There is a place, a stop away from heaven. I’m not saying its name here. But it is one of those beautiful, impossible roads that cuts its way through some inexplicably vast expanse of public land.
It’s near San Diego, where I live. Flanked on either side with beautiful trails for hiking, biking, off-roading, camping and backpacking, yet empty on most days, it is among the most varied, exciting places I have ever been. It is the place I go when I need to feel small.
Chevy Blazer EV Long term owner review
Photo by: Mack Hogan/InsideEVs
Trouble is, in almost every type of car, getting there is a chore. And the most fun option is the one that every car enthusiast seems to call boring: An electric crossover.
Why Most Cars Are Annoying
The route from my house to God’s own tarmac is as follows: first, navigate the stop-sign-ridden treachery of my own neighborhood en route to the interstate. Expect traffic. Merge onto the highway, right before it merges with another. Spend 10 to 30 minutes bottled up in the chokepoint.
Next, drive on wide-open highways for 40 miles with a 70 mph speed limit, and a 4,500-foot elevation gain. Then, arrive at the road, and attack its winding, majestic bends.
My most recent drive on my favorite road.
Photo by: Mack Hogan/InsideEVs
Finally, find a cool trail, off-shoot or forest road leading somewhere into the wilderness. Explore as far as possible in the car, and continue on foot.
It’s my review route for a reason: It contains every aspect of American driving, condensed. There’s urban traffic, rural interstates, high-speed backroads and dirt logging trails. If you want to go anywhere in this country, those are the domains you should master.
Yet pretty much every gas car I’ve driven annoys me in one of these situations.
Hyundai Ioniq 9 Road Trip
Photo by: Suvrat Kothari
My manual, supercharged Mazda Miata was a chore in traffic. So was the Porsche 911 GT3. So is pretty much every gas car with a truly great engine, because great engines are rarely optimized for low-speed drudgery.
Then the highway section, where sports cars always fail. Given the elevation gain and the 80-mph traffic flow, too, this is where every mainstream gas car or hybrid blows it. Driving a Honda CR-V hybrid up a mountain was not an aurally pleasant experience. It sounded like it wanted to explode. So, too, do most gas-powered pickups.
Those trucks—and my trusty but thirsty 2001 Chevrolet Tahoe—also fall apart when I get to the highway. It is a great driving road because it is twisty, and flowing, and contains great elevation changes. All of these things are annoying in a gas truck, where you have to worry about manually downshifting to relieve pressure on your brakes.
2025 Chevy Blazer EV SS First Drive
Photo by: Chevrolet
By this point, the only gas cars that are still doing well are the luxury and grand-touring stuff. Naturally, I had a great time doing this trip in a Mercedes SL and a Lexus IS 500, but the party had to end when the pavement stopped. I couldn’t get to my favorite hiking or camping spots.
Now, it’s fine enough if you never want to take a car off pavement. It’s not for everyone. But a whopping 35% of all roads in the United States are unpaved, which means anyone in a low-slung sports car is missing out on quite a bit.
So what do you get if you want something that shines in traffic, on long high-speed highway slogs, over back roads and down into the backcountry? A crossover, of course. That’s what we’re all buying. If you want to have any fun, yours had better be electric.
Why Electric Crossovers Are So Great
Here’s a synopsis of the same drive in a Mercedes EQE 320+ SUV: The car was silent and perfect in town, drove itself through the traffic, handled auto lane changes the entire highway slog, was silent on the brutal mountain climb, ungodly fast on the twisty bits and completely sure-footed on the dirt.
Photo by: Mack Hogan/InsideEVs
The same is true for the Hyundai Ioniq 5 XRT and my own Chevy Blazer EV, albeit without as much driver-assistance wizardry. The BMW iX crushed this test, and the Mercedes EQE SUV did alright too, albeit it was a bit too big and heavy to be charming.
I can’t remember an electric crossover botching this test.
And I can’t imagine better adventure vehicles, in general. I’ll admit: Charge logistics remains a pain point. But beyond that, I’ve now camped in the backcountry in two separate electric crossovers, drifted one through remote sand dunes, bombed another down a dirt-road rally stage and slid another through a muddy bit of woods. In the EQE, I casually pulled four-wheel drifts as I rounded corners on dirt roads. In the Ioniq, I did donuts in the sand.
Please ignore the evidence of my muddy four-wheel drifts.
Photo by: Mack Hogan/InsideEVs
Ask any EV owner: Fun comes naturally to these things. The power is instant and limitless; so long as you know how to tune a chassis, you can make the rest work. Sure, an EQE or Blazer EV aren’t on equal footing with a Miata, but they still have something no gas car can match: An instantly responsive powertrain, perfectly linked to your foot and perfectly controlled in low-traction scenarios.
That means you can romp on them on canyon roads or blitz down a dirt path knowing you’ll never get caught off-guard by turbo lag, or a wandering transmission, or a dip in the powerband or a mid-corner gear change. You have seamless power always, a center of mass that’s two feet below your ass and—in most of these things—a rear-biased all-wheel-drive system. If you can’t have fun in that, you are lacking in imagination, not opportunity.
A recent day in the Mojave Desert in a 2025 Hyundai Ioniq 5 XRT.
Photo by: Mack Hogan/InsideEVs
That means you can romp on them on canyon roads or blitz down a dirt path knowing you’ll never get caught off-guard by turbo lag, or a wandering transmission, or a dip in the powerband or a mid-corner gear change. You have seamless power always, a center of mass that’s two feet below your ass and—in most of these things—a rear-biased all-wheel-drive system. If you can’t have fun in that, you are lacking in imagination, not opportunity.
2026 Tesla Model Y Juniper
Photo by: Patrick George
They are perfect in traffic. They are silent on the highway. They are eye-bendingly fast around corners and on straights. They have more torque for off-roading and finer motor control.
As specialist tools, many internal-combustion options still reign. A Ford F-150 Raptor or Lamborghini Temerario would be best with gas power—as is true of the Miata. In a car enthusiast’s ideal world, where we all have a stable of cars to choose from for each task, these are the dream machines.
That’s not the world we live in. Navigating urban traffic, cruising on highways, carving up twisty roads and poking around dirt paths aren’t distinct tasks; they’re essential components of exploring the world via car. For each individual part, you may find a better gas vehicle.
But if you want to enjoy the real-life experience of driving, with all of its warts, I recommend doing it in an electric crossover. They’re not the most fun anywhere, but they’re plenty of fun everywhere.
Desert testing the 2025 Hyundai Ioniq 5 XRT.
Photo by: Mack Hogan/InsideEVs
Contact the author: mack.hogan@insideevs.com
