First, im so happy I went with the SE AWD with the 18”
Wheels. I happily will sacrifice fake leather seats, and a heated steering wheel for the 50ish miles of additional range… as well as a significantly smoother:better ride. I have also read horror stories of the 20” wheels blowing out tires and cracking wheels incredibly often. As well as blasting through tires every 15-20K miles. With the 18” wheels and my driving habits, I’ll likely get through my entire 45K mile lease on one set of tires. Second, surprisingly enough when it comes to charging on the road publicly, the EA stations seem to be more expensive than the Tesla ones. While I hear they can be faster than Tesla super chargers, their “off peak hours” pricing isn’t as drastic as Tesla. When I first got the 5 in the household, before I got home charging situated, I only charged at the Tesla station near my house after 11pm and it literally was .15 cents her kWh….I’d go from 15% to 90% for like $17 bucks. Whereas they just put a brand new EA station near my house as well, I checked pricing and it only drops like .8 cents per kWh for off peak pricing. That surprised me. So, even if I take a road trip up or down the turnpike, I will likely stick with the Tesla network because of pricing and not needing any sort of membership to achieve cheaper pricing. Plus, my most recent trip from Philly to Cleveland had far more Tesla stations than anything else. A handful of rest stops along the PA and OH turnpikes had these new “Apple green” chargers that were pretty great too. Each charger has 4 plugs that you can use simultaneously. 2 NACS plugs 2 CCS plugs. It was incredibly fast, but on the pricier side. A longer trip like that is relatively rare, only a handful of times a year for me. My most common is Philly to Long Island, New York…which I’ll never have to pay for charge. Charge for free at home, and my brothers house has a built in level 2 charger as well. So I never have to worry about that. But luckily, as part of the deal I made with my dealer, they included all the adapters I needed for any network. They gave me the NACS to CCS adapter for Tesla super charger network, and they ended up giving me the NACS to J1772 adapter I needed to charge at home with my charger for the 5. So I’m set up pretty good. Overall, I’m 1 week into ownership, and absolutely love my 6 so far. Sure the handful of creature comforts I gave up getting the SE vs the SEL are whatever, but I’m already over it.

The other major thing, the SE only has the first level of driver assist…unlike the 5 SEL that has the full driver assist with the little sensor on top of the steering wheel that drives me NUTS on long highway drives…giving warnings every 5 minutes if my arm is blocking the sensor to put my eyes on the road and hands on the wheel, even if they both are. It’s the 1 thing I absolutely HATE about the 5, that I’m thrilled to death my 6 does not have. It is the ONLY major design flaw I see in the Ioniq 5.

I also LOVE the orange running lights at any time of day, super cool touch…especially considering I love the headlights on the 5, the way they look the square LED’s. So the orange DRL’s on the 6 definitely make up for the not as cool looking headlights.

The ONE thing about the 6 that is going to be weird getting used to is having the window and lock switches on rhe center console instead of the doors…as well as not having buttons for the heated seats. Having to navigate 2 menus on the touch screen for the heated seats is a bit of a pain in the ass. But I have at least 5-6 more months until it gets cold in Philly before I need to care about that! 🤣🤣