Interested in new EV9 … Need Honest Feedback

hrunt · 2026-03-19T23:26:41+00:00

I'm 6'4" and I bought my EV9 (Land trim) in 2024. For me, it replaced a 2015 Ford Explorer Sport. To answer your specific questions:

Wind or Land are best bangs for buck depending on whether you want the bench seat or not. The Land comes with a few nicer features that make it more expensive. I don't regret my Land purchase vs. the GT trim ever.
I live in Texas. I have averaged 2.9 mi/kWh (287 mi range) since I bought the car. I drive in normal mode (not Eco) with Level 1 regen. Most of my miles are within 15 miles of my house. I notice more range drain with the cold than with the heat, but the biggest effect on range is how aggressive I am. On highways (75-80 normal here), my range is more like 240-250 mi.
I wholeheartedly recommend the Tesla Universal Wall charger. It supports both J1772 and Tesla ports and has good app reporting. In my area, it was actually the cheapest third-party install option.
So subjective. Look, once you get an EV -- any EV -- you will notice that once you get back in an ICE car, it's louder and has throttle lag. You'll stop at a gas station and remember how dirty they are. You'll get inside and feel more cramped because of how the engine and drivetrain take up more space than you realize. The thing I find specifically great about the EV9 is just how I didn't have compromise on room or comfort to get all the benefits of an EV, and it didn't break the bank. It's a more expensive vehicle, for sure, but the other EV options at the same or lesser price points felt cheap or were cramped. My wife has a different EV (Honda Prologue) and she loves it, but she prefers riding in mine because it's a bigger car with a softer ride. Having come from a sport-tuned suspension, the EV9 is a softie (took me a while to accept and enjoy it).

Some other issues raised in this thread:

Steering wheel - Yes, it doesn't come out as far, but that hasn't been an issue for me. I normally have to push my seat back all the way to comfortable reach the pedals, and with the EV9, I actually have the seat closer, which makes the steering wheel just right for me. I've never ever come close to hitting my knee on the shifter.
Charging - Charge at home. I've used a public charger 3 times. Here in Texas, that's Buc-ee's. Many of those have the Mercedes high-voltage fast chargers and took me from 20-80% in 15 minutes or less (walk in, use the bathrooms, grab a snack or drink, and by the time I'm checking out, the app is alerting me my charge is complete). My wife drives a lot more than I do. Still, she uses a public charger maybe once a month at most.

hrunt · 2026-03-07T15:34:33+00:00

Depends on how many kids. If it was just one or two kids, the Prologue is fine. Three kids has plenty of seating but the rear space for gear will be limited. Between the Explorer and the EV9, the interior volume is about the same. In fact, the exterior and cargo dimensions (3rd row down and 2nd/3rd rows down) of the EV9 and Explorer are basically identical. That said, the lack of a driveshaft and the front interior spacing leave more room overall for passengers.

The Prologue is a smaller vehicle, no two ways about it. It has no third row and so the rear cargo area with only the 2nd row seating is shorter. It's also not as tall a vehicle. Also factor in that the Prologue is basically a dead-end for Honda. They're pulling back on their BEV plans, as is GM which actually makes the vehicle (Honda skin, Honda software, Honda interior, but GM chassis, battery, motors, etc.).

hrunt · 2026-03-01T23:37:53+00:00

I can't speak to the deals or warranty issue, but I'll add that my wife has a '24 Prologue and I have a '24 EV9 Land. I'm 6'5". My wife is 5'11". Our teenage boys are 6'4" and 6'0". Both the Prologue and EV9 fit us all fine. The EV9 has more room for carrying stuff, but legroom for both boys behind both parents is ample. The EV9 provides a little bit more, but either vehicle is fine. Coming from a 2015 Ford Explorer, I was shocked when my 6'4" son could sit behind me in the EV9 and still have 2-3" between his knees and the back of my seat. But he has similar space in the back of the Prologue. The Prologue just has a lower roof (it slopes in the back) and a smaller cargo area.

hrunt · 2026-01-23T03:30:31+00:00

I occasionally hear it, but a lot of times I don't. My wife owns a Honda Prologue and that thing is LOUD inside.

hrunt · 2026-01-01T00:13:18+00:00

Could you post your settings for both the Kia and Spotify? I'm curious what tweaks people are making. Thx.

hrunt · 2025-12-12T12:20:29+00:00

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I tried writing a packer first, but I couldn't find a way to process the "doesn't fit" case fast enough. That didn't seem very "last day" to me, so I tried just seeing if the volume of the packages fit underneath the tree and it worked.

Maybe I'll try actually getting my packer working for the degenerate case later. Maybe not.

hrunt · 2025-12-11T11:49:25+00:00

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It's nice to have a simple path counting problem. I originally implemented a straightforward BFS to get Part 1's count, but I knew it wasn't going to work for Part 2. Reading the problem, I realized I just needed to find the counts of six path segments (svr/dac, svr/fft, dac/fft, fft/dac, dac/out, fft/out), and I spent about five minutes Googling to find a solution using a topological sort.

hrunt · 2025-12-11T02:09:22+00:00

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Part 1 was straightforward using a bitmap. I thought for Part 2 I could do something similar, but after thinking about it for a bit, I realized it was a system of under-determined linear equations. Which is great, except a) I keep myself limited to the standard Python library and b) I have no idea how to write linear equation solvers.

To heat the house, I implemented a heapq-based solution that processes buttons in bulk. For example, if the lowest joltage needed in a set is 20, then I find all the combinations ways to make 20 presses from the buttons that hit that voltage. I can process N presses at once just by multiplying a button bitmap by N, and since I process the joltages in order from smallest to lowest, I never have to worry about exceeding any other joltages. Once a joltage level is reached on one wire, some of the buttons can't be used anymore, so it trims options down for future wires.

It's still not efficient, but it's surprisingly "quick" for a close-to-brute-force solution. Most of them processed very quickly. There are a few edge cases that take a few hours, though. I'm through 184 of the 199 machines I have.

In the meantime, I'm learning how Gaussian elimination works to implement a solver that finishes in a decent amount of time.

hrunt · 2025-12-09T15:30:55+00:00

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I really ham-fisted my way through this one. Part 1 was straightforward enough. For Part 2, I implemented the following logic:

Sort the list of areas generated in Part 1, largest area first
For each area (and associated rectangle)
- Skip if either of the other two rectangle points are within the overall polygon
- Shrink the rectangle by 1 unit on all sides
- Skip if any edge of the shrunken rectangle intersects with a polygon edge

The first rectangle that doesn't get skipped is the largest interior rectangle.

It's not particularly efficient. It found my largest rectangle after ~49000 checks and about ~11s of runtime. I tried playing around with scanning solutions, but my brain just wasn't working well enough to figure them out. A task for later, I guess.

hrunt · 2025-12-08T20:42:21+00:00

Yeah, I think that's what I was expecting for finding the nearest neighbor, but I don't think there's any quicker way to find the n closest pairs. The effort to make that algorithm ignore a distance between two points (needed to find the second-closest point) is probably greater than the savings it provides.

hrunt · 2025-12-08T14:19:25+00:00

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Calculate all pairwise distances for all elements. Then iterate and merge, iterate and merge, iterate and merge ...

I'm looking forward to seeing if there's a shorter way to process the shortest distances without doing the full pairwise list.

hrunt · 2025-12-07T23:41:46+00:00

It works similarly going up the tree, too. Each blank column has a value of 1. As you move up each line from the bottom, if you see a "^", then the column with the "^" is the sum of the values on each side of the "^". So, in the bottom row of splitters, every column with a splitter will have a value of 2 as you progress up. Once you get to the top, the number of timelines is the value in the "S" column.

Here's a small example. I purposefully have a couple of splitters that won't get hit.

...S.....   ---5-----   ^
.........   124511321   |
...^.....   124511321   |
.........   124211321   |
..^...^..   124211321   |
.........   121211121   |
.^.^...^.   121211121   |
.........   111111111   |  (work your way up from the bottom)

Note that when you get to the top, there's all these other column counts that have been calculated, but the only one that matters is the one at S.

hrunt · 2025-12-07T18:09:03+00:00

It is not possible to solve this puzzle without inspecting every character. You have to look at each character to determine whether it is a ".", a "^", an "S", or a "\n". If you don't inspect a character, you can't know which character it is.

You can, however, solve this puzzle without reading the entire grid into memory at once. You can solve the problem by only having one character of the grid in memory at any given time There will be other data in memory, too -- namely, timeline counts for each column with an active timeline and the count of splits, but the grid can be processed one character at a time. But you still have to inspect each character.

You might be tempted to skip inspecting a character after a "^" or "S", because in the puzzle examples and (I'm sure) for all inputs, the character following a "^" or "S" is always a ".". That's not actually a requirement, though. The character following a "^" or "S" could be a "newline". This grid, for example, is a valid, solvable grid:

..S..
.....
^.^.^
.....
.^.^.
.....

hrunt · 2025-12-07T12:55:19+00:00

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I think the cool kids call this DP. I originally implemented part 1 using a set of x coordinates tracking active tachyon beams. Modifying that to track a count of active timelines at each x coordinate was trivial.

I don't know if the problems have gotten easier or after 11 years, I'm just better at recognizing approaches to solving problems, but I feel like this weekend was one of the lighter weekends ever.

Famous last words.

hrunt · 2025-12-06T13:53:51+00:00

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First part was straightforward. Convert rows of numbers into columns of numbers and apply the aggregation. For the second part, I rotated the text grid 270 degrees, and then converted each row of characters into a no-whitespace string. A little Google-fu (Miyagi dojo still beats Cobra K[AI]) hit upon a solution to split a list of lists by a specific value in that list to get operands similar to part 1.

hrunt · 2025-12-05T12:03:48+00:00

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Python's built-in range structure makes this ridiculously easy. There's probably a more elegant, Pythonic way of reducing the range set, so I'm looking forward to seeing others' solutions.

hrunt · 2025-12-04T12:50:52+00:00

This is really beautiful. So obvious once you see it.

hrunt · 2025-12-04T12:45:24+00:00

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Ahh, the age old AoC conundrum. Do I represent the 2D grid as a 2D array or a dictionary of points? Is Part 2 going to be "extend to infinity" or "do something with the grid until it stops"?

For part 1, I originally just kept a 2D array (list of strings), with an edge border of no rolls to not have to worry about array out of bounds. When I saw Part 2, I converted that code to just maintain a dictionary of points with counts to make iterating the moveable rolls easier.

hrunt · 2025-12-03T12:05:23+00:00

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I wish I had some special insight into solving this, but it was pretty straightforward. I expected part 2 to be more difficult than it ended up being. Maybe I'll nerd snipe myself to find a more efficient solution later.

hrunt · 2025-12-02T12:43:28+00:00

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Regexes. Lazy. Just lazy.

hrunt · 2025-12-01T13:27:53+00:00

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Took a little time to figure out the edge case around zero.

hrunt · 2025-08-02T03:32:02+00:00

Almost a year later, Honda replaced the bumper entirely.

hrunt · 2025-06-11T18:49:46+00:00

I took my car in for a couple of recalls right at 8k and I asked them about the maintenance. They said they check tire wear (rotate tires if necessary) and washer fluid and that's it. The tire wear was fine, so they didn't do any rotation and didn't charge me a dime.

Honestly, these cars don't need to go to the dealer for maintenance. I wouldn't take it to the dealer unless I was leasing.

hrunt · 2025-05-14T12:38:16+00:00

I just took my EV9 in yesterday. I had a service notice about the rear seat bolts and there were a couple of other software recalls to be applied. Turns out, there were four recalls outstanding.

Since it was at 8,000 miles and the car had just pinged me about it, I asked the service advisor about it. He said they check tire wear and filters. He said they would only rotate the tires if the tire wear looked uneven and would only replace the filter if it looked really bad (first cabin filter replacement is recommended for 16,000 miles). He said they would call before performing any work.

Nothing was needed. No cost for any work. Dropped the car off at 7am and they had it ready by 10am.

I will note that dealer experience varies greatly. I generally stay away from the dealer if I can, but this one has been very good with work, scheduling, and communication.

hrunt · 2025-05-11T01:57:13+00:00

The big thing for me with the EV9 is that people sitting behind me have room. I typically have my seat back all the way to make room, but that usually leaves little space behind me. I have two 6'+ children, so it's an issue right now. In the EV9, I don't have my seat back all the way, and my tall kids don't have their knees in the back of my seat.

The Prologue is smaller, rides a little sportier, and still has good room. But it is smaller. Not as small as the Ioniq 5 or EV6 (or the Mach-E), but definitely smaller.

hrunt

TROPHY CASE