Road to Electric Mazda Canada

Feels a little biased, would love to hear from someone who maybe isn’t sold on EVs yet and why. But I appreciate all the info that’s been provided so far! Are there more episodes coming??

I recently bought a new PHEV, it is our second PHEV we now own. And I am a huge proponent of EVs and I have loved driving my PHEV for years. That being said, while you have some good info, you do need to check some of your facts. In the second episode a guest states that most EV batteries are warrantied for 8 years, while this is technically true, manufacturers now list “abnormal degradation”, but they no longer define what abnormal degradation means (used to be industry standard minimum 70% remaining over the 8 years - at least this was the case six years ago when we bought our first PHEV). However, we discovered when recently purchasing our new car that this was quietly removed from multiple manufacturers warranties recently, and no one is talking about it. The sales person said it was likely that was too expensive for the manufacturer to stand behind, and despite me pushing and elevating to their Canadian warranty head office, no one was willing to give a definition of what they meant by “abnormal”, meaning they would not warranty the battery basically unless it failed entirely (even if it had only a little range). And further you state the cost of replacing the battery was 6K or 8K, I was actually quoted, for a PHEV battery - not full electric, at a cost of about 20K, about triple what you mentioned. Lastly, the guest suggested for those who like to take road trips once or twice a year, maybe take another car, or “maybe just don’t do it” - a ridiculous sentiment. This is an important conversation to have, but you need to engage with people in a much more meaningful way, with real life facts, without telling them they can’t do the things they want to do. I have family roughly 400kms away; out of reach of many true EVs on a single charge in colder temperatures, which in Canada can be up to six months of the year, am I supposed to not go and visit them at the holidays? Lastly, and maybe this is just me, I’m not so sure about calling a PHEV an electric car. The H stands for hybrid, literally meaning something between a gas and full electric. Sure it can run on electricity sometimes, although many will kick on the gas engine still if you really hit the accelerator (ie merging or passing on a highway). But despite both myself and my wife driving a PHEV, I would not consider myself as driving an electric car. In my opinion, hybrids and PHEVs are nothing more than a transient technology on the way to full electric. The only reason my family bought a second PHEV now rather than a full electric, is that we do both occasionally drive longer distances for work and the charging infrastructure, in Ontario at least, is still garbage with lots of reported public charging stations being down commonly, and still the extreme majority of public chargers are level 2, not level 3. Again, this is a very important topic to have a real conversation on here in Canada, but it does need to be grounded in reality for Canadian life.

I’m a huge advocate of renewable energy and EV’s but the spin put on the question of range reduction in Canadian winters has left me suspecting the objectivity of the podcast. I’ll go somewhere else for my facts.