Kia officially launched the 2025 Ray EV in Korea with the same low starting price of under $21,000. However, the new model year gains additional features. With incentives, the entry-level electric car can be bought for as little as $15,000 (20 million won).
The “New Kia Ray” was reborn as an entry-level EV last year. After opening pre-orders last August, starting at around $20,500 (27.35 million won), the Kia Ray EV secured over 6,000 reservations in less than a month.
It was found recently that most trips were less than three miles, with only 2% of all trips made are more than 50 miles.
That number is a little misleading as it counts every stop as a “new trip.” I could leave my house and drive 60 miles, stopping every 10 minutes, and they’d count that as 20 trips of 3 miles or less. Meanwhile a car with a 120 mile range probably wouldn’t have enough juice to make it back home depending on how far away my last stop is from the house.
I see your point, though my own experience is similar to @PriorityMotif@lemmy.world, and perhaps just as anecdotal as yours, is that people more often take trips that are A-B-A, A-C-A, A-D-A, than they do A-B-C-D-A.
I suppose it’s just a matter of convenience or time constraints, but running more errands in one trip is an overall time save in many occurrences, and more people should do that.
Makes me wonder how many of these ‘trips’ are one stop then back home and is many contain multiple stops. Or if it would drastically change the average to remove the multiple stop trips.
Thanks for raising that point, I hadn’t considered it before.
Even A-B-A is counted as “two trips” which immediately doubles the number of trips and halves the distance of each. I have no idea what the rates of A-B-A versus A-B-C-D-A trips are, but their methodology here makes the entire study seem almost pointless, at least when trying to gauge the average mileage people are driving per day in reference to EV range.
Even using average yearly mileage can be misleading as almost nobody drives a fixed number of miles 7 days a week. I have a fairly long commute at 100 miles round trip, but my average daily mileage over a year is only 60 miles, or 60% of what I actually drive when I’m going to work. Someone telling me that a 120-mile range vehicle would work just fine for me based on my daily average would be completely wrong in that assessment when you account for efficiency losses and extra load from things like highway speeds, using the heater, or me having to make side trips somewhere on a work day.
That’s another good point. I guess I assumed that A-B-A was a trip to the grocers and back, for example, but a trip out to the countryside to see the inlaws for the weekend would count as two trips, the A-B and the B-A. Counting the grocery trip as two trips doesn’t seem right to me, I don’t take hours in there.
For what it’s worth, the various electrification plans I’ve been involved with all assume that these ‘long stops’ being the employment location, the hotel, the theatre, the doctors offices, all have charging on site. If this were the case - even just at the workplace - it would be a big help for electric vehicles that have small capacity batteries.
That’s because people leave their house an insane number of times to go buy one thing at the store and come back. I swear my neighbors leave the house and come home again 10-15 times per day.
Obviously people often don’t drive very far for work or shopping, but many do maybe every weekend or once or twice per month take a longer trip to visit family or for leisure.
The car needs to be able to handle that, without being a huge pain to have to charge all the time.
The idea that 90% of trips are short is a moronic argument for selling EV with small batteries, unless people have multiple cars, which most people don’t unless they need to, and even then short range can be a problem, because dependency on the cars, means that both cars need to be able to fulfill the required tasks.
Edit:
Funny how this is downvoted, when mostly everybody agree the FIAT 500 sell badly because it has too little range for the price.
Even if only a few percent are short trips, it’s a pain to have to charge multiple times on a single trip occasionally, like once per week.
Visiting family out of town every weekend is 104 trips a year. Commuting each work day is 520 trips. That’s 16% of all those trips that are long distance.
Once you add in the grocery getting; the drives to school (only 10% of children walk or ride bikes); the doctors appointments; the local leisure related trips; I can see how 90% of trips could be short range - and that’s still accounting for taking a long weekly trip, which I don’t think most people do.
From the way you wrote, “The car needs to be able to handle that, without being a huge pain to charge all the time,” gives me the impression you don’t like electric vehicles and might not be open to any of these conversations without it turning into an argument. I could be misinterpreting your tone, and if so I apologise, but I don’t think the content nor the conclusion of that study should be called moronic.
I’m not disputing the 10% maybe even 2% short trips is true, I’m arguing it’s a bullshit argument for making cars with short range.
Which is false, I’m all for electric, and my next car will definitely be an electric. But not one that can’t handle what I do in weekends, which would be ridiculous.
For me that means 450 km range minimum. Which I may only need once per month, but the alternative would be to rent a car once per month, which is obviously idiotic, because it’s extra hassle and more expensive than buying the proper car to begin with.
Alternatively having to charge on the way, but the 450 km is for charging once, so less than that would mean charging twice or more, and I don’t want that extra time added on a trip that is already long.
Cars with smaller batteries, very often also charge slower.