September 12th 2025 ========== End of the Road, finally. --- That last post back in March? Man, how a LOT can change in such a short period of time. Since then, I received a "Return to Office Full-Time" order from my employer, and I was absolutely stressed out about money because of it. Shortly after covid lock down and we were all sent home to work from home, and my employer (a security technology company) looked as though it wanted to by the leading provider of Work from Home security, my wife and I decided to was time to buy our first home. Unfortunately, there was only so much that fit without our modest budget. There were inventives for first time home buyers that topped out at $500,000, and the average home anywhere within driving distance of my employer started at $600,000. Gotta love the good ol' GVA (Greater Vancouver Area), where the reliable homeownership experience is: don't. But we looked anyways. Eventually we found this great townhouse in a smaller town; where rolling green fields of farmland were plentiful, you could buy fruit and provisions directly from the harvesters. extremely animal friendly (I always wanted a dog), and the elemtary school was a stone's throw away from where we were buying. Even better, there was a third floor to this three bedroom townhouse that could act as anything, and I wanted it for a home office for me to work from home in. We bought it. Shortly after that, the reliable family vehicle (a 2016 Dodge Grand Caravan) started to become.. a lot less reliable. I purhcased this mini-van with 22km on the Odometer, and now just shortly having crossed the 100,000km mark.. problems were showing. Winter was arriving, I needed something reliable.. but what? Well, now I lived in a small town where the average vehicle was a pickup truck, and a lot of what made me me, a northern boy from the town where spruce runs deep in it's veins, was starting to emerge. Was time to get my gun license, was time to get into hunting, time to get into camping and bushcraft, and I didn't know it quite yet but I was also getting into woodworking (see what I mean?). I wanted to go offroading and experience life away from the big city. It was time to re-join _my_ people, and I traded in the minivan for a 2020 Ram 1500 Crewcab Warlock Edition. I was _elated_. I was on _top_ of the world. I felt great, and I took that thing with my family in it on many adventures. Just about 4 years into that truck's ownership and I'm starting to regret it. Not because it wasn't serving it's purpose, but because this Hybrid Return to Office order had ionadvertantly turned my Adventure-Mobile.. into a pavement princess. But what was kinda worse was the cost to fuel it. Being a 5.7L V8 Hemi, it was _thirsty_ almost all the time. What made it even worse was the cost of gas itself. The GVA had always been known as some of the most expensive fuel across Canada, rivaled maybe by the GTA (Greater Toronto Area), but I lived around farmland and that meant that certain gas stations got certain tax breaks and the gas was always more affordable than practically the rest of the province, or at least on par with the cheaper areas. Anyways when I picked up my truck, gas was sold at $1.31/L. Which was still considered quite high for the time, but we alls just kinda assumed gas was going to be high during covid as people were driving less. Well shortly after buying the truck, the gas costs _skyrocketed_ past $2.35/L sometimes as high as $2.75/L. Nothing puts the damper on "fun adventure" like only putting in a half tank of gas for the same price as what used to fill it to capacity. At the time of the Hybrid Back to Office mandate, gas was still hanging around closer to $2/L than not. But I made it work. Just barely. My fuel costs were pretty insane, and it was a constant source of stress for me, but hey I can make this Hybrid thing work. Well, here are were nearly 4 years into ownership fo the truck, and I'm being told to it's back to office full time. The extra couple days of driving the crazy distance between work and home ran me broke each paycheck than I had anticipated. Gas wasn't getting much cheaper, and in fact it was threatening to rise again with Trump coming back into office and threatening his trade war and installing Tarrifs. I was glued to the news, gas price fluctations, I was canceling subscriptions (shout out to SiriusXM btw, hate you guys too), I was eating less, and telling my kids "no we cant afford that" more often than ever before. It shattered my heart. I've worked so hard to not have to do that to them for that specific reason. It was time for a change. Time to make some big decisions. I wasn't in a fortuitus position to do so, but I spenmt the next couple months after the mandate going into _deep research_ mode on how to make this commute work. Where I casn shed some expenses, where I can adapt to a different provider. But these were all small gains. What was really killing me was the cost of fuel. Maybe.. it was time to consider trading my favorite vehicle I'd ever owned and driven.. my adventure-mobile.. for something a lot less demanding on fuel. Trading in smiles and fun for practicality will always feel like a downgrade. I had to make sure that the fun didn't outright disappear, but what could I do? I spent an absolutely ridiculous amount of time and attention on what to do with this gas guzzler. It was an extremely large problem. I considered everything: smaller sedan liek a Civic, or a hatchback like a used Golf, hybrid SUV's like the RAV4, I considered everything and spent an unsustainable amount of time laser focused on how to approach this and with what. We had this broken down Jeep in our driveway. The vehicle was meant for my wife, but it was problems. Not just your standard jeep style engine problems, but with the bodywork. And im not talking about rust, i'm talking about mold. The GVA is a pretty damp and moist place, but the past few years saw record breaking rainfalls that kept the moisture levels and humidity high. I noticed in my wife's jeep that the seats, steering wheel, and all the vynil trim on the intrior would regularly have a mold problem that my truck wasn't having to deal with.. later found out it was a problem with the gasket around the front windshield. No sooner did I find out what the problem was, did some jackass in town decided to huck a rock at the jeep's back window absolutely shattering the hell out of it. Turns out, they don't really make those windows anymore. So now the all the moisture in the air was creeping in at full force, creating entire ecosystems that could sustain life on the interior of this vehicle. It was time to get rid of it, the cost of repair was just way too high for what it coiuld provide so we just decided to get rid of it. But she still needed a vehcile. Around this time, my mother who lived in a different town hours away from us, was practically gifted a client's Mercedes they were looking to part with, and my mom had been looking for an upgrade from her '07 Passat. After talking it over with her, my mom offered to gift my wife her Passat. This was a _huge_ deal, my mom _loved_ that Passat. The only stipulation of ownership from her was that we do everything in our power to love and care for it, and that was an easy promise to make. We made a family trip out of it, rented a car (a 2024 Nissan Kicks, the weakest car I'd driven since my '86 Plymouth Caravelle) and took off for the Okanagan. During the ownership transfer, I got a lot of opportunity to just drive the small land boat that was the Passat around, and something just really _clicked_ with me about it. I formed an *instant* bond with that car. I got my wife to drive us home in it, but by the time it started getting dark she suggested we switch and I was ecstatic to get behind the wheel again. I drove that car like a bat out of hell, and it felt _completely natural_, like I had been driving this thing for years. When we got it home, I asked my wife if I could use it to commute to work and save the truck for running around town, in an effort to save some gas. She agreed, and I was psyched. Maybe this was the answer I needed all along? "No.." I remembered, "This is my wifes car." It already had 320k on the odometer and it's entire purpose was for my wife to pick up a _lot_ of the driving responsibilities now that im returning to the office full time, and she really hated driving the truck. Make no mistake about it, it's meant to be a towncar, a runabout, a chore carriage; not my commute car, not the adventure mobile. I also noticed that I wasn't quite.. saving nearly as much on gas as I was hoping for. Instead of having to fill up 1.75x per week in the truck on average, I was filling the Passat 1x per week, and though it was far more efficient on gas the problem was the long stop-and-go nature of the highway I drove on. The '07 Passat's V6 engine is just not designed to efficiently handle the fuel needs for that specific _kind_ of driving needs. Capable, sure, but nowhere near the best. It was good at driving long distances at a consistant speed, it was shockingly good at acceleration for a non-turbo V6, and it was great going around town where you can get up to 30-50km/h with ease and stay that way for a bit. My commute was not it's happy place. But it was still overall cheaper than affording gas with the truck. So I stayed with it for a while. I cannot continue to express how much I love that Passat. It _got me_ in a way I wasn't expecting. Ever since I could learn to drive, my entire family has stayed primarily within the Chrysler and Dodge ecosystem, and my driving habbits were no different. My '86 Plymouse Caravelle, my '02 Dodge Daytona (5 speed _baybee_), my '13 Dodge Avenger, my '14 Chrysler 200, my '16 Dodge Grand Caraven, and finally my '20 Ram 1500. Notice a pattern? And now sudddenly I found myself behind the wheel of this.. european.. thing. Volkswagen.. VW huh... ya.. why NOT a Volkswagen? I notriced there was a VW dealership within a short driving distance away from work, and I figured what the hell, why not listen to someone wax poetic to me about what could solve my conundrum. Well, after a week of constant discussion, and a lot of questions and answers being asked... I dropve to the dealership with my Ram and stepped outside of it for the last time, as I drove off the lot with a brand new '25 VW ID.4 AWS Pro S. Oh yeah, fully _electric_ baby. I may follow up in another post about the nuanced journey to arrive at that decision later, but ultimately we decided that if I wanted to fulfill my fuel reduction needs, despite the highway being the lions share of my commute, it was more cost effective to forgo fuel and oil entirely and go all in on electric so long as I can charge from home. No longer needing to do oil changes, or worry about oil filters, fuel pumps, timing belts, spark plugs, and alternators.. saves me a metric _ton_ of cash I didn't even really relize up front how much of my cost-of-ownership budget was going into; but then with regen braking I also get to not wear out my breaks _nearly_ as fast as a traditional car, saving on that too? I found out I couldn't quite charge at home the way I wanted too, but I also found out that public charging is still vastly cheaper than the gas equivilent too. Though I also found out how fast an EV can chew through it's battery reserves. So I was still charging 1.3x per week on average, it was like how much and how fast my truck would drink it's 96L of gas, my ID.4 would slurp it's 80kWh battery reserves about as fast. But instead of spending $1.56/L on 90L worth of gas, I was spending $0.50/kWh on 50kWh's worth of charge average, or even $0.35/kWh on a slower charge if I could get away with it. Or even better, a little less than $2/night if I could charge at home. Finally my commute problem was solved. The logistics behind everything else could be figured out from there. But for now, there was the entire summer break left to deal with. This was a _massive_ learning curve for a brand new EV driver, as it turns out not just the cold affects range.. but also high heat. BUt also heat and electronics don't mix very well and can cause any number of temporary glitches I just wasn't totally aware would be presented to me. But I got through it, and everything's been fine. But I'll be honest I've been exceeedingly exhausted, hot, and trying to acclimate to this new full time work schedule, among all kinds of other summer shenaigans such as high amounts of socailizing (I'm a massive introvert) and family duties to keep the kids entertained and explorative with their interests. Among all that i've just been entirely exhausted and unable to focus on anything at all, beyond just melting on the couch catching up on some shows with my wife. We'll we are now on the other side of summer, and things are going back to a routine. Thank goodness. Meanwhile, I finally got that client's site done. It was an exceptionally slow churn, way slower than I could have predicted, thanks in large part to this return to office thing sending my entire way of life into a total spiral. But we're on the other side of it now, and I've managed to do some pretty cool things I'm excited to share! But now, it's time to go unplug my car to let someone else charge, I'll update with more details in the next one. Cheers, ~K