I’ve been meaning to write an update on my post about electric driving — and only just now have I realized it has been a whole year since that post. Time goes by so fast!

Unfortunately, we had a bit of an accident and completely totaled our Kona (lovingly named Sparky). Thankfully all occupants were okay. It meant though we’d have a new opportunity to re-think what our primary car is.

We found a very lightly used 2024 Ioniq 5 for a significant discount over brand new. (Cars depreciate fast — and this is insane)

The Ioniq 5 was the car I wanted the first time we were shopping, and in the intervening couple of years, they have become much more readily available. As I wrote about last year, I prefer used cars thanks to depreciation, and we actually had a reasonable selection of used Ioniqs across the Denver metro area available. I highly recommend this route — it saved us a bundle on a car that literally only had 400 miles — so was effectively brand new.

The Ioniq 5 solved all the things I didn’t like about the Kona

• We got AWD, which we don’t need or care about very much, but is pretty important in blizzards on I70 in the mountains.

• Still have heated seats — mostly for back pain. These heat up so fast.

• A bit larger, especially in the back seat, so our kids have a bit more leg room.

• This car has a more up to date charging system, so it fast charges so fast. We hardly ever think about charging because we have the at-hone charging which saves so much time — we never need to go to a gas station anymore. But if we forget to charge, or want to take a road trip, it’ll only take about 20 minutes to get back to a reasonable charge level.

• It also has a bigger battery, so its range is higher than the Kona’s, and we actually charge it less often. (we usually charge only once we get below 50%)

• Basically — faster fast charging, longer range, and much more options for fast charging — has all combined and I no longer think about charging or range at all.

Overall — I highly recommend this car if you’re in the market. There have been some reports of challenges online about the charging controller (called the ICCU) and we briefly had a moment of concern driving home from the mountains when we got an error message indicating ours might have a problem. But Hyundai recently issued a software recall on ours, and we haven’t had any additional trouble, so fingers crossed they’ve solved it.