2022 Kia EV6 Official Thread

Ugh...no thanks.

Off topic but on that note, I'm intrigued by the Ford Maverick. If they can hit that 20K price target...wow...people will eat that up. And it's a hybrid as well. I know...not a BEV...but...that price has me interested.

 

Yeah, my daily driver budget has been ~$20k for the last 10+ years. With incentives and tax credit, Prius Prime was within my budget. For my next car, I would love to have a BEV, but sub $20K is going to be hard. I can get Leaf down to ~$25K, but hybrid Ford Maverick can be my next car. Far more economical than a $58K SUV.

 

So it might start in the mid- forties then.

 

Ah but I tend to keep cars 10 years and I don't want to spend all that time kicking myself because my car doesn't have xyz. Both our current cars are top of the line with every option package. $37-40k cash.

 

The problem with fully-loaded cars is they often contain features I wouldn't want if they were free, such as leather seats and sunroofs. In fact, these "packages" they now sell, instead of being able to order features a-la-carte, are a big turn-off for me with regards to car buying.

 

It's not the "better deal" I'm after. For example, I bought a Prime Advanced, which comes with "Softex" seats. They're awful like all leather or faux-leather seats, so I covered them with cloth seat covers. If the leather seats were free I wouldn't want them and it's truly a bummer that I had to both pay for the Softex seats and the cloth to cover them up when they sell cloth seats. I just couldn't get them on the version with the safety features and the HUD.

Same thing with the sunroof. If it were offered free-of-charge I would refuse it. They are hot, annoying, high-maintenance options. When I've had them I've had them fully-closed 99.9% of the time. In fact, one of the many turn-offs of the Model 3 and Model Y is the panoramic roof, which isn't optional. I suspect I'd end up painting over it or something to prevent the sun from coming in. And, no, 70% or 90% film isn't close to enough.

 

The price is likely inflated to account for the federal and state incentives. After the roll out, I would not be surprised to see discounts in the Northeast like seen for the Prius Prime.

You aren't accounting for the cost the a la cart added to the ordering and manufacturing chain. Packages and trims came about because it let a car company offer more features for a better price than the competition. If you could have ordered exactly want you wanted in the Prime, it probably would have cost more, even after getting the seat covers.

 

As I said, "It's not the "better deal" I'm after".

I'd rather have cloth seats rather than leather seats with seat covers on them. And I'd rather not have to buy a sunroof so that I can have blind spot monitoring, especially since I wouldn't buy a sunroof if it were free, since I'd rather not have one than have one.

 

If price wasn't an issue, then you are free to have someone reupholster seats. No need to settle on simple seat covers. You can even have someone weld in a piece of metal, and repaint the roof to get rid of a sun roof. These are straight forward things to do in comparison to what some have done to make a car exactly as they want.

15 years ago, Volvo was a la cart with basically everything on the list. From fancy paint to upgraded speakers to basic cruise control. Cool to have options, but I bet most buyers opted to reach a deal on a car on the lot that had the most requested features. Some packages do have infuriating feature combos, but overall they are a better value for all parties. Otherwise they would have lost to the a la cart method in the market place.

 

Even with features bundled together as Packages, think of the number of ways you can order a relatively common car like a Rav4. Hybrid or ice. 6 different colors. 4 trim levels in each. 3 Packages for each. 20 accessories. Multiple that all out. Then think what would happen if each of those packages were order-able separately. Maybe 6 features each. The overhead get atrocious. I wouldn't want to be the person who determined what inventory of option x would be needed and guessed wrong.

Which is why foreign cars were eating the big-3's lunch when they were first introduced. A civic had 2 levels and maybe 6 colors.

I'm just guessing on those numbers, too lazy to look them up. But they are pretty close.

 

I may not be after a "better deal" but I'm not after getting ripped off either. Spending $5k for a package having $4k worth of features I don't want just to spend another $5k undoing those features is getting ripped off.

I've actually avoided buying cars because of packages I didn't like, and kept the old car instead. With the Prime, the undoing came down to $300 worth of seat covers so not so bad, but I didn't buy a 2016 Prius Hybrid because of the packages offered and kept my old one another year. That's one example. If these EVs come with packages I can't stand, I'll probably do the same and just not buy one. Maybe most people are too dumb or too uncaring to get what they want, but I'm not. I wish they weren't this way so people like me who do want what they want could actually get it.

 

And an a la cart system would likely add several thousand dollars to the base price of a car before you got to adding on the options. Which is why nearly no body does it anymore, and the brands that do are of the "if you have to ask the price, you can't afford it" set.

Then the price for a set of options within a current package would be higher than what the package costs now. The package allows the manufacturer to have high margin features help pay for the low margin ones, in addition to reducing the overhead of having the parts for X package from options A, B, C, and D. The Rav4 hybrid would not be doing as well as it is if Americans saw the price for the hybrid option separate from the AWD one. Which is why Toyota doesn't do that in the US, but does offer FWD and AWD in other markets.

As for the tactic of using a desirable option to get you to buy ones you don't, well a la cart just had its own BS to get the money out of you. The many options Volvo once had with a la cart were split into two tiers. To access the options on the tier for your car order had a fee of around $1000. One of those top tier options; cruise control, and not your fancy adaptive cruise control.

 

But the problem is I end up with options I can't live with. Take the Ioniq 5. If I want a blind spot monitor (I do - for safety), I have to get 20" rims, which means lower-efficiency, poorer ride and more expensive tires, and a panoramic sunroof which will cause me to get flash ophthalmic migraines (which can cause temporary partial blindness) while driving. So in order to do something for safety, I have to do something that's totally unsafe and another thing that's totally inefficient and two things that are uncomfortable.

 

I usually keep the cars 10 years or longer if it lasts that long, but I am completely opposite of what you do when it comes to car buying. I try to be as minimalistic as I can be and look for value in a car I purchase. Most often the features the higher trims offer are non-essential, and if I did not have the feature to begin with, I won't miss it. The problem is that more features the car has, more cost for replacing or repairing it in a long run. Plus, even if I pay for all the extra features, they won't last any longer than the cheaper bare-bone model. Our road salt is just as merciless on a top-of-the-line model as on the cheap base model.

The only time I buy higher trims of the model with more features is either the essential (to me) feature is only available in the higher trim, or if the cost is the same or lowers on the higher trims. The cost reversal can happen a lot on used cars. I purchased a top-of-the-line used Nissan Pathfinder Hybrid Platinum 4WD. Still, I don't use or need most of the features that came with it, but it was less priced than the same year similar mileage lower-trim model that was available then. And the same price reversal happened to the 2017 Prius Prime Premium model I purchased new which was priced less than base model Plus at the time. The only thing is that I hated two features the higher Premium offered, Softex seats and 11.6" screen, that I had to trade it in with 2020 PP LE.

 

I doubt road salt is the problem. I've had two cars for over 30 years here in Colorado where lots of road salt is used, and neither car had even the slightest spot of rust anywhere on it. It's ocean spray and high humidity that does it, not road salt. But I'm a thousand miles from the ocean in the high-desert.