Do you want an electric vehicle? Well, you might want to reconsider driving the improved golf cart more than a few miles to work and back, especially if you plan to go at average highway speeds.
Such is what Car and Driver found in its hilarious review of the new, electric Mazda MX-30. And that’s not an outdated EV that ought to be consigned to the garbage right now. The automobile is the 2022 model.
To give some history, the MX-30 is intended to be an electric vehicle (EV) for the typical American worker who commutes to work. It is intended for a daily commute of around 30 miles in typical city/suburb terrain (so there are no significant inclines), with options for charging it at both ends of the daily trip, according to Mazda.
If your job isn’t too far away, it might be suitable for commuting, but as Car and Driver discovered, it’s completely inappropriate for anything else, as the car was running short on charge after a terrible 70 miles.
Despite having an EPA range estimate of 100 miles between charges, the review claims that on a road test at 75 mph, it only traveled a very underwhelming 70 miles.
The review might have put the car’s failure to go more than a negligible distance in even harsher terms, saying:
The argument can be made that the average owner doesn’t need more than 100 miles of range, but we aren’t going to make it. It’s 2022—we’re seeing 500 miles from electric cars, and 200 miles should be expected. The MX-30 offers an EPA-estimated 100 miles of total range; we made it only 70 miles in our 75-mph highway test. Even worse, the MX-30’s 76 MPGe for those 70 miles of highway driving is less efficient than far more powerful EVs. The Model S Plaid got 91 MPGe in the same highway test, for example. Recharging at a Level 3 charger, it can get 80 percent topped up in 36 minutes; this takes 2 hours, 50 minutes at a Level 2. Our ride from home to the test-drive site and back wouldn’t have been a possible round trip in the MX-30. Mazda does offer 10 days of no-cost loans of other vehicles from its fleet for the first three years of ownership, but who wants to swap cars any time you want to leave your neighborhood?
You don’t want to read in a review that something “wouldn’t have been possible,” especially when it comes to the quite reasonable expectation that the car should be able to get to and from a testing site without too much difficulty.
The new EV simply isn’t that capable; the laws of physics cannot be disregarded, thus the $35,000 car can only travel as far as my truck, a 2013 F-150, can go on four gallons of gas, as the review discovered (about 80 miles)
That’s not only embarrassing, but it also demonstrates an issue with electric cars: they can’t travel very far, and even if they had a massive battery pack that could carry them up to a regular car’s range (around 500 miles), it would still take hours to charge them.
Oh, and the Mazda can’t even accelerate like a rocket ship, as the writer highlighted, but Teslas at least have the redeeming feature of being pleasant to drive since they do so. The Review noted, saying
Mazda’s EV is currently only available with a single motor making 143 horsepower and 200 lb-ft of torque. It’s zippy enough around town, but on the highway, or even some of the wider, meaner streets of Los Angeles County, you won’t be passing any Teslas—or even Chevy Bolts. At the test track, it took a lazy 8.7 seconds to get the MX-30 up to 60 mph. The CX-30 does it in 7.6 seconds, while other similarly sized electric SUVs such as the single-motor ID.4 and the Hyundai Kona Electric do it in 7.6 and 6.3 seconds, respectively. It’s even worse at freeway speeds: Accelerating from 50 to 70 mph takes 5.3 seconds, which feels like an eternity on an onramp. Top speed is a mere 91 mph. This sluggishness is somewhat expected given the MX-30’s $34,695 starting price, which is slightly more than a Chevy Bolt EUV’s yet less than what it takes to unlock the ID.4 and Kona. Our well-equipped example cost $38,600. We tend to accept a certain lethargy in small gas engines in return for fuel economy or a low buy-in price, but electric motors need to make up for their lack of fun noises with fun acceleration. The drivetrain in the MX-30 feels detuned, maybe to stretch the range of its small 32.0-kWh battery pack, which leads us to our next performance demerit.
Yup. it appears that there is still a use for combustion engines after all.
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