I'll try and answer all of the posted questions so far here.
We went with the lease, our last car was leased and we like that option, it suits my wife well as she drives very few miles and it keeps her in a new car.
Plus, this is the first model year, you never know... so, after 3 years we will have options.
The price was very fair, no "premiums" charged for this being new. The incentives right now are great and the dealership was very easy to work with.
Eric the salesman is one of only 2 (?) that have been trained by Kia on these cars, he knows his stuff and is a fun guy.
The North County Kia dealer is getting their charging stations installed this week, I am not sure if they will charge $ for use or not but I do know they are not offering a deal like Nissan is for "free charging for 2 years". They give you a card for 'Greenlots' charging network but from what I have seen and looking at the Greenlots website, I am not impressed. In this world, if your website sucks, well then your service probably sucks. For me, so far I seem to like Chargepoint, but have not even had to charge anywhere yet. From what I have seen, it looks like you can charge at local fast chargers for less than $2 as it only takes 33 mins to charge from zero to full on one of those. We have a few of the L2 chargers near us that are free to use.
The farthest trip so far has been from Escondido to our house which was about 40 miles.
When we left the dealership the car was at 98% and when we got home it was at 61%.
AC was on the whole way and my wife was driving it like an ICE car.
It got on the fwy and passed anything she wanted to pass along the way, no problems with get up and go.
I work about 45 miles away and I figure that I could surely do it round-trip when I am allowed to.
Sorry guys, we will be logging things a little closer for more info as we go.
She is lucky enough to only have a 2.2 mile commute to work. Yeah, really!
Today after her 4.4 mile round trip, it only went down by 1 mile of estimated driving distance!
She worked the "b" mode regeneration pretty well. I was proud. (I am an ex-Honda Insight hyper-miler).
The cool thing here is that you can drive it just like a normal car if you want to.
The trickle charger that comes with it does seem pretty slow, not sure with her limited driving if we will ever need more but if you do drive farther, the L2 charger might be needed. After getting home the first day and the car being at 61%, when plugged in it said it would take 10 hours and 40 mins to charge up. We didn't let it charge but a couple hours last night and it seemed to have actually charged more and faster than the assumption that the car tells you for time to complete.
She got the Caribbean blue, base model. It is blue with a white top, looks kind of like a mini Toyota FJ Cruiser. The base model really is very loaded, only missing parking sensors and leather seats, not anything we needed.
This thing is amazing as far as electronics. The info center has all kinds of information, where is the nearest charging station, how far can I go (with or without AC, etc turned on). Works great with bluetooth AND has it's own built-in Verizon 3G data communication (cannot be setup to broadcast wi-fi that I can figure out) for it to get navigation updates, etc. You can download apps like Yelp but so far I think that is it, looking forward to more. It's like an iPad in the dash.
The UVO EV app is pretty cool, it works but kind of limited. From our iPhones we can check the battery status % and estimated driving range. You can lock and unlock the doors (and see if they are locked or unlocked). If the car is plugged in you can tell it to start/stop charging and schedule the charging as well as if you want to remotely turn on climate control. It doesn't show how long it will take for the charge to complete, which would be nice.
We were literally 'ready' to buy the Nissan Leaf two days before and then I got the call that this was in. My wife wanted the Kia Soul originally anyhow, she loved it, I wanted an EV, when she test drove this she looked at me and said "I want this car".
The biggest problem with this car is that it's not mine, it's hers. And I don't get to play with it. :lol:
I'll post a pic as soon as I can figure out how to do that here.
