This is Technology Bytes, episode 131 for September 7th, 2025.
Technology Bytes is a microcast where I share brief bytes on interesting technology.
Enjoy and here we go.
So I thought I’d circle back around to something I covered, well, about six months ago and that is my new car that I purchased, the EV6 from Kia.
And six months in, let you guys know if I still like it as much as I did when I first got it and if there’s anything that’s changed and what I’ve learned and some of those kinds of things.
So it might be a little bit of a shorter podcast, but we’ll see where it takes us.
So the short answer to the question, do I still like my EV6 is yes, I really, really like it.
It still is maybe one of the favorite cars that I have ever owned and I’ve owned a lot of different cars.
Unfortunately, it probably waste of money for many of them and maybe even this one is not the best financial decision, but it is a very nice car.
It still performs very well.
I don’t have any issues with it.
And over the months that I’ve used it, I have learned a few things.
We have taken it on two significant trips to California.
So those are long distance drives and I think I covered the first one in a previous podcast and the latest trip was just over the last Labor Day weekend and it wasn’t a bad trip.
It was a little more challenging on the charging side than it has been in the past.
We ended up driving out of our way a little bit to charge the vehicle, but there’s something that goes with that.
The fact is that with the purchase of the car, I got free charging for a certain number of kilowatt hours, in fact, a thousand and I use that so that I don’t have to pay to get across the country or not across the country, across the two states that take me to California.
And so that means that charging can be a challenge because there are not as many opportunities to use free charging as there would be if I didn’t really care where I charged.
And so it’s Electrify America and they are pretty prevalent all through the areas where I travel and it is a pretty good electric vehicle charging network, but they are often in need of repair or are in disrepair.
There was the same car stopping in the same places because many of the people on the road are going to similar destinations, at least similar roads for much of their travel.
And so again, we ran into people that we had seen at this station versus this station, another station.
And so that’s always kind of fun.
Have yet to run into somebody who doesn’t follow the etiquette of waiting for the next charger to be available, those kinds of things.
It’s always been a pleasant experience in that mode, but there is a challenge.
So there’s a station outside of a Walmart, there’s four charging stations.
So again, not very many compared to the Tesla supercharger network, which I could use if I wanted to pay the money, but I’m cheap.
And if I have something for free, I might as well use it.
And so that adds to the challenge of owning an electric vehicle.
Now for 90% of the time, I am using my car to go from home to work, from church to home, from home to shopping and back.
And I get to charge my car at work.
It’s a bit of a slow charge.
I bought a charger and I’m able to plug it into 120 volt, like 30 amp circuit at work.
So it charges fairly slow, but I’m there for eight, nine hours a day anyway.
And eventually I get up to 100%.
And usually by Friday, almost every time by Friday, before I go for the weekend, my car is charged to 100%.
And then when I go back, I just start it all over again.
So that is fairly simple and an easy way to keep the car in a mode that allows us to use it however we want to use it.
The other thing is that the Kia has become our primary vehicle, which is a little bit different because previously, whatever car my wife had was our primary vehicle.
That’s the one that we would drive.
But now we take the EV6 wherever we go.
And so we have ended up saving money on gas, not just because the EV is all electric, but because my wife’s gas car sits and waits until she needs to go to work or she goes somewhere independent of myself and takes her own car.
And so that’s been a blessing as well.
Just a little bit of a savings, even though the car was a little more expensive, I think it more than evens itself out.
So overall, super happy.
The tech is still good.
The mileage when the battery says it’s 100% full, I feel has dropped a little bit in this first six months.
But I think that might be normal with batteries anyway.
It’ll be interesting to see over the next year, however long I have it, how much that goes down as well.
It hasn’t really affected anything that I do.
Didn’t affect the trip to California.
But for the first time on the trip home from California, because of charging situations outside of my control, kind of, I ended up pulling into a charging station with about 8% battery left.
And that’s the first time I’ve been in single digit battery condition.
And it was a little bit nerve wracking.
I think, you know, my friend calls it range anxiety, but I knew what I was doing.
We knew we had plenty to get there.
Just means we were sitting there for longer.
But again, outside of Walmart, we did our weekly shopping.
So lots of ways to manage the charging regardless of where you are.
So I get to manage mine at work.
On road trips, I manage it by, you know, being near someplace to eat.
We can stop, have some dinner.
The car will get charged.
We get some snacks, whatever that happens to be.
So overall, still very happy with the car.
Still very happy with the purchase.
And I’m looking forward to driving it for many years to come.
Well, that is all I have for today.
If you have comments, suggestions, or questions, you can send them to technologybytes at merrickfamily.com.
Thank you for listening to the Technology Bytes microcast, and I look forward to the next time we are together, taking another bite of technology.
