Range anxiety is a real thing. Especially when you haven’t get got a sense for what your vehicle is capable of. I figured we’d stop either way in Placerville to charge up to 80%, but I wasn’t counting on the uphill climb being as strenuous as it turned out to be on the way to South Lake Tahoe. I topped up to 60% there and was down to 47% when we charged on the return trip, then went from 80% to just under 20% home. A hair over 160 miles for 60% of the battery, which implies a total range at freeway speeds of about 250 miles – or more realistically, a range of around 200 miles on mostly level ground between fast-charges from 20% to 80%. In a world where the ID4 will be the regular runabout chore car and able to charge overnight at home, that’s more than sufficient, but it implies fueling up en route to any serious destination out of the Bay Area.
Which is fine. The Malibu is still meant to be the long-haul driver, and fast charging a rare necessity for special circumstances – the all-wheel drive for Tahoe makes it preferable for such a trip. In all other respects, the ID4 is everything we were promised. It feels modern, in a way that makes it awkward to stream bluegrass and 40s music in it – it feels like cyberpunk tunes only, whether 80s or vaporwave or what have you. It sits high enough to be useful but not awkwardly so; driving home through serious wind this afternoon never felt unbalanced or risky. Cargo was easily managed, and it was comfortable enough to it in for a couple hundred miles without incident. And in a weird je ne sais quoi sort of way, it feels right. This is the sort of vehicle we were all supposed to tool around in come the 2020s, fueled by solar power at home (even if relayed through Silicon Valley Green Energy) and connected via iPhone to navigation and streaming audio. The interior club lighting and the LEDs front and back only enhance the feel of it.
Meanwhile, once one gets out of the car, the iPad mini is serving as the personal computer of the future. It’s doing exactly what I wanted in the evenings: reading, browsing, background music, Wikipedia lookup while watching television. The whole Apple Pencil writing isn’t really a thing, although it makes a very useful and precise tapping tool. And it works splendidly when one has the keyboard, although it hasn’t proved very useful for Swift – but that could be as much my own failure to ignite on learning to code (of which more later, including how things stalled out). It’s a lot better for reading than a 5.4” phone without having to constantly raise one’s glasses (of which more later) and a usable USB-C port opens the door for all kinds of things – basically it has replaced my laptop for all personal functions. Which is just as well; once macOS 12.3 and iOS 15.4 drop I should be able to mouse from laptop to iPad and type in whatever I want, so having my personal computer integrated alongside my work one.
They are both a nice artifact of life in a future that doesn’t always seem to have much of one. Of which, as I keep saying, more later.