Why It’s So Hard To Make An Electric Car That’s Fun

One of the first challenges from the latest season of The Great British Bake Off was having these British amateur bakers make “American-style” cookies. Unexpectedly, it was a gastronomical disaster just this side of the Midland Counties Beer Poisoning of 1900, though with thankfully fewer fatalities. Many of the cookies were more like candy bars, or featured meringue toppings and sour fruit. It was very odd.

Even the phrasing of the challenge was bizarre, with a request to produce 30 American-style identical cookies with… decorations? The classic American cookies (chocolate chip, oatmeal raisin, snickerdoodle, peanut butter, etc) are not decorated. They’re sweet, sure, but not overwhelmingly or cloyingly so, and a bit of salt often provides a counter to the sugar.

What the bakers created, primarily, are more like something you’d get at a novelty cookie bakery. Think Crumbl or Insomnia Cookies. Not that they’re necessarily bad, if that’s what you want, but they aren’t really American-style, nor are they in any way sufficient when what you’re thinking of is a Tollhouse-style chocolate chip cookie.

This is how I feel about most electric cars, and why I think it’s so hard for fans of EVs and fans of traditional internal combustion cars to even speak the same language. A focus on pure statistics might make one assume that a cookie with more sugar is the better cookie if you like sweets, when, to me, a saltier cookie with less sugar is what I’m really craving.

An example.

In a long conversation about the future of the Volkswagen Group and combustion cars, someone on BlueSky said the following:

Who is still going to buy a Porsche ICE car, when a dual motor EV can eat any one of them for lunch easily at the hypothetical race off the stop light?

This poster is not wrong to say that if what you want in a performance car is to accelerate faster than anyone else, you ultimately are better off buying an electric car. In terms of performance-per-dollar, it’s nearly impossible to beat a Tesla Model 3 Performance, which costs under $60,000, can hit 60 mph in under 3 seconds, and produces over 500 horsepower. If you wanted the same level of objective, numerical performance from a gas-powered car you’re in the realm of, say, a Ford Mustang Dark Horse SC, which costs basically twice as much.

Porsche has found it so hard to find customers for performance EVs that it’s shifted its strategy back towards making more expensive 911s, which are inefficient and illogical cars. They’re also fun as hell. So is the Mustang. If a rational person would rather have a Model 3, I am definitely not a rational person.

High performance electric cars, going back to the culinary metaphor, sometimes feel to me more like that Gushers candy, which supposes that if you want something really sweet, there’s nothing better than a chewy bit of sugar confection that blasts a lukewarm splurt of corn syrup straight into your mouth while you eat it. It’s an appealing notion to children, maybe, but try arguing to an adult that a Gusher is better than, like, a Twix, or a Kit-Kat, or any other candy you can think of. [Ed note: I prefer Toffifay, which is “too good for kids.” – Pete]

This isn’t to say that it’s impossible. The Hyundai Ioniq 5 N pulls it off by mimicking a gas-powered hot hatch, and the new i3 is apparently very good. A Porsche Taycan Turbo comes close, although it’s still not as fun as the basest base Cayman or Boxster.

All of this was on my mind when I decided to borrow a purple Rivian R2 Performance AWD.

An R2 Has The Performance, If Not The Feel

To clarify, this is not going to be a full review, because David did like 6,000+ words on the R2 after its launch this summer and I agree with his take. The R2 is an excellent electric SUV, and the fact that it looks very much like a smaller R1S isn’t a detriment to me, as I think the R1 is an extremely handsome design.

I own a Honda CR-V Hybrid that is just an car to me. I don’t really care that much about how it looks, I just like that it’s efficient, safe, and was affordable. If you were only thinking about a car as something that’s efficient, safe, and affordable (relative to an R1S, at least), then a Rivian R2 is a sensible choice.

Many people, I suspect, aren’t into the R2 because it makes rational sense. My friends who are interested in buying one look at it like something fun. And, in a way, it was. Driving the Rivian R2 for a week, I found it to be both sensible and even enjoyable.

Was the actual point-to-point of driving it fun? Not exactly. I appreciate that even the dual-motor performance version only trots to 60 mph in the mid-3-second range, because anything faster than that makes me feel like I want to barf, and barfing is not usually fun to me. Still, the novelty of an electric car accelerating at non-nauseating speeds doesn’t do much for me, and after a while the trick loses its appeal. I have more fun in my E39, which is slower, but makes a bunch of loud noises and allows me to shift. Maybe that’s juvenile, but it’s my truth.

I feel the same when I attempt to hustle it around a corner. Absolute credit to Rivian for taking something that’s roughly 5,000 pounds and overpowered and also making it easy to drive quickly. There’s a specific high-speed curve I use as a safe benchmark for measuring composure, which is the unheralded yet most important characteristic in a fast car. Most people think power is key, but power without grip is just wasted heat, and grip without a good sense of where it ends is just an invitation to make someone’s Cars & Coffee reel go viral.

Attempt to throw a Rivian R2 around a corner, and it’ll probably save you from embarrassing yourself using a “brake lock differential” to do what torque vectoring or a limited-slip differential might do in a different vehicle. Is that fun? Not really. Under pressure, the hefty SUV jolts and dives like a USC freshman tight end, but in this situation you’re not the tight end, you’re one of the hapless Ohio State defenders. There’s not a lot of feel there, because there’s not a lot of feel with most good electric cars, so you just hang on while the car straightens itself out.

So What Makes It Fun?

If the driving of the Rivian R2 is nice, though not particularly fun, then every other part of the experience will have to make up for it. Thankfully, for most Rivian owners and even grizzled autojournalists like me, the rest of the car more than delivers.

I had the R2 for Halloween, and got to use the Halloween Mode I wrote about last week. You can see video of it below, or by clicking here.

 

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I can’t film the different modes from outside the car, so I had my ultimate frisbee buddies sit in the car and hit the various buttons of Halloween Mode for me, and you’ll notice them dancing with joy. I was too busy trying to film without tripping that I hadn’t noticed their wild gesticulations, but that’s basically the feeling you get when you have a car that’ll turn itself into Ecto-1 (or Ecto-R2 in this case) just for funsies.

Even the main cluster makes the R2 look like a little ghost-fighting ambulance, which made me smile while driving it. It’s even better when parked, because you can put it in “Trick or Treat Mode” and have it tell you ghost stories, give you a Ghostbusters-themed soundboard, and will let you smush little Stay Puft Marshmallow guys on the big infotainment screen. My daughter happily proclaimed, “This is one of the best cars you’ve ever gotten” after playing with it for ten minutes.

While this may seem slight, and even childish, it’s not something most cars can really do! This is a silly yet powerful way to demonstrate that Rivian’s value proposition is, in large part, due to its completely integrated brain. In a normal car, everything is controlled by overtaxed ECUs attempting to make a bunch of different supplier-coded systems work together. Rivian wrote all the code, and it can therefore blink the lights like a ghost trap, play a siren, and turn the lights inside green (Tesla, too, has some similar abilities, and my friend played ghost noises from his Model Y to try and scare/amuse our kids during Halloween).

I love old Volvos. To me, old Volvos are fun. That’s difficult to explain to people sometimes, but there’s a joy in clever packaging and stout capability.

The frunk on the Rivian is wide enough, and deep enough, to toss in all my frisbee gear so that it’s not stinking up the rest of the SUV. IT also has a delightful opening action, and almost seems to be smiling at you when you do it.

Can a color be fun? This particular R2 has Borealis, which is a light-shifting color not that dissimilar from Ford’s Mystichrome, just without the green infill. It is a fantastic hue, and people went out of their way to turn their heads to look at it when I passed.

It’s also a neat trick that the rear glass can drop into the hatch, which allows the Rivian to be used as a portable sound system or, if hanging out after the game enjoying a beverage, a place to hang out.

This isn’t the most traditional sort of fun, and it requires a change in perspective, which is why I think so many electric car fans are people who weren’t gearheads before this moment. I can totally accept that what I find exhilarating–controlled slides and barely controlled tire destruction–is unappealing to many people.

What you taste in your mind when you hear ‘American cookie’ may not be what I taste in my mind, and that’s fine. I don’t want to yuck your yum if you won’t yuck mine. What the R2 shows is that, if you’re willing to broaden your tastes a bit, you might find something worth a second bite.

Top photo: Author