But why?
Serious question. Why would it have been perfect?
Saving enough in gas to justify cost?
Just wanting to save the world?
Not being a dick. Just asking.
It would have been perfect now and moving forward because our vehicle needs have changed as a family unit.
- Our oldest has a car, my old one, and gets to 90% of her stuff on her own now so we dont have to consider her activities.
- I changed jobs and either work at home or go to an office that is half as far as before.
- A major activity for my wife and one kid is 40mi away and they go 4-5x/week.
Having one of our cars as an EV would allow us to use significantly less gas if my wife drove it. She almost never drives more than 100mi in a day, but often drives 80-90mi. 90mi of country highway miles? Thats perfect for an EV and the big handwringing issue that so many mention, how to charge, wouldnt be an issue since it would be well under within the range and it would sit in our garage every night.
We would still have 2 ICE vehicles and we could still take whatever length trip we want without having to consider charging locations. We just got back from Chicago yesterday- drove 330mi in, drove 120mi over 3 days, then drove 330mi home. Since we werent at a house with a charger, we would have just driven my ICE vehicle.
We wanted to buy an EV because-
- in our specific use case, it would have saved money in 5.5 years, assuming gas prices stayed at $3.50/gal and electricity stayed at whatever it was locally 12mo ago. This is specific to the performance of the vehicle we wanted, and while obviously gas and electricity wont stay the same for 5.5 years, there is no reliable way to predict what those costs will be, so using current prices was the best option. What I can confidently assume is that the gas price I was using was hardly some wildly expensive number, nor was the electricity cost some really inexpensive number.
- it is tech that is not cutting edge and has been around long enough for us to feel comfortable trying it. We are not early adopters and do not buy vehicles for status/image, so this seemed like a point where the tech and product offerings had become utilitarian and established enough to make it worth trying.
- the convenience factor is high. No more stopping at gas stations, listening to random engine sounds, oil changes(just did 3 in June...oof), etc. The car would be fully charged each day and we would never come close to running out of battery in a day.
My wife likes the idea of moving away from oil and viewed that as a benefit. I like the idea too, but it wasnt a motivation for me. Neither of us is oblivious to the reality that battery creation and charging results in pollution. At the same time, neither of us is ignorant enough to also think pollution creation and use from a battery is in any way equal to pollution creation from ICE use.
Our state leads the country in % of energy created by wind, so a significant amount of electricity used to power the car would have been wind generated. Neat and all, but still not what motivated me.
In the end, we couldnt buy any of the EVs we wanted. Dealers in our state are unable to carry them because our state has no emissions laws. The car companies are focusing EV sales in states where they need to comply with clean air laws. We tried to buy the couple of different models from other states and that also didnt work- either dealers were not allowed to sell out of state or the dealers were charging a very high 'out of state tax' because they could.
So I bought an ICE vehicle that gets an unimpressive but perfectly fine real world 28.5mpg combined on city and highway, and we will look into EVs again in 3 or 4 years when my wife's car goes to our youngest kid.
^ you asked...
