Electric Cars or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Efficiency

Warning: This is going to be a longer post than you’ll normally find on MUB!

In The Beginning…

In October 2016, I bought a brand new 2016 Nissan Leaf S. I had never bought a brand new car, and may never buy one again, but I was lucky to take advantage of a $7,500 federal tax credit for my purchase, so I figured it was kind of worth it. 

My previous car that I sold leading up to the Leaf purchase was a 2008 Lexus IS350. It was a 306 horsepower beast that drove like a dream. My issue was that I became aware of how much it cost me to maintain it. New tires? $1,200. “But, wait, you don’t have to buy those all that frequently!” Au contraire. When you have differently-sized tires in the front and back of the car, you can only do so much to avoid wearing them unevenly because you can’t rotate them in your typical fashion. This is one of the factors that led me to calculate a per mile cost of about $0.50 for that beautiful car (fuel, maintenance, replacement cost, insurance). Another issue that led me to consider opting for a different vehicle was that I had stopped caring what most other people thought about me. Who was I trying to impress driving a fancy car that sold for around $50,000 brand new? When I hear my coworkers talking now about how so-and-so drives a fancy Lexus, Mercedes, or BMW, I wonder to myself whether the people driving them truly understand how much it costs them to drive and maintain those cars.

Enter the Nissan Leaf, a four-door, hatchback, fully-electric vehicle (EV). Factor in the federal tax credit and it was a clean swap for my existing Lexus. It was a fully-electric car with an EPA-rated range of 84 miles. “Hey, that isn’t a long enough range to do anything with!” Except it’s the perfect commuter car. My round trip to the office at the time was about 30-35 miles. I could easily drive two straight days to work without plugging in to recharge. Not bad, if you ask me. Besides, my wife had a Honda Civic if we needed to take longer trips.

And speaking of plugging in to recharge, for the first year of ownership I only plugged the car into a regular-old 15-amp outlet in my garage and I was totally fine. At the time, I was renovating our master bedroom and bathroom and the garage was functioning as a supply warehouse for that endeavor. Anyways, no problem with using a normal outlet to charge for a full year. As far as cost is concerned, in my 5 years of ownership and 25,000 miles driven, I spent less than $3,000 total, “fuel” included, and never once went to a gas station.*

In fact, one of the beautiful things about electric cars is that there is usually very little maintenance to perform. This reduced cost brought my cost per mile driven to around $0.33.** So overall there was a savings of around $0.17 per mile. Doesn’t sound like a huge sum, I know. But if you were an “average” American driving 13,500 miles per year (according to Car and Driver), that’s a $2,295 savings every single year. If you were to invest that difference and earn 7% annually, at the end of a decade you would be more than $36,000 richer. If you kept doing that over a 30 year career, you would be about $234,000 richer. I’ll accept looking a bit like a dork in order to have several hundred thousand more dollars in my investment accounts at the end of a 30 year career… Or you could buy a beautiful-looking EV and not look like a dork at all. 🙂

Anywho, back to my thoughts on the Leaf. There are a few reasons not to love the car. The first is that it does not have any sort of cooling mechanism for its battery. Because of that, its battery is more likely to degrade over time. This is a big deal. Many of the Leaf forums over the years are full of otherwise-happy owners whose batteries have degraded to the point where they need to replace them, and replacement is not cheap (~$5,500). Adding to that, the rest of the industry has largely moved to active cooling systems for their car batteries, which is one of those measures that I would argue is worth paying a little extra for. An ounce of prevention is worth $5,500 of cure. My Leaf suffered no battery degradation during the time I owned it. Then again, I live in Washington DC and not Arizona. The other reason not to love the Nissan Leaf is that it is quickly being overtaken by other electric vehicles when it comes to range. I was happy with my 84 mile range (which was closer to 100 miles since I drove like a grandma and got over 4.0 miles per kWh). What I wasn’t happy with was that the rest of the industry had taken off like crazy with longer range cars and I was afraid my sweet little 84-miler wouldn’t hold its value long-term.

[*Dramatic Music*] The Trade-In

So what was a relatively early-adopter to do?** I traded my Leaf into Carvana and bought a used 2017 Chevy Bolt LT. Range issue? Solved! I went from a 24 kWh battery (84 mile range) to a 60 kWh battery (238 mile range). Battery degradation issue? Solved! The Bolt has an active thermal conditioning system for its battery pack and is warranted for 8-year/100,000 miles. I’ll take it. In addition to the longer range, the larger battery pack on the Bolt provides me with a little bit more peace of mind in the event of a power outage, which I’ve detailed in another post. Suffice it to say I bought an inverter to hook up to the car in the event of a power outage so that I could run refrigerators, heaters, lights, etc (though not all at the same time) all without the noise and pollution of running a car engine the whole time. Hopefully electric vehicles in the future will have whole-home backup potential, but the industry hasn’t quite gotten there yet.

So what else is different between the Leaf and the Bolt? The Bolt is much zippier (that’s an industry term). The driver also sits much higher in the Bolt than in the Leaf. The Leaf seat position was like driving a car. The Bolt’s is more like a small SUV, even though it’s very close in size. This is one aspect I frequently bring up to my mom, who’s considering getting rid of her older SUV but won’t entertain the idea of getting anything where she doesn’t “sit up high.” My overall impression is that the build quality is quite comparable between the Bolt and Leaf, but the engineers at Chevy went a different (better) direction on battery design.

What else is there to know about electric cars?

I am not one of the people who will tell you that you must get an EV or you’re a bad person. I’m also not going to argue vehemently that there are no drawbacks to electric vehicle ownership. However, I will offer encouragement to those who think that this might fit their lifestyle and their values. Part of me hopes that my decision to buy one of these cars early on helped spur others to do the same, or at least de-stigmatized EV ownership, and that I can one day tell my son that I did something to try and preserve our planet. We are, in fact, facing a practically-hopeless freight train of a catastrophe called climate change. Even incremental change on a large scale begins to make a huge difference, just look at what the US has done with the adoption of LED bulbs (and what it hopes to achieve by 2027).

So, as far as the benefits of EVs, there are a myriad: 

(1) Money savings can be substantial.

(2) Energy savings are substantial.

(3) No road pollution. Look here at what COVID lockdowns and decreased commuting did to our air pollution levels: “On a city-level, 50 of the 61 analyzed cities show nitrogen dioxide reductions between 20-50%.” That’s huge! Imagine widespread adoption of EVs that could make stats like that permanent or even greater. I realize many detractors will point out that electricity production from things like coal power plants would have to increase to handle that kind of load on the electric grid, but even the efficiency of scale achieved by a coal-fired power plant is far and away better than that of thousands of little gasoline and diesel power plants driving around on our roads. Besides, the electricity mix is improving towards cleaner energy, so we won’t be faced with that kind of argument for much longer anyways! In the meantime, many electricity utilities offer customers the option to pay for renewables as the source for their electricity, so you can opt into that to be even cleaner.

(4) As I wrote above, I haven’t had the need to go to a gas station for my car. Not once. Since 2016. Those delightful trips to a smelly, dirty locale will not be missed.

(5) Lower maintenance than their gasoline or hybrid counterparts. The relative complexity of electric motors is far lower than that of gasoline engines (you’ll just have to trust me on this one). You also never need oil changes. If you decide to use regenerative braking in your electric car, which I highly recommend, you will also go through brakes at a much slower clip than in a gas car. Typical gas car brakes need to be replaced after about 50,000 miles. Many owners of electric cars, regardless of how long they own them, may never have to replace their brake pads. Insane, I know. Electric cars also have much simpler transmissions. I think you get the point here.

(6) As an American, I like that the U.S. has an edge in this field, at least for now. Tesla has forced the big automakers to adopt the technology and take it mainstream, which is great news for consumers. Chevrolet is manufacturing these cars in the US (Ford’s Mustang Mach-e is being manufactured in Mexico, but they opened a plant to make the electric F150 in Michigan), and Tesla has been doing so for years, so there’s a win for US manufacturing jobs.

On the other hand, there are some drawbacks.

(1) On long trips (interstate travel, mostly), you may have to take longer to plan out where you can charge your car. Check out this tool from ChargeHub that shows public charging infrastructure on your route (or in your neighborhood!).

(2) On long trips (interstate travel, mostly), you may have to take longer at your stops than you otherwise would in a gas car. For my 2017 Chevy Bolt, you can get about an 80% charge in 1 hour. Some fancy Tesla fast-chargers will get you to an 80% battery charge in only 20 minutes! The reason a lot of these fast-chargers base their time calculations on the 80% threshold is because the battery charges much slower from 80%-100% than from 0%-80%. It’s simply more efficient to stop more frequently and charge to 80% than it is to charge fully to 100% because the time to top off from 80%-100% is longer than the 0% – 80% charge time. Something about battery chemistry and engineering… Anyways, pack a book or a picnic, or go for a run!

(3) Many who live in cities, apartments, etc., might not have a place to reliably plug in at night.

If I’m being brutally honest, the first two points for the detractors are not really great points unless someone exclusively takes road trips in their lives and has no access to another car. I have told friends over and over again, you shouldn’t shop for a car based on the criteria it needs to fulfill 1% of the time for you. It should be the absolute most efficient method of satisfying 99% of your daily needs. Examples would be “Oh! But once a year I need to take my family to the beach and we need the space in the Expedition for all of our stuff,” or “I travel to see my family every year in Iowa from DC and I don’t want to have to make multiple stops for long periods of time.” I believe these people are simply looking for reasons not to get an electric car. For the money saved and the convenience of never visiting a gas station or getting an oil change, you can use that money and time earned to spend on a longer trip once a year. Think about it—wouldn’t your road trip to visit family in Iowa probably just be much cooler if you rented a convertible with the $2,000 you saved that year by driving an EV? Couldn’t it be less stressful if you spent an hour on your stops to fast-charge, have some coffee, lunch, and/or nap? Or couldn’t you just rent a minivan (one of the world’s most efficient and effective, if often-hated, vehicles) on Turo to take your family to the beach?

I will cede that people who live in apartment buildings or other areas where they won’t have access to reliable charging infrastructure is not the ideal setup for EV ownership. That said, there are ways to make that work. For instance, spend a bit more to get a long-range EV where you wouldn’t need access to a charger all the time where you live. Alternatively, look into going car free if you live in such a densely-populated area. There’s very little you could do that would be more environmentally friendly or good for your wallet.

For me, the positives of EVs far outweighed the negatives. Hopefully I provided you a bit of insight as to why, and you can consider an EV for yourself!

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*I actually did go to a gas station once. I needed to fill up a tank of gas for my lawn mower. That makes twice I’ve visited a gas station with a non-gas vehicle—the other time was on my bicycle for the very same reason.

**This is high estimate, in part to be ultra-transparent about the potential savings with EVs.

***And a huge kudos to those out there that bought EVs long before me. I appreciate your market signaling and dedication to make my EV experience much better as a result!