If you aren’t aware, I recently bought a 2015 Fiat 500e. I can’t afford the cool stuff I really want like a 996 Turbo or a decent Honda S2000, but I also prefer motorcycles for having fun anyway and can get a press car if I really want to go on a road trip, so I decided to go one of the least-expensive electric cars that you can buy. Plus, while I’ve previously happily owned a first-gen 500e in Los Angeles, the area where I currently live is far more rural than Koreatown, so part of me wanted to see just how bad it could really be. A little more than 1,000 miles later, I don’t know if I have a true answer, but I’ve definitely learned a lot about owning an EV.
Now, you don’t buy a decade-old compliance EV that started life as a European city car expecting to take it on any road trips, and I knew that going in. What’s really holding me back isn’t the range or availability of chargers, though — it’s the slow charging speeds. I probably wouldn’t mind stopping every hour or so to stretch my legs and pee, at least not that much, if the 500e charged fast enough that I could get another hour’s worth of highway driving out of a charge while I was doing that. On a Level 2 charger that would take several hours in the Fiat, and I don’t have that kind of patience.
The good news is, almost any used EV you find these days will charge far faster than the 6.6 kW charging rate I’m stuck with. Turns out technology isn’t stagnant, and one early example might not mean all EVs did or still do come with the same limitations. You’d think that would be obvious, but I got a couple of comments on my first post acting like this is some kind of gotcha. Yeah, I knew I was buying an early EV with an old battery and outdated charging tech when I bought it. This is supposed to be a torture test of sorts.
Home charging
That said, charging it on a 120V wall outlet at home remains the thing to do. If you drive enough that you really need a Level 2 charger, it’s possible you’ll get some benefit out of it, but I suspect the vast majority of owners would get plenty of range charging overnight. And while apartment charging can still be an issue, apartments are also much less common in rural areas. If you live in the Bay Area, look away now, but I’m about to go look at a house later this week that rents for less than $1,500 a month. Not an apartment. A house. I didn’t specifically want a house, but I have a short-range EV that charges slowly and work remotely. Even though the grocery store has fast chargers, I actually need to charge where I live.
If you own an older apartment building, I can understand not necessarily having new chargers installed. Newer, nicer buildings can get away with charging higher rent, and you can’t. What really blew my mind was the brand-spanking new apartment complex I called, which I want to emphasize was completed in 2025, told me they didn’t have any electric chargers. Who thought that was a good idea? So in a way the 500e has made my housing search more difficult, but again, that’s specifically because of its short range and incredibly slow charging speed. If you can’t charge at home or work, you probably shouldn’t buy a first-gen 500e, although you could probably get away with it if you had a street charger a short walk away. Sadly, short walks don’t exist in rural areas.
Out in the country past the city limit sign
What I do get in this rural area, however, is the opportunity to spend 30 minutes on a mostly 65-mph road driving to my girlfriend’s house. That isn’t horrible by rural standards, but it does mean that if I drive over there and we go somewhere else, I have to charge at her house or hope there’s a public charger where we’re going because the miles add up quickly. It also doesn’t help that this battery appears to be affected by cold weather much more than newer batteries that haven’t already been charged 1,000 times. At one point, it got so cold that I was maybe working with a 50-mile effective range, which isn’t ideal when the drive I make most frequently is 40 miles roundtrip. And yet, I can also only think of one time the range anxiety actually got to me.
I’d driven to my girlfriend’s house and arrived with about a 70-percent charge. When we left to pick up food, I don’t know what it was, but the anxiety got to me. The temperature outside was also dropping, and I really didn’t know if we’d make it back. A dead EV on the side of the road is a little more complicated to get moving again than a gas car, and I had someone else with me, so I panicked and turned around so we could take her car. The next day, even though I had less charge than I’d started with the night before, I drove past the restaurant, and I would have been fine. I would have needed to charge at her house to get home, but the one time the range anxiety got to me, it was a false alarm. That doesn’t mean it isn’t real, especially in a car where the cold-weather range can be so unpredictable, but it’s also taken a while to get used to the car and how far I can actually push it.
Money saved, money earned
Since I live in Georgia, the weather has already been warming up, and it’s currently about 65 degrees outside. And yep, the range is definitely better when it isn’t below freezing outside. I still can’t drive for 100 miles down the highway or anything like that, and highway driving still saps range faster than roads with lower speed limits, but it’s also cut down on how frequently I feel the need to charge and how comfortable I am leaving it at, say, 50 or 70 percent when I get home. If I didn’t have to drive so obnoxiously, unnecessarily far to get to every gat-dang doctor’s appointment and restaurant, this car would be fantastic. Then again, I also wouldn’t be able to rent a house for less than $1,500, so there are tradeoffs, you know?
While it may be annoying — even though I did this to myself intentionally — having to deal with the shortcomings of a decade-old short-range EV that can’t fast-charge, a big part of the reason I bought this car was to ensure I had something I could use to get around without having to worry about head gaskets, valve cover gaskets, starters, alternators, engine oil, transmission fluid, or any of the other headaches my 2008 Subaru Forester gave me. Sure, the battery could always die on me, but I’m hedging my bets here on the general lack of maintenance, plus the part where the car still reports getting at least 140 MPGe even during highway driving. It’s cheap to insure, cheap to refuel, and should be cheap to operate. Even my tires should be cheap to replace since I’m rocking adorable little 15s. Plus, it costs less than $2 for a full charge at home.
So what am I going to use the money I’ve saved on gas to buy? Hopefully something that makes it easier to stream music via Bluetooth. I foolishly assumed that pairing my phone with the car would let me do that, but no. Either I’m missing something that’s going to make me feel like an idiot when one of you points it out to me, or I need to buy an app. If it’s the latter, I’m thinking one of those home speakers I can suction cup to the dash or windshield might be the way to go. That way, if a sweet EV lease deal comes along that’s too tempting to pass up, I can just use the speaker for something else.
