driving in snow in “All Purpose” or “Conserve” the vehicle fish tails in snow any time the rears cut in/out, in snow or off-road you don’t get that effect at all). I assume that is part of the deal, and if it isn’t it is something many EVs have, so I am sure they thought about it, and it’ll be on the “TODO” list. I don’t know if that means it gets _done_ before the first ones ship, but over the air software updates are definitely a thing, and part of what is for sure covered by the JV. Plus driving modes demo well.

It’s just a perfectly flat power and torque curve, with instant responsiveness and everything on tap all the time at every speed.

Well, not really, you get max torque from 0RPM, but it does tail off towards max RPM, otherwise they wouldn't end up with things like a top speed of 130MPH.

Fourth - size and fender visibility is a killer. [...]

Fifth, last, but by no means least - air suspension was really cool, but I’m pretty sure I hope it isn’t required for the offroad package. I only bring this up as Scout had mentioned there will (I think for sure?) be an optional air suspension.

Ditto. Rivian’s R1 is all air-suspension, and it is cool, and a kick ass party trick. However everyone that has ever used a air suspension ends up either a lot of warranty issues towards the end of the warranty, or post-warranty they end up with some real pain, or they sell before the warranty expires (if you get an extended warranty make sure it doesn’t exclude the air suspension!). I just don’t think air suspension is a “last decades” kind of item.

I hope Scout can avoid requiring air suspension, as cool as I think it is, I would rather be able to get a Scout and know it’ll last me 15-20 years, not 8 to 11.

I have the Ford-branded Bilstein 6100s from Ford Performance, and while they don’t glide over the small stuff like the air suspension, they feel far better over large features. I mostly ignore water bars, train tracks, and speed humps. They’re also really cheap and effective.

I really hope Scout goes with something like that, especially with more damping capability versus the usual small diameter factory shocks since it’ll probably weigh 6-7000 pounds. If not, I hope the aftermarket can come up with some…

Auto leveling for car camping or rooftop camping would be really cool, but I wasn’t impressed with the air suspension over bigger gutters, speed bumps, railroad tracks, etc. Since it was a rental, and from an actual human instead of Hertz, we were gentle on all those bigger bumps. The giant anti-sway bars probably didn’t help (again, 9000 pounds of ‘we’re better than you’).

The Rivian definitely uses air suspension for leveling in camp mode. It is pretty awesome.

Maybe a load leveling rear air suspension wouldn’t negate the benefits of a full steel setup, while allowing a modicum of lateral leveling for camping?

Anyway, this is probably my biggest concern. Maybe someone with serious Rivian off-roading experience as well as non-air suspension offroad experience can chime in?

My off roading experience is for the most part pretty gentile, so I’m not sure I have useful feedback here. I mean I’ve driven a dry streamed, and a few modest obstacles, but most of my off roading is “on grass” (like my own back and front yard while towing), or on a dirt/mud road. Some of which I’m super happy not to be using any of my prior cars because while there is a road, that mostly means “no trees in my way” not a drivable surface!

I haven’t used an off road vehicle with a non-air suspension to compare it to!

TL;DR Living with an EV was easier and more fun than I expected, air suspension is cool but feels gimmicky and I don’t think I want it for off-roading, if I wasn’t wanting to go way off the beaten path I’d go full BEV.