This week, Drive crowned the Kia EV9 as its car of the year (and its family car of the year), an accolade that I can absolutely understand now that I’ve had a weekend to drive the thing around. It rocks! It’s spacious, it’s luxurious, and it feels great to sit in (we’ll be doing a full review later this week). It’s the combination of these things that led me to the following test: what would working from an EV be like?
Now, we could chalk this up to ‘working from a luxurious car and nobody ever thought otherwise’, but no, I found the experience to be worth writing home about.
I assumed that the aircon blasting over the two days I worked from the backseat would leave me with a flat battery. But this was absolutely not the case – in fact, I only noticed a drop of about 8 per cent over the day (though to be fair, I was driving the Kia EV9 Earth, which has a gigantic 100kWh battery). I also slept in the car overnight with it plugged in, which you will also read about later. Another advantage over petrol cars is that, for this purpose, I could barely hear the car – whereas to avoid a flat battery, a petrol car would need to be turned on and off now and again.
The greatest advantage the Kia EV9 had in the ‘working from an EV’ space is that it’s freakin’ huge.
It’s difficult in photos to get a good scale of just how big the Kia EV9 is, but for this article (and to save some talking points for our upcoming review), believe me when I say the middle row is extremely comfortable. Even more so when you push the front two seats as forward as possible, and the middle row as back as possible.
The armrest for the front two chairs extends far into the back to offer two cupholders (and throughout the car, you’ll find 10 cup holders), which is more than enough room for a laptop to sit on if you need it.
Image: Zachariah Kelly/Gizmodo Australia
For me, the biggest problem was power. The laptop I use, the flagship Surface Laptop Studio 2, needs a recharge halfway through the day. Now, solution one involves plugging the laptop into the front seat USB-C chargers, however, these are slower than what the Laptop Studio 2 needs, and although USB-C charging is compatible with most laptops, the Studio 2 needs a powerful proprietary Surface charger.
My eventual solution was to leverage the car’s vehicle to load (V2L) capabilities – and use the Australian wall socket in the boot.
The only problem I had with this was for the wall socket to activate and work, the car needs to be in ‘Ready’ mode – which is activated by putting your foot down on the brake, and pressing the power button (it’s basically what Neutral is in a combustion engine car).
While I did worry about someone walking over and hopping in the car, and taking me for a joyride, everything was fine. It was just an annoying step in the process, but I don’t mind. Everything worked out – and as pointed out by my colleague Neerav Bhatt, I could have enabled ‘Utility Mode’ in the settings to immobilise the car while in Ready mode.
If you’re wondering what I did for Wi-Fi when working from an EV, I use a Belong mobile plan and had more than 200GB of data banked with its cheapest offer. It just rocked.
And yes, I did play games on my laptop in the backseat. My home away from home. This was a fun little experiment, but looking at the rental market right now, I hope this doesn’t become how I do my job going forward.
Image: Zachariah Kelly/Gizmodo Australia
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This article has been updated since it was originally published.