The polycule is going car shopping. Fuck cars, and fuck the world that makes it impossible to live in a city without a car when you have a family full of people with disabilities. (We drive about 4,000 miles a year, and Zipcar still1 isn't reliable enough for us.) Here's the rules:
- Needs to be a fully electric vehicle.
- Needs to have sufficient range to get from Seattle to Vancouver, one-way, on a single charge. (It's a hilly route, so EPA range estimates overestimate quite a bit.)
- Needs to have fast charging, because the world still hasn't solved the problem of "how do you charge an EV when you live in an apartment building".
- Needs to fit folks, in both the front passenger seat and the rear seats, who are 6'4".
- Cannot be a giant SUV or a Tesla.
- Needs to be at least cognizant of the fact that several separate households will share this car — namely, we'll need more than the standard 2 keys. (We have 3 for our current car, a Nissan Leaf.)
And we have test driven and otherwise completely approved of the Kia EV6 for meeting all of these. It's bigger than I'd like, but it's certainly the smallest "SUV" I've ever seen, and if it were smaller it probably wouldn't fit my partners. The only other vehicles with this kind of range are Hyundai's IONIQ line, built on the same EV platform, but those are either obnoxiously larger or too small.
My rule of never committing to a car until I've completely read the owner's manual has perhaps saved our sanity here, because last night I found this on Chapter 5, Page 11:
A maximum of 2 smart keys can be registered to a single vehicle.
And of course, you must have a "smart key" to start the vehicle.
The sales guy we spoke to yesterday talked to his service desk, who confirmed to him, yes, they can't register a third key to the vehicle, even if all of them are present at once.
Internet searching brings up a ton of threads on recent Kias with this seemingly arbitrary requirement. Some dealers claim they can't, others claim they can. There's videos of service departments demonstrating how they can pair and re-pair keys, with the ability to pair four at a time, on a 2021-era Kia. A few area dealers claim it's possible but it's unclear if they're actually listening to our question.
This is, of course, one of the two automakers whose recent vehicle security lapses have landed them, and their customers, in hot water. So maybe it's not a huge deal if we can just steal our own fucking car by hacking the CAN bus from a headlight.
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I could write a post longer than this one about every time Zipcar has fucked me over.
A maximum of three Smart Keys can be registered to a single vehicle.
THREE.
I need you to understand that these are both THE SAME FUCKING CAR as the EV6. It's the same EV base. Kia licensed the same infotainment / vehicle control software, because those are the same thing in an EV, from Hyundai. The dashboards are entirely the same.
And ignoring, for a moment, that Kia decided to decrement whatever variable exists by one. Why on earth is it only three for the Hyundais?
fuck cars fuck cars fuck cars
