[00:00:00] Speaker A: What's holding you back from owning an EV? That's what we're going to discuss on today's episode.
[00:00:07] Speaker B: Welcome to the your Energy Footprint podcast, where we cover easy ways to lower your energy bill and other ways to make your home more sustainable, with a few energy industry highlights sprinkled in. Hi, I'm Robin Seidoff, and I've been in the energy industry for the past 20 years in both utilities and power generation, and I'll explain everything you need to know for some quick wins in your home to become more sustainable and save some money. Now let's dig in.
[00:00:32] Speaker A: Today's episode is part three in our series this month celebrating Earth Day. The first two episodes covered electrification of everything as a strategy to reduce the emissions driving climate change with the existing technology that is already economic for the most part. In the second episode, we cover the basics of heat pumps and why you should consider one if it's time for you to replace your existing furnace or air conditioning.
While we're talking about Earth Day next week, I did want to note that I will be running a sale on our courses for homeowners that are interested in investing in residential solar for Earth Day. An email will go out on Sunday with the codes, so if you're interested, then please sign up for the
[email protected]. Now let's get into the details on electric vehicles that might be holding you back from making the switch.
Let's start with the cost of ownership, which I think of as how much you're spending on routine maintenance, fuel, and insurance.
These factors are personally why I never want to own an internal combustion engine car again. Does anyone really like going for an oil change every few months with an EV? The big maintenance items are seriously rotating the tires, changing the windshield wiper fluid, checking the brakes, etcetera, kind of the incidental things that went along with those oil changes. There's clearly no oil to change, but there's no maintenance on the battery to surprise you either.
When I bought my first ev, which was a Nissan Leaf in 2018, I believe there was a recommendation to have the battery capacity tested every year, and the test was supposed to be about $115 at the time.
I didn't do it personally. But if you're buying a used EV or you're approaching the end of a warranty on the EV battery, I would definitely recommend getting the test done. I would always recommend getting the battery tested or solar panels tested before the warranty expires. Now, if you're interested on how much you'll be spending on an electric vehicle each month versus gas.
The manufacturers have come up with an electric miles per gallon metric. That may be a bit confusing. The simple way I like to think about it is to look at the capacity of the battery for the car you're interested in. For my Tesla y, it has 75 kilowatt hour battery, for example. Then you'll get the range, which is 330 miles from my car. The last piece of the calculation is your utility rate.
Now you can calculate the cost to fully charge your battery, which in my case is 75 kilowatt hours, times my rate of. So it costs me about $18.75 to fully charge my car from home to drive 330 miles, or less than six cents per mile. Since the range is similar to what you can get on a tank of gas in many vehicles, you could also think about how much you paid the last time you filled up your car. Was it less than $20? Personally, this sounds like an amazing deal to me. And I didn't waste any time needing to stop on my way home either.
Now, if I'm out on a long drive and I stop at a fast charger, I typically pay about forty cents per kilowatt hour. This probably puts the cost per mile closer to going to the gas station. But because I can charge at home, I rarely need to do this to close out the cost of ownership. I just wanted to mention that I haven't noticed any big variations in my insurance rate from owning an electric vehicle. Rates change, of course, based on the value of the car. So there may be an EV factor buried in there somewhere, but I haven't noticed any material swings.
One thing I would add is that with an EV, possibly due to the federal tax credit and maybe some other who knows what, you tend to lose more value than you would a different car driving off the lot.
You can add coverage on your insurance to cover the gap. If your car is totaled and it's worth less than the remaining loan amount at the time, you may be able to get coverage for this from multiple sources, so make sure you compare rates. I think my options were from my insurance and from the dealer. Just be aware of your rights to cancel before you sign any paperwork at the dealer, which is always a good rule of thumb.
Okay, so we've covered the out of pocket expenses for owning an EV. So now let's get into the psychological costs. We can call them.
These are the range anxiety and the battery capacity in cold weather.
First for the range anxiety. Depending on how far you drive on a daily basis, this may not be a concern for you during a typical week. I think I've heard that the average person drives around 30 miles or so per day. So now that the ranges of EV's are in the ballpark, you'll be good to go for a week of driving, even if there's no charging on a daily basis.
For cold weather, the reduced battery capacity is definitely a real thing. But again, now that capacities give you about 300 miles or so in ideal conditions, you will still have the majority of that, even in cold weather. The climate varies, of course, across the US, so it would make sense to check with your friends and neighbors that drive EV's in your climate that can tell you about their own experiences.
For me personally, living in Connecticut with a cold but not extreme winter, I don't have any concerns about the winter. Personally. If I had a remote cabin farther up in New England that I plan to visit in the dead of winter, I might feel a little differently. My concerns would mainly be about the risk of a power outage preventing me from charging the car while I was in a remote place.
One other thing I would add to this, actually, is getting a charger at home. So we just installed a charger at our house, the 240 volts charger, a few months ago, and as I mentioned, we got our first EV in 2018.
While we haven't had EV's consistently through that time, we have always charged fine our hybrids and electric vehicles with just whatever outlet was around. One was in landscaping, one more were in the garage. You don't have to spend thousands of dollars to install a charger at your home when you get your first ev.
The other thing to note is that this will take longer to charge, but if you're only driving 30 miles a day, you should be just fine.
So now that we've covered all the basics for ownership, before I wrap up, I want to touch on considerations for buying an electric vehicle, the battery life and the price of the car. First, let's talk about the longevity of an EV. When I first heard about the Prius more than 20 years ago, I think I heard the battery only lasted ten years, and I assumed that meant it would be toast and have no value at all. While I was an electrical engineer at the time, I knew nothing about batteries in used cars. So I assume many of you might have a similar assumption.
In reality, the batteries used in hybrid and electric vehicles will come with the manufacturers warranty for the first eight to ten years that you own the vehicle. It should guarantee that at the end of that time, the battery will still have 80% of the initial capacity remaining, give or take a little bit, depending on the manufacturer, which you could think of as 80% of the original range in miles. Since most new EV's have about 300 miles in range, at the end of the warranty period, you should expect to have at least 240 miles of that original range. That doesn't sound too bad to me personally. With this in mind, now let's talk about buying EV while they're becoming more popular. Buying an EV is still expensive. With the high inflation we've seen in the past two years, all cars are expensive and the EV's available still seem to be at a premium. And now it's gotten more complicated to get the $7,500 federal tax credit. While I'm not a car expert, I do think it's worth considering buying a used electric vehicle, especially since I found out that the Tesla Y I bought last September just over six months ago is worth about half of what I originally paid for it.
Now, I would recommend doing your research on which car to buy on consumer reports, since they offer unbiased information comparing different car models. But because there are less moving parts than a typical car, I would assume that there's less that could go wrong with the used vehicle.
If I were going to buy a used EV, I would pick a lower mileage car over a newer model year. The wear and tear on the battery comes from cycling the battery, meaning charging and discharging it, and a higher mileage car will have more cycles on the battery. I would also have the battery tested to ensure that there's no major issues. It may be hard to find an independent shop that can test an EV battery at this point, but it may be worth it to have the dealership run a performance test. That's it for today. Do you have any questions about EV's that I didn't answer? Please reach out and let me know. You can email me
[email protected] or find me on Instagram at yourenergyfootprint. On next week's episode, I'll cover my experience with my own rooftop toller over the past three months. Be sure to subscribe so you don't miss it. If you've enjoyed today's podcast, please rate and view this podcast to help more listeners find us. I really appreciate it. Our mission at your energy footprint is to educate consumers on ways you can be more energy efficient at home, as well as how to make significant investments like solar while saving money. You can find more information on our courses for homeowners interested in installing rooftop solar on our website, www.yourenergyfootprint.com. All of our information is unbiased and based on my 20 years of experience working for utilities and as a renewable developer. We are not affiliated with any installers.
