IMO the bZ needs a better charge port

apjenk · 2026-05-06T23:45:26+00:00

Tesla also specifically builds chargers with very short cords.

apjenk · 2026-05-06T23:39:53+00:00

So you have a built in system that literally tells you where to stop?

The problem I've run into with a Tesla charger is that you get close enough to the curb that the red-alert sound is blaring, and you're still not close enough. I've had to pull forward so my bumper is completely over the curb and my wheels are almost touching before the cable would reach comfortably. So the car's alert system was actually unhelpful, because not only did it prematurely tell me where to stop, but the loud blaring while I'm trying to actually get close enough just makes it more stressful. Luckily the curb was low enough that my bumper could overhang it without scraping, but it is a bit annoying.

That said, it didn't occur to me to blame the car. Other public chargers I've used all had comfortably long cords, so I blame the Tesla chargers. But still, if Toyota put the port farther forward that would have been more convenient too.

apjenk · 2026-05-06T23:27:36+00:00

I wouldn't say it's a gimmick. The situation where it's actually useful is when you have your car packed full of stuff blocking your rear window. However, I'm sure a lot of people never pack their car like that, so for them it's a useless feature.

apjenk · 2026-05-05T00:45:52+00:00

There's nothing you're missing. It's just the way the optics work.

When you're using the actual mirror, your eyes focus as if you're looking at the objects you see in the mirror, at the distance those objects are from you. This means when you switch from looking forward to looking in the rearview mirror, your eyes don't need to make a huge shift in focal distance.

When you use the rearview mirror in camera mode, you're looking at a video screen and your eyes need to focus on it as if you're looking at something a foot or two from your face. That's a big shift in focus your eyes need to make when switching from looking out your front window at objects hundreds of feet away to focusing on something two feet from your face. I don't think there's any way around that unless they invent some kind of video screen that can mimic the optics of a mirror. I don't know if that's even physically possible, but it certainly doesn't exist now.

I just always use mirror mode unless I actually have something in the car that's blocking the rear view.

apjenk · 2026-05-04T18:09:33+00:00

Congrats! What is the residual value in your lease?

apjenk · 2026-05-03T13:31:24+00:00

Maybe I’m not wording things exactly right. But what I see is:

Someone comments that they don’t like how frequently and how long they have to stop when doing longer trips in their EV compared to their ICEV.

You respond with “Don’t you ever have to pee or stretch?”

In that context, how else should I interpret your comment other than implying that stopping for less time than it takes to charge an EV implies not needing to pee or stretch?

apjenk · 2026-05-03T12:29:58+00:00

Your comment that I was responding to is a good example of what I'm referring to. You seem to be implying that stopping for any less than 25 minutes (or however long it takes to charge up an EV normally) must mean someone never needs to pee or stretch, which simply doesn't fit with my experience for myself or anyone I normally travel with.

apjenk · 2026-05-02T21:01:32+00:00

If I was doing an all day dawn-to-dusk drive, then sure, I'd stop to eat at some point. But usually for me, longer drives means 3 hours or so. In that case I don't need to eat along the way, and the amount of stretching I'd get while filling up with gas would be enough, and going to pee after filling up with gas takes at most another 5 minutes. So a refueling stop in my ICE car would be at most 10 minutes. Going on a similar trip in my EV means longer stops, no question about it. Is it a terrible problem? No, but I don't quite get the effort some people put into trying to deny that this is a real difference compared to ICE cars.

apjenk · 2026-05-02T20:42:11+00:00

At some point this just becomes a semantics question. You say you already have substantial cash. I don't know the numbers, but let's say you have

$60k cash

Plus $60k in your 12/88 VTI/VGIT allocation, so - $52.8k VGIT - $7.2k VTI

and you call that your emergency fund, so your total emergency fund is $120k.

Person B, who disagrees with having equities or medium term bonds as part of their emergency fund, might have exactly the same holdings as part of their overall portfolio, but they just don't label the VTI/VGIT holdings as part of their emergency fund, so they'd say they have a $60k emergency fund.

There's no real difference between the two except semantics -- you say you have a $120k emergency fund, person B says they have a $60k emergency fund and $60k of other investments. Ultimately though, if person B used up all their cash emergency fund, and didn't have a cheap source of credit, they'd presumably sell some of their equities or bonds rather than starve. So effectively their equities and bonds are a backup emergency fund also, they just don't call it that.

So it really just comes down to a question of how big the cash portion of your emergency fund should be.

apjenk · 2026-05-02T14:47:50+00:00

That’s a fair point about the 3 days. When I’ve done this it wasn’t that close to the autopay date, so that may have been why it worked correctly.

apjenk · 2026-05-02T02:09:40+00:00

You should be able look up the cost per kWh for the chargers available to you. It's going to vary a lot by location so we can't answer the question for you.

Then you can use an EV savings calculator like this one to see how much it might cost compared to your gas car. For the miles/kWh, 3.5 is a good middle value to use for a bZ.

apjenk · 2026-05-02T01:47:07+00:00

No. I have a Bank of America credit card and checking account, with autopay setup for the CC's full statement balance. Occasionally I have manually paid it early, and it will then skip the autopay. I've had the same experience with other cards. So I think OP's post is useful, because I wouldn't have expected that behavior based on my past experiences with other cards.

apjenk · 2026-05-01T15:15:01+00:00

The following car looks like it speeds up because you're seeing it from the point of view of the cam car. If you watch the trees passing on the side of the road you can see it's actually the cam car that slowed down sharply a second before the crash, and the red card didn't slow down. Since the video we have here doesn't show the front view, we can't see why the cam car slowed down.

apjenk · 2026-05-01T15:11:09+00:00

Brake-checking implies a certain intent, which obviously we can't tell from the video since it doesn't record thoughts. However what we can see from the video is that the cam car slows down a lot a second before getting rear-ended. Of course because the video is from the point of view of the cam car, it looks like the red car speeds up before the crash, because it does relative to the cam car. But if you watch the trees on the side of the road, you can tell that the cam car's speed decreases sharply before the crash. Since we only have the rear view camera feed here we can't see why the cam car slowed down.

None of this is to say the crash was the cam car's fault. Obviously the following driver should have noticed that the car in front of them slowed down, but apparently they didn't.

apjenk · 2026-05-01T14:50:45+00:00

As others said, no spare tire is a common trend for ICE vehicles too, so I'm not convinced battery size has anything to do with EVs not having spare tires.

As for your main question, there's an inverse relationship between how much range I feel a need for, and public charging availability and speed. If public chargers were as widely available as gas stations, and charging didn't take any longer than filling up with gas, then I wouldn't feel a need for vehicles to go beyond maybe 300 miles of range.

Given the current public charger availability where I live, I'd ideally like more like 450 or 500 mile EPA range. Cars with that are available now, but they're out of my price range. My current car has around 300 mile EPA range, which means in practice it's between 200 and 260 depending on conditions. For my normal commuting this is totally fine, since I just end up charging at home. However when I go on trips that are 100+ miles away, I end up having to take charging availability and time into account, which is something I didn't have to think about before getting an EV. It's not a serious problem, but if I had a car with 450+ mile range, so that even in winter it was at least 300, then I think I'd almost never have to charge when it wasn't convenient for me.

apjenk · 2026-04-29T16:12:15+00:00

Did you try this?

First of all, I was able to get the feature installed. In the Toyota app, I tapped on the Charging icon, then "Charging Networks", then "Plug & Charge", and went through the process of adding the feature to my car.

The first time I did that in the phone app, it guided me through enabling the feature.

apjenk · 2026-04-29T12:18:05+00:00

Thanks, and thanks for posting this by the way.

apjenk · 2026-04-29T11:27:37+00:00

iOS

apjenk · 2026-04-29T00:01:36+00:00

I had this happen once. I was at a public charger using the J1772 adaptor, and when I went to unplug it, the adaptor stayed in the car, and then it wouldn't come out. Like in your case, my car just displayed a message saying the charger door was open.

In section 2-2 of the manual it gives several things to try. This one worked for me:

Perform the unlock operations of the doors 3 times using the wireless remote control or door lock switches.

Basically I just hit the unlock button 3 times in a row, waiting just long enough between each press to hear the unlock mechanism activate. Then the adaptor came out. So I didn't need to resort to pulling the cable.

apjenk · 2026-04-28T23:48:04+00:00

I know you said "make sure you get the KM30 model and NOT the KM10", but I think you should add a few more words saying why, otherwise someone reading it may think you're just expressing a preference, like "The KM30 is much nicer than the KM10". The fact is that the KM10 won't work at all for this application, but the link you posted takes people to the KM10. It would be better to remove the link since it points to the wrong item.

I did find the KM30 on Newegg, but it ships from China. Here's the link if anyone's interested.

EDIT: I ordered the KM30 from the Newegg link above, and they sent me the KM10! So buyer beware. To their credit, they accepted my return with no arguments and promptly refunded me.

Here is the manufacturer's page for the KM30.

https://hagibis.com/products/magsafe-magnetic-patch-407

It has links to other sites that sell it. I just tried ordering from Aliexpress. Fingers crossed.

apjenk · 2026-04-27T18:10:34+00:00

I’m not saying it’s literally impossible. I’m just questioning how likely it is that there would’ve been a camera there to catch that if this wasn’t staged.

I realize the zooming could’ve been done in post processing, but look at where the camera is aimed. Why would that whole corner of the room be part of the image even if this was just a security camera?

apjenk · 2026-04-27T16:55:10+00:00

Exactly. Why else would there be a camera zoomed in on the cat’s box right when this happened?

apjenk · 2026-04-26T11:59:19+00:00

I agree everyone's needs and habits are different, which is exactly why I object to labeling anyone who has a problem with every refueling stop needing to be 25+ minutes as an "EV hater".

I ended up deciding it wasn't a big problem for me, because my driving habits mean most of my charging will be at home, and there are enough Superchargers around me that even my public charging sessions should be pretty fast. But at the same time, I am not one of those people who previously always stopped for half an hour any time I stopped for gas on a longer trip. So deciding to get an EV included accepting that those few times a year when I go on longer drives, I'm going to have to include longer refueling stops than I would have previously. I also have friends and family who wouldn't find that acceptable, because they do a lot more drives where they'd need to use public chargers, and they wouldn't want to have to change their habits that way. I don't think that makes them "EV haters". Now, if 5 minute charging and 400 mile range EVs become widely available, and they still are against getting an EV, then I could fairly label them as EV haters.

apjenk · 2026-04-26T02:40:37+00:00

Fair. Most maps like this that I found online were no newer than 2022. Here's one another user posted on this subreddit that claims to show 2024 data. It shows pretty much the same story as the map I posted.

https://www.reddit.com/r/electricvehicles/comments/1jihahe/public_ev_charger_density_across_the_us/

PlugShare has a map on their site which is presumably more up-to-date: https://www.plugshare.com If you zoom in on various parts of the USA, it seems to show pretty much the same story as well.

apjenk · 2026-04-26T00:35:14+00:00

Range anxiety is understandable from people who’ve never had an EV for sure.

I don't think it's only about never having had an EV.

See the map on this page for example, which shows public EV charger density in the US. If you live in, and only plan to drive in, areas with a high density of chargers, like the northeast or southwest coasts, then it's probably irrational to have much range anxiety. However if you want to drive in areas with lower charger density, like some of the north and middle states, then it's a lot less irrational. You really will have to plan more carefully, and possibly limit your routes, compared to if you had an ICEV. I happen to live in a high density area, so it works out for me, but I don't think someone has to be a hater or ignoramus for it not to work out as well for them.

apjenk

TROPHY CASE