I Switched Back to Gas After Years of EVs—Do I Miss Plugging In?
Easier doesn’t necessarily mean better.
Fueling is a necessary evil of getting anywhere, and the popular thinking is that doing it in gas cars is always easier than in electrics. As I find myself pumping petroleum again after several years of plugging in, I’m inclined to agree. But I have thoughts.
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Prior to the 2025 Acura ADX I’m currently assigned, I had the pleasure of chaperoning MotorTrend’s 2023 Hyundai Ioniq 5 and the burden of managing the 2023 Tesla Model Y as my yearlong review vehicles. As an apartment dweller, I’ve never had at-home charging, so for both EVs I relied on public charging. Getting the hang of that routine didn’t take long, but charging annoyances were common.
Now that I’m back in a combustion-powered vehicle, my routine is like most drivers: going to a gas station, anytime, anywhere, and departing a few minutes later with ample range to continue my journey. Simple as that sounds, it’s not perfect.
Inconvenient—Or Is It?
The operative word here is “go.” I always need to go to a gas station, but with EVs I barely had to go anywhere at all. Across the street from home there’s a light-pole-mounted Level 2 charger, and there are others within a few blocks. At the MotorTrend office I go to most days, there’s a whole row of Level 2 chargers in the parking lot. These let me plug in at places I’d already be anyway. Time involved in the process amounted to walking between plugging in and unplugging.
Unlike with EV chargers, most drivers including myself never need to hunt for a gas station. Still, even the few minutes filling up takes could be longer than my most convenient EV charging option, even without home charging. That much time is never enough to get anything done—enough to clean the windshield, at best. And it’s all spent in the gaseous milieu of a fuel plaza rather than the quiet familiarity of my neighborhood or office.
Going the Distance, Mostly
This benefit is only in the context of local driving. Of course, for long-distance driving, getting gas always requires less time and thinking than calculating charge stops and hoping everything works. That’s true even as Tesla has opened its vast Supercharger network to other brands.
However, gas cars don’t all deliver an effortless road-trip range advantage. The subcompact ADX’s EPA-rated driving range is 378 miles with AWD, a distance our long-termer seems unable to hit. According to our fuel log, the most miles we’ve coaxed out of a gas tank is 345 miles (my heart beats faster thinking about how far I drove with the refuel light on), and we’re refueling every 260 miles on average. That average aligns with driving range among mainstream EVs, and the maximum is short of some EVs, albeit high-end ones.
Even with the ADX’s relatively short range, the overall time a road trip takes is much less than it would be in an EV. Gas is better for getting to a destination as soon as possible. In an EV, though, I often appreciate how charge stops break up a drive, even if it takes longer in the end.
