It’s been 8 months since I last bought gasoline. Last December I took delivery of my Hyundai Ioniq 5, a battery electric car (BEV), which I mostly charge at home in my garage. So when I travelled to my native Germany twice for family events, in March and again in August, I decided to also go for a BEV as a rental car if possible.<\/p>\n
In both cases I ended up with a different model than I had made a reservation for. In March I reserved a Skoda through Sixt but was offered an upgrade to a Volkswagen ID.7, which was more spacious and had a larger battery. In August I booked a Polestar 2 through Hertz but ended up with a BYD Seal.<\/p>\n
Using public chargers in Germany and Japan<\/strong> While chargers in Japan tend to be billed by the minute, in Germany the billing is by kWh, which is much more fair. On the other hand, the electricity rates in Germany were much higher. I paid as much as 79 or 89 cents per kWh (146 or 165 yen per kWh). In Japan the maximum charge speeds are lower but so is the cost. With the eMobility app in Japan and ad hoc use (no monthly charge), I pay 55 yen per minute at a 50 kW charger and 77 yen per minute at a 90 kW charger, which is equivalent to 66 and 51 yen per kWh. These 90 kW eMobility chargers automatically throttle down to 50 kW after 15 minutes, so you only get the benefit of the faster charge on short charging sessions. There is also a small number of Flash chargers that handle up to 180 kW, but so far these are quite rarer. At expressway service areas you will see almost only 50 or 90 kW and sometimes you have to share that speed with another car. By contrast, in Germany, 150 and 300 kW chargers are very common.<\/p>\n March 2026: Volkswagen ID.7<\/strong> When I picked up the ID.7 at the rental car garage, my first step was to try to connect the phone to Android Auto but I had difficulties. The user interface on the center console screen was unimpressive. I had heard comments about VW’s software in the ID.4 and ID.4 before, but had hoped that things had improved for the newer and more up-market ID.7. A member of the rental car staff helped us and eventually I got it working.<\/p>\n Even ignoring UI issues, the ID.7 felt one class below the Hyundai. I loved old school rotary dial volume control for the system on the Ioniq. Minimal distraction while driving! Ideally the volume control and the temperature control should not look the same.<\/p>\n The ID.7 only has two buttons for 4 electric windows, plus a front\/rear toggle. I am not sure how many cents that saves, but it’s just ridiculous. To be fair, new VW models are going back to 4 separate buttons.<\/p>\n The car was fairly quiet and spacious. Acceleration was good. Legroom at the rear is very generous. The trunk feels long but maybe more narrow than in the Ioniq 5. With the rear seats folded down there is plenty of luggage space.<\/p>\n There is no on\/off switch like there is in the Hyundai (or the BYD, see below). That took a bit getting used to, but after driving you just get out of the car and lock it with the key fob and then the lights go off. When you come back, the car unlocks as you walk up to it. You get in, put it in drive and off you go. It’s nice that the air conditioner already starts as you walk up to the car.<\/p>\n At a length of 4,961 mm the ID.7 is some 300 mm longer than the Ioniq 5, but\u00a0while parking it or turning corners I never really noticed how long it was. Its turning circle is 10.7 m vs. 12.5 m in the Ioniq 5. The wheelbase in both cars is very similar, close to 3,000 mm and longer than most other cars.<\/p>\n I love the head-up display (HUD) on the Ioniq 5, but the one in the ID.7 wasn’t quite as good: Readability depended too much on the viewing angle. If I moved my head, it seemed to get more difficult to read. That may depend a bit on how tall you are.<\/p>\n Charging was fast when connected to a sufficiently fast DC charger. The best result I got was 184 kW on a 300 kW DC charger. On the way to the charger\u00a0 I used battery conditioning to get the battery up to room temperature, since outside temperatures were still somewhat wintery. When I used a 150 kW charger near where I was staying and did not use conditioning, I would only see 40 kW. If I wasn’t in a hurry, I could leave the car there for up to 4 hours without incurring a blocking fee. At a different charger that was rated 285 kW and with some conditioning and an initial SOC of 50 percent, I got about 80 kW, still not brilliant.\u00a0 In total I drove over 900 km. Efficiency was good and I didn’t feel range anxiety.<\/p>\n August 2026: BYD Seal<\/strong> The first impression was positive: Connecting the phone to Android Auto was easy. It took me a bit longer to figure out the volume control for the audio when I was playing music on Spotify. In the end I used voice control, which surprisingly only worked in English even though I rented the car in Germany. Later I tried to find a setting in the user interface to change the system language but was unsuccessful (not that this caused me a problem, it just surprised\u00a0me).<\/p>\n Unlike the Hyundai or VW, the BYD didn’t have paddle shifters on the steering column to adjust the regen level or to enable single pedal driving. It turns out there are only two regen levels that are selectable via the touchscreen UI, with the more aggressive one active when I received the car. The car did not change between recuperation and propulsion as smoothly as I was used to, it often felt like a switch was flipped rather than a gradual phase-over between the modes, which made it feel unrefined.<\/p>\n For the drive to my family I used mostly autobahns and cruise control, which was easy to use. Acceleration is less powerful than in the Hyundai Ioniq 5 or the Volkswagen ID.7, but perfectly adequate and certainly better than your average gasoline-engine rental car. <\/p>\n As an EV without engine noise it was of course quiet, but not quite as quiet as the Hyundai or the VW. Maybe there’s less sound-proofing material used to keep out road noise, to save weight and cut costs.<\/p>\n The lane tracking felt a bit more nervous, I could feel it tug back and forth in small increments quite frequently as it was making adjustments to keep the car centered in the lane.<\/p>\n Unlike its more upmarket competitors, the car doesn’t have a HUD that projects the most important information into the windscreen. You do have to look at the driver display for speed and other data, below the windscreen. Because the car monitors the driver for distractions, to make sure you keep your eyes on the road, it often pops up alerts if it thinks you’re looking at instruments or the screen for too long, but it really overdoes it, particularly when you’re wearing glasses which seems to throw off its eyeball tracking. What’s more, when using Android Auto, the turn-by-turn information is only shown on the center display, not on the driver display, so you have no choice but to take your eyes off the road when navigating to a selected destination.<\/p>\n The trip from the airport was 132 km, with an indicated charge use of 20.9 kWh, which is 15.8 kWh per 100 km or 6.3 km per kWh. I kept the speed around 115 km\/h. That’s not a bad\u00a0result. I started off at an SOC of 91 percent and had 67 percent left on arrival. That corresponds to about 550 km of range from 100 percent charge,\u00a0similar to what\u00a0I get from the Ioniq 5.<\/p>\n The next day I had to drive to Schwabing in Munich and back with\u00a0my sister-in-law to\u00a0pick up my brother, for another 290 km. We got back with a remaining charge of 6 percent or 25 km of estimated range. Because the range estimate is pretty consistent and Google shows the exact number of km to the destination, I never got nervous about that because I knew I had enough margin.<\/p>\n I then connected the car to a local 150 kW charger where it quickly ramped up to 120 kW of charge power. It\u00a0 estimated 1 hour and 10 minutes from 6 percent to full.\u00a0 I knew the speed would drop at or near 80 percent SOC. Most likely the last 20 percent would take almost as long as getting to 80 percent. Because I had enough time, I didn’t limit charging to a maximum of 80 percent but let it charge to 100. With LFP batteries\u00a0that is not a big deal whereas with NMC, you should minimize the time the car is left parked while in a very high charge state (above 80 percent) if you want to minimize battery degradation over the lifetime of the car. When I came back 70 minutes later, the car was indeed fully charged.<\/p>\n Two days later I also used a level 2 charger (AC). The necessary cable was provided in a compartment under a cover in the floor of the trunk. Based on the range, I didn’t really need to charge then, but all parking spaces around the restaurants were taken while two charger spaces sat empty and I could use them if I was charging the\u00a0car during the meal.<\/p>\n On the final day I drove to a 300 kW charger 10 minutes from the airport and had 54 percent left. I charged back up to 92 percent (I had been told to return it with at least 85 percent charge) while taking a look at a shop next door and using a restroom there. The maximum charge speed \u00a0that it soon ramped up to was 120 kW again. At the very end, before I manually stopped the charging process, charge power had dropped to 45 kW. Because of this drop at the end, topping up the battery all the way to full is not as efficient timewise as 5 percent to 75 percent.<\/p>\n Summary<\/strong> The VW ID.7 is let down by poor software and too much reliance on the touch screen vs. buttons. I hope they fix these issues but basically Volkswagen’s software strategy is a mess and they seem to change their mind all the time on how to address it. These issues spoil a bit what would otherwise be quite a nice car.<\/p>\n The BYD Seal is in a class of its own because of its lower price point, which also shows in some of the engineering choices made. It’s competent and has good range and is eminently practical. If you want to switch away from fossil fuels and are on a limited budget, the BYD Seal is not a bad choice.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" It’s been 8 months since I last bought gasoline. Last December I took delivery of my Hyundai Ioniq 5, a battery electric car (BEV), which I mostly charge at home in my garage. So when I travelled to my native … Continue reading
\nBefore I talk about the cars in detail, some words about the charging experience in Germany. Almost all public chargers in Germany, whether level 2 (230 V AC) or fast chargers (400\/800 V DC), require an app or an RFID card to authorize charging. Only a small number of chargers can be used with only a normal credit or debit card, like you would at a conventional gas station. After doing some research, I installed the enBW Mobility app, which gives you access to virtually all public chargers in Germany. However, I could not install the app from the Google Play store because my Google account is set to Japan. I added another Google account to one of my phones and that one has an address in Germany and a German credit card. With that workaround I could find and install the enBW app and use it for charging. I don’t know how other non-European customers would deal with this. Unlike my main phone, that phone with the app didn’t have a mobile data plan for Germany, but I just used USB tethering to the other phone that had data whenever I needed to start a charging session, since an internet connection is needed to operate the DC charger. Some of them did not even have an LCD display, they were just IoT (internet-connected) devices.<\/p>\n
\nI was invited at a wedding, along with my wife and my son’s family. So that’s 4 adults and one baby, plus a baby seat. When my wife and I arrived at Munich airport, I was offered the ID.7 as an upgrade (at higher cost than what I had reserved), but I went for it because I knew we really needed as much space as we could get. Even with the big VW we could not have fitted all our suitcases at once but that was not an issue since we did arrive or depart on the same flights and when we travelled together, the suitcases stayed at the homes of our German family who we stayed with.<\/p>\n
\nIf you can charge at home overnight, none of this matters. If it isn’t a cold time of the year or you can select conditioning long enough before charging and have access to a 150+ kW charger, the ID.7 does pretty well. I was very happy with the 184 kW session and as a bonus, that particular charger also worked with a regular credit card.<\/p>\n
\nA friend of mine had tried the Polestar 2 as a rental car and he liked it. Performance was excellent but charging speed \u00a0was average. I was curious about it and\u00a0booked it, but when I came to pick up the car at the airport, I was given a BYD Seal instead. Its 82 kWh LFP battery combined with its good aerodynamics give it good range, so I didn’t mind the swap.<\/p>\n
\nI am still extremely happy with the Hyundai Ioniq 5. The car feels like it’s in a class or two above the others in virtually every aspect. If it’s out of your price range, consider the Hyundai Kona or Hyundai Inster or one of the Kia models that share the same architecture (minus the 800 V charging reserved for the more high end models).<\/p>\n