For those involved in the Buyback program: what are your plans after?

I personally like the one screen does all on the Model Y.. Takes very short time getting used to it and knowing where everything is.. Wouldn't want to go back to buttons unless the screen goes out one day.. Seats are super comfortable. Legroom in rear is amazing..

 

I bought a '21 Ultimate, identical to the '20 I surrendered except Sonic Silver instead of Ceramic Blue. None of the cars I looked at lured me away, but I'll see what comes out over the next couple of years, starting with the Ioniq 5.

I bought it on June 30, out of concerns that the $3,000 Dealer Choice Cash incentive might go away (it hasn't) and the shrinking inventory of nearby '21s might eliminate every color I would want to own (it since has). I was able to find a Costco Auto participating dealer with inventory, so paid a discount off invoice, less the dealer cash and a new $1500 California rebate that I hadn't even heard of, good on purchase or lease with no income test.

Programming the settings on the new car took about ten minutes because I knew where and what they all were. Moving the mud flaps from the old car to the new one took a couple of hours. I had forgotten how hellaciously hard it is to get at the screws behind the rear tires, even with a right angle ratchet driver made for tight clearances. My salesman says his service people just pull the wheels.

 

So now that we're in the buyback program, considering a 2021 Ultimate or VW ID4 Pro S. Thought the ID4 had a nice ride and liked the extra cargo space. Was crazy about the regen. Doesn't really stop the car like the paddle on the Kona. Will probably stick with the Kona however, as it seems the better deal plus we are familiar with it.

Now just trying to figure out how we can take advantage of the $3,000 dealer incentive which ends August 2. We leased our bricked Kona and are still waiting on our buyback offer. Not sure the offer will arrive before Aug 2 as we only got into the program last week. With the $3,000, NYS $2000 rebate and the $7,500 we could get into the Ultimate for less per month than what we paid for our Kona Limited. Might have to just lease it before they give us our formal offer--risky but I'm assuming they always make an offer of some sort?? Someone correct me if I'm wrong about that.

 

I believe it they said they will buy it back you will get an offer. (A very generous offer, usually)

 

I was in the same situation. I wanted the $3,000 offer which, the first time I noticed, was good through May IIRC. Then June 30. Then it was July 7. Now it's August 2. No guarantees, of course, but that's how it's been going. I waited until I had a firm offer with a price, and then bought my '21 Ultimate on June 30.

The New York lemon law says that if your "car is out of service by reason of repair of one or more problems for a cumulative total of 30 days or more," then you're "entitled to a refund or replacement." The initial letter from HMA - at least, the one I got - said "HMA offers to repurchase your vehicle." So short of having a check in hand, it sounds like you're in a pretty solid position.

About the $3,000 Dealer's Choice Cash incentive - it only applies if you finance. I paid cash, but to get the $3,000 I financed their minimum of $10,000. I plan to pay it off after three months, which is the minimum for the incentive. There's effectively no prepayment penalty, just a $75 minimum finance charge which will be covered by interest payments. A friend of mine did the same thing. Neither of us has reached the three months yet, though.

 

Hello,
I tried to delay the buy back process of my car as much as I can but it's moving forward.
Ideally I would like to keep the car until I can buy the Ioniq 5 but it looks like I am going to have to hand over the car before the Ioniq 5 makes it to dealerships.
Has anyone considered renting an EV while waiting for the 5? Any recommendations?

 

I talked to my Hyundai dealer about it and was considering a short term lease but they don't want anything shorter than 24 months. I'm in the same boat and not sure how to work around it. Even a hybrid would work but nothing so far.

 

Buy a used Ioniq EV then trade it in for the Ioniq 5.

 

It depends a lot on what you need. There are used cars out there - you might find a BMW i3 or an eGolf, but the range will be less. At the end of the day, you probably won't be able to sell it for what you paid for it.

 

Yes, the 2017 Ioniq EV or e-Golf with 124 mile range may get you around town OK. You'll lose some money buying and selling soon after but it may be the best way to go. I purchased a 2017 Ioniq EV a few months ago to get me through 2021 while I wait for the Ioniq 5. Now we will turn in my wife's Kona for the buyback and need a second short term temporary car. Planning to buy the 2022 Kona EV out of state once it is available.

 

I looked long and hard at a Model Y to replace my 2019 Kona, but my wife has had a Model 3 for a year now and there are just too many bugs and missing features for me to feel OK going with a Tesla. To wit:

• Sudden phantom braking happens almost every time I try autopilot, which is not very often, due to the sudden phantom braking. It's dangerous and unpredictable imo.
• There is no distance or throttle modulation when following a car in stop and go traffic on autopilot, i.e. when the car in front floors it, the Tesla floors it, and when the car in front stops suddenly, the Tesla stops suddenly. With the Tesla's massive torque, this makes autopilot in stop and go traffic very jerky and anxiety-inducing. I prefer to "manage the gap" so that my car stays moving a smooth speed even if the car in front is a raging stop-and-goer. Together with the previous bullet point autopilot is very nearly useless to me.
• There is no rear radar so the blind spot monitoring is late to react and unreliable.
• Similarly, the lack of rear radar means no rear cross-traffic alert when backing out of blind parking spaces. I use this feature on my Kona nearly every time I park in a parking lot. Big miss.
• Charge scheduling is very rudimentary and doesn't let you set peak hours to avoid like the Kona does. Preconditioning and departure-time scheduling is unreliable. If you have a short window of low or high rates, there is no way to guarantee the car only charges inside or outside that window automatically.
• Teslas A/C heat pump for some reason generates an enormous amount of condensation, which apparently pools in the condenser and mildews over time. After a year or so your A/C system will smell like dog **** (literally) for the first 5 minutes or so after turning it on, especially in the summer heat. You have to replace the cabin air filters and spray the condenser down with foaming cleaner to reduce/remove the mildewy dogshit smell as often as once every 6 months even in a temperate dry climate like SoCal.
• The cabin air filter is not easily accessible behind the glove box like literally every other car in existence, you have to remove the entire kick panel in the passenger footwell to get at it, and it's held on with those little easily-breakable automotive clips.
• If you park somewhere with no AT&T signal, like an underground garage or your home in the mountains, the car will eventually go into deep sleep mode where the cellular antenna gives up searching for a signal and stays offline. This means you can't wake the car up with the app remotely unless you walk up to it in Bluetooth range first or physically open a door. Additionally, once the modem goes into this long term deep sleep mode it will never wake back up again unless you reboot the infotainment system, even after you've driven it back into town. Every time I drive my wife's car into town I have to wait until I know I'm back in signal range and then reboot the whole car (including the speedometer and wiper controls!) before it will pick up the internet signal again and give me traffic info etc.
• Occasionally the car just forgets paired keycards and they have to be re-added manually
• Sentry mode is neat but completely useless because it drains an INSANE amount of battery power when parked and not plugged in. You don't really need sentry mode when parked at home or at work where you're likely to be plugged in, in fact the most helpful time to use sentry mode is when you've parked your car for longer terms like say for example at an airport while you're gone for the weekend. However, we just parked the Model 3 with sentry mode on last Wednesday afternoon and left it with about 150 miles of range on the clock, and came back to it Sunday evening and it had drained itself down to only 65 miles of range. 85 miles of range lost in 4 days! That's like 20kWh to run a few cameras for 4 days. 20kWh is enough to power my entire house minus the HVAC for 4 days and it needs that much just to run four cameras? Stupid.
• Similar to and in explanation of the above, the car wakes up almost every single system to do anything. Sometimes I walk into the garage and it wakes up to do an OTA update and the relays kick in, fans and pumps start whirring, the giant screen turns on, etc. - for being focused on efficiency while driving they are alarmingly oblivious of their efficiency while parked. I've left my Kona parked at the airport for a week and come back with functionally zero range loss. We parked overnight at a mountain resort last winter, went to bed with it at 19% range that night and it woke up in the middle of the night to apply a software update and left us with only 10% the next morning, barely enough to even get down off the mountain. Why? Why would it wake up to apply an update when it's not plugged in, has very low SoC, and it's cold as **** outside?
• This one's less of a big deal and I'd probably get used to it eventually if it was my daily driver but the throttle mapping is just so linear, with all that torque it makes it such a herky-jerky driving experience. It's like driving a manual with a stage 3 racing clutch, it's just impossible to be smooth with it unless you're in "chill" mode and then the top end is gutless.

All in all they're good cars, and there are a few things that they're unparalleled at currently (EV-centric navigation, effortless fast charging, max range) but in my experience at least they're definitely not as amazing as everyone makes them out to be.

To stay on topic here, I'm torn between a 22 Kona and a Mach-E, and I think it's going to come down to dealer availability since I won't really be able to wait around on a long ordering process.

 

MachE, watch Out of Spec Motoring at about 17 minutes . 80% charge,speed drops kW to about 11kW. Met a MachE owner recently,and they can't lock their charge port,button's outside so it won't prevent someone from unplugging you when you're not at 80%,and need to be. Yes, this owner got unplugged by a Bolt.

I have an X,and don't have the myriad of issues you describe with your 3. I also have a friend who has a 2018 Model 3,and it lives in a building where it parks under about 40 floors.it doesn't plugin while parked,no OTA issues or they would be pushing their 3 out of the garage during COVID.Especially when they were quarantining for 14 days at one point post traveling. Your 3 may be a defect?


Recently, overnight , the Kona at around 80% SOC lost about 20km/12miles while unplugged so it doesn't blow up.During early COVID lock downs,my Kona suffered from range loss just parked.Along with the auxiliary battery warning light illuminating [emblem] about once a week,or month.Thankfully it has never not started,yet.Also have phantom braking with ,and without ACC, no FCA alert.The infotainment is inaccurate when you compare with bluelink's data,range, time,charging. I think mine is a lemon.

 

This is typical of the impression I got of the Mach-E. It's a nice Beta vehicle but not yet a 1.0 version.

I went through this with the Volt. GM nailed the concept on the Volt, it drove great, and I loved it. But there was a long list of fiddly little irritating things. GM listened and fixed just about everything in the Gen 2 - so I traded up to one. (Bloody shame they stopped making it. It was the one credible transition vehicle for buyers reluctant to give up their ICE.)

The Mach-E is like the original Volt, but worse. Handling is not nearly as good, and almost every feature I looked at needed tweaking to be ready for prime time. Typical example: There's an alarm for exceeding the speed limit. Good part: It has a tolerance adjustment. Bad part: It only adjusts up to 5 mph over, so I'd never use it.

Some of the problems can be fixed in software, and Ford has OTA updates (competitive with Tesla). But who knows whether they will listen to complaints and fix them?

 

It has been a little over 2 months and over 7100 miles already with the Model Y and it has been amazing so far.. Zero issues and 2 road trips already..Kona was amazing and an incredible value and one of the most efficient EVs around town but the Model Y is awesome and fulfills all my needs.. Autopilot is something that I would never want to give up.. Works amazing.. It does have small flaws like occasional ghost braking but nothing that future OTA updates can't fix.

 

Test drove the Y back in December,it hesitated on the highway under a shadow while using FSD beta. Yes, Tesla will fix their AP issue like they did with the 3 when it STOPPED at over passes. For the things I do like with my Kona Electric,like XM radio,homelink, moonroof, ventilated seats,auto high beam. I didn't get the Y. Ordered a dual motor cybertruck. Cannot beat the SC infrastructure,especially V3.

 

It's funny how people give Tesla all sorts of excuses for their software not working correctly but complain about the smallest things in other cars.

How come that Hyundai's lane assistant works so good with only one single camera and Tesla "buckles" at a shadow of an underpass? Yet it's such great software from a "software" company?

Don't get me wrong, I love Tesla's in general just wondering why they get treated so differently.

 

It may be a while until the Cybertruck starts being available.. There are 1.25 million reservations and if you recently ordered, you may have to wait 5 years until you will receive it.

 

Having owned the Kona for 53k miles, it's not fair to compare the active LKA with the Tesla's system. If you rely on the Kona's LKA, you will end up DEAD! It works fine on SOME roads but on ohers, it can't even do clearly marked curves on narrow roads. I would trust the Tesla system for hundreds of miles like I did on my 3100 mile road trip where I was 3000 of 3100 miles on autopilot. The Tesla system will always side on the side of caution.. Rather I get instances of phanom braking than hitting something. It's not like ghost braking is something that happens frequently.. It happened to me 3 times in one section of highway in South Texas and nowhere else on my 3100 mile road trip. No other system as anywhere close as good as Tesla's. I rather have the system set up to be too cautious as crashing into something. Also, the system on the Kona requires you to move he steering wheel every 10 - 15 seconds.. Just laying your hand on the steering wheel with light pressure is not enough for the Kona as it is on the Tesla.. Just the weight of lightly laying your hand on he steering wheel is enough for the Tesla to stop nagging while on he Kona, you have to actually move he steering wheel a bit to stop the nagging.. This becomes annoying, so I kept active LKA off on my Kona.. On the Tesla, I use Autopilot all the time.