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According to Politico, Mark Carney is under intense pressure.
Auto Manufacturers want to get rid of the electric vehicle mandate. They simply refuse to sell more small electric cars in Canada, claiming it's impossible / unprofitable.
They also say Donald Trump is now President of the United States. Climate Change is no longer an american concern. The political climate in the United States has changed and Canada should follow the US, whether it likes or not.
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/07/10/canada-ev-mandate-elon-musk-tesla-00446980
I don't see it being viable for me as my car sits in front of my house most of the time (love the walkable neighbourhood) and then suddenly makes a 700 km trip once a month, and I can't charge it at home, and the charging options are ass at my destination, and there's exactly one fast charger on the route. The constant fast charging would also hammer my battery like crazy, and I total roughly 25,000 km in a year. To top it all off, the station wagon / practical sedan / large hatchback EV offering is very slim, and I really hated the "sitting on a skateboard" feel of the IONIQ 6, it made my legs ache.
But I'm a perfect storm. For someone who does not go far often and can charge at home (that happens to be the vast majority of people who need a car), EVs are basically perfect. Just rent a car or take a plane the few times you need to go out of range from a charger, or just plan for charging.
What I want for myself is a plug-in hybrid, but they're kinda rare, expensive, make little sense for most people and aren't really available in a sedan / wagon form factor.
I love EVs, I like driving them, and I think they would go great with a general reduction of total vehicles on the road (i.e. more effective public transit), more right to repair and less telemetry.
Addendum - My case sounds like it would be perfect for using car sharing like Communauto, but they're really expensive for my use case, and tracking one down has been such a complete pain in the past that the extra cost of maintaining my own vehicle was worth it for the ability to be able to up and leave for work at a moment's notice wherever I'm needed. I remember having to travel an hour into town to get to my Communauto rental, just to discover it's in limp mode, it's trashed, etc. They're much better nowadays, but my pandemic then-new-car is now mostly paid off.
If you’re doing a 700km trip once a month, and if we assume you need to charge back up four times — that’s 4 full charge cycles per month, or 48 per year.
A typical EV battery is rated for 1000 to 2000 charge cycles. With an average range of roughly 450km per charge for many modern EVs, and assuming the lower bound of 1000 cycles, you’ll need to put 450 000 km on your vehicle before you have to worry much about battery degradation. Based on your own 25 000 km/year estimate, that’s 18 years of ownership.
Or if we look at it based on charge cycles per month (which we’ll round up to 6 to accommodate for other driving outside your 700km trip once a month), that’s 72 full cycles per year, which won’t get up to 1000 total cycles for nearly 14 years.
Considering the average ICE vehicle in Canada only lasts 10 to 12 years, you’re going to do way better in an EV than you would with ICE. Battery degradation for EVs is VASTLY overstated — estimates of modern EV batteries from the last few years is they should be able to get 1 million miles out of them — the rest of the car is likely to fall apart before the battery fails.
Now the lack of suitable charging infrastructure on your route is a real (and valid!) problem, and we can only hope that situation gets better for everyone (here in BC, BC Hydro has been building out fast charger infrastructure every 150km along all highways throughout the Province, so road trips here are NOT a big issue. I’m on such a trip now incidentally!). But myths about battery life, especially coming from EV enthusiasts has to die.
You bring good points! My concern about battery life is more specifically about the toll fast charging puts on a battery, and such a car would be supercharging for most of its existence.
I did rent out a dual motor long range IONIQ 5 for a test trip, I really enjoyed it, but I was stuck for an hour at a fast charger at a random closed Ford dealership off the side of the 20 on the way back because I couldn't charge at my destination in Levis during the day.
I also had a LOT of issues with Electrify Canada and Flo, from non-functional stations to stations where the sessions just wouldn't end. It happened twice, and the second time it happened, it took support (I forget which company, I think Flo) a whole WEEK to close the charging session properly. During that time, I could not open any other charge session, and had to call support every time I wanted to charge. 🙃
Otherwise, Quebec's charging infrastructure is okay, but the lack of fast chargers (350kw+) make it difficult to do long trips without stopping constantly, and northern Ontario / Quebec is basically devoid of charging stations.
The toll that fast charging puts on the battery tends to mostly be a problem either in very hot climates, or in instances where you’re charging to 100% a lot. But if you’re using fast charging mostly to get up to 80% here in Canada you’re likely not going to run into a significant decrease in battery life.
(Unfortunately, we can’t say much about this from real world experience, as vehicles that can handle 350kW+ charging are still somewhat rare, and those that do exist (like vehicles built upon Hyundai’s E-GMP platform) aren’t even 5 years old yet).
I drive an AWD IONIQ 5 (Ultimate Edition FWIW) — and the most trouble I’ve had at chargers has simply been lining up when it’s been too busy, and having to wait for much slower charging vehicles to finish up at fast chargers. But that has also been rare, and is more common through the BC interior where there are long distances between towns/cities through the mountains and EVERYONE stops at them to top up. But I’ve certainly heard my share of stories. Indeed, just last week I was helping a friend who is taking a road trip out to Alberta find suitable charging near his hotel — and it turns out that in that area there has been a significant problem with people chopping off the cables repeatedly.
It’s only getting better — but where things are improving is pretty uneven. But this is where the EVSE installation credit for car manufacturers is so important — and why we can’t back down on the 2035 phase-out of sales of purely gasoline powered vehicles (recall, PHEVs are permitted for sale after 2035 by the current rules). If the automakers can’t make the 2026 sales targets they can start building out the EVSEs we need to convince people it’s safe to buy more EVs.
I lived with the exact same car you have, and yeah, waiting for slow cars at fast chargers was one of the pain points, but I think this is just a question of social etiquette. More charging infrastructure should also resolve this issue.
You may very well be right about our temperatures generally not being high enough to hammer the battery that much, though Quebec summers can get pretty hot for short periods of time.
How is your IONIQ 5 in the deep of winter, with winter tires and -25c weather? I never drove such an EV in winter, and since current EVs rely so much on the insane efficiency of their motors rather than the battery capacity, temperature and tires can make a difference in range.
I live out on Vancouver Island these days (although have previously lived in Toronto and Montreal — so I know what summers there are like!), and we don’t get -25C weather. Snow is a bit of a rarity as well (we do tend to get snow a few times every winter — but it often doesn’t stick around or accumulate for long). As such, so far I haven’t even bothered to put winter tires on the car — I have M+S tire, the car is heavy, and “snow mode” (which you get by holding down the “Drive Mode” button on the steering wheel) does a great job of ensuring traction is maintained in the snow. For the maybe three times we get a bit of snow each year it more than suffices.
Fortunately I learned to drive in Southern Ontario with lake effect snowfall. It’s amazing how many people on the island just have no freaking clue how to deal with the tiniest dusting of snow 🤣.