Is an electric vehicle right for you?

I was delighted to purchase my 2023 Chevy Bolt EUV in early March. It wasn't easy. The market was still uncomfortably tight, and available vehicles were hard to find. The few dealers that had a vehicle on their lots often demanded substantial premiums over MSRP, typically in the $3K to $5K range. That was unacceptable to me. I ultimately put down a deposit, sight unseen, on a car whose color wouldn't have been my first choice, with a dealer five hours distant, on a vehicle that was still in transit from the factory. I'd been looking for a while and had almost given up, and then I got lucky.

Hopefully the market is somewhat better now, but I haven't checked. Chevrolet says it plans to build 70,000 Bolts this year, a lot more than last. But it also said this will be the Bolt's final year, despite its undeniable success, because Chevrolet is reworking its entire EV fleet, which will be built on its next generation Ultium "platform."

[Update: A general strike by workers against the "big three" auto makers is ominously looming. I've not investigated how it could affect Bolt production, but I'm guessing it wouldn't be good, and that could constrain availability.]

Buying an EV was overwhelmingly right for me. But is it right for you? I'd say that, at a minimum, you need to answer the following three questions all in the affirmative:

1. Do you own your home, or can you otherwise charge your car where you live?

2. Is your daily commute (or daily driving miles) comfortably within the vehicle's stated range?

3. Do you have another, gasoline powered, vehicle that you can take on longer trips?

Although this will change over time, charging infrastructure is still spotty, and anyway, charging takes time. You'll definitely be happier if you can charge at home, and it will almost certainly be the cheapest way to charge as well. In fact, charging an EV at home can save you a lot of money compared to fueling a conventional gasoline powered car, and it's a lot more convenient too. I plug in every evening when I get home. It takes about 10 seconds. I don't miss going to the gas station.

Regarding the second question, my Bolt's rated range is 249 miles, but what you actually get can be higher or lower depending on various conditions. You definitely don't want to cut it too close. For this car, I'd want my daily driving miles to be less than 200.

My own situation is practically perfect. I have a daily round-trip commute of 100 miles, which is large enough that I save lots of money thanks to the car's impressive fuel efficiency, but which the car can easily accommodate.

As for the third question, you really don't want to take your EV on a trip. I don't want to, anyway. Fortunately, I already own a Prius, which can take me as far as I want to go.

The problems with using an EV to travel are that, as I said, charging infrastructure can be spotty, and sometimes, according to reports, unreliable. That will continually improve over coming years. If you're traveling, you absolutely need to have a charging station available at the right place, when you need it. And you want it to be both operable and available. It's not available if someone else is using it.

As I said, charging takes time. I can add 500 miles of range to my Prius in 5 minutes at the gas station. But it takes 30 minutes at a DC fast charger—the fastest charging option—to add 90 miles of range to the Bolt. And if you can't find a DC fast charger, charging could take you a couple of hours, or more. If I had a trip of, say, 300 miles, and if I knew for sure I could access a DC fast charger at the 200-mile point, then I might do it. But my basic assumption is that my car isn't for travel.

But maybe owning a separate commuter car makes sense for you, like it does for me. Or an around-town car. A lot of two-car families could find such an arrangement beneficial and satisfying.

Charging at home is pretty simple. My Bolt came with a charger, plus Chevrolet will pay all or most of the cost of having an electrician install a suitable circuit and outlet to plug it into. Availability of space in your house's electrical panel for the required circuit might be an issue, so beware of that.

There are two "levels" of at-home charging for electric vehicles: Level 1 and Level 2. Level 1 is very slow, and Level 2 is a good bit faster. Neither is nearly as fast as the fast DC charging you can sometimes, but not nearly always, find at commercial charging stations.

The Bolt's charger can do both Level 1 and Level 2, and you can switch between levels whenever you want, assuming you have the appropriate kind of electrical outlets to plug into, which I'll explain. The charging level is automatically determined by the kind of outlet you plug into, and you switch levels by just changing the short cord that plugs into the charger unit on one end and into the electrical outlet on the other. All that cord change does is ensure you have a plug that fits into the kind of outlet you're using, and the kind of outlet determines the charge level. It's easy.

Note that cord switching isn't something you'll likely be much doing in any case. Normally your charger will remain plugged in to a particular outlet where you'll do all or most of your charging, and that outlet will determine what level you charge at.

The charger itself is a small portable device that plugs into an electrical outlet via a short cord on one end and, with a long charge cord, your car on the other. The charger comes with short cords for doing either Level 1 or Level 2 charging, and, as I said, switching them is simple. The long charge cord that plugs into your car always remains attached to the charger. You'll generally keep your charger at home, plugged into its dedicated outlet. Commercial charging stations provide everything you need to charge, so you don't need to carry any equipment with you to use them.

The exception is that you might need a small adapter to plug a Tesla charging cord into the connector that's currently on the Bolt and on many other non-Tesla EVs. Increasingly, people will want to charge their cars at Tesla charging stations, and anyway the Tesla connector is becoming the new industry standard that all EV manufactures have agreed to adopt. If you do charging on the road, you might want to have the adapter. But if you do all your charging at home, none of this even matters.

To do Level 1 charging, you just plug the charger into a regular household electrical outlet, which operates at 120 volts. Most everything in your house plugs into such outlets: Your toaster, your living room lamps, your hair dryer, etc. You know what I'm talking about. You can even use an already-existing outlet if you have one in a convenient location. You do need to make sure no other appliances are operating on that circuit while you're charging the car, because the car's charger will use most of the circuit's capacity. If you overload the circuit you'll trip the breaker. The normal and best setup is to have a dedicated outlet on a dedicated circuit with its own breaker. With Level 1 charging you only get around 4 miles of range per hour of charge. Not much, but it could work for you if yours is just an around-town car, and you keep it plugged in whenever you're not using it. Do the math.

Level 2 charging at home will give you around 27 miles of range per hour of charge, so a fully discharged battery can be charged in around 9 hours. My car stays plugged in all night, and all my charging is now Level 2, so the car is always ready for me with a full battery next morning. By the way, it isn't necessary to bring the battery all the way up to full charge once you plug the charger in, just as it isn't necessary to completely fill your gas tank. You can plug and unplug whenever you want, adding a little or a lot in a single charging session. All that really matters is that there's sufficient charge in the battery to go the number of miles you'll be driving. The car gives you a continual estimate of how many miles of range is available, bracketed by minimum and maximum estimates.

Level 2 charging uses a 240-volt circuit, and an outlet similar or identical to those that high power appliances such as electric stoves or clothes dryers use. You'll probably need to have that installed and, as I said, be sure there's room in your breaker box for the new circuit. You'll probably need an electrician to verify this and do the work, unless you know your way around electrical wiring. As I said, Chevrolet will generally pay for this, including parts and labor. Chevrolet contracts with installing electricians, so they'll make all the arrangements. Chevrolet won't pay for it if you do the work yourself. Your dealer will provide the details. I don't know about other vehicle manufacturers.

You don't really need to know this unless you're going to do the work yourself, but the Bolt charger needs 8-gauge wire, a 40-amp breaker, and a NEMA 14-50 receptacle. The Bolt's charger draws 32 amps in Level 2 charging. You can buy aftermarket chargers that charge even faster in Level 2 by drawing more amps, but they require larger wire, larger breaker, and so forth. And as always, the Bolt's charger can also do Level 1 from a regular household receptacle, as described above. You can configure the car to draw 8 or 12 amps in Level 1 charging, with 8 amps being the default. Most regular household circuits are protected by 15-amp or 20-amp breakers.

A lot of commercially available charging stations you'll see around town operate at Level 2. These might charge a bit faster than your at-home charger, but they're still a lot slower than the fast DC charging I described above, which some people refer (incorrectly, but that's ok) to as Level 3. Fast DC charging really is in a category of its own, and is a lot less common at the moment. Expect that to change rapidly.

Incidentally, if you can plug into a Level 1 or Level 2 charger where you work or shop, it might make sense to do so. Such arrangements will become increasingly common in our new electrified world. But again, it's probably cheapest to charge at home, except that some businesses or employers might offer free charging, for reasons we won't get into here. If you patronize commercial charging stations, you'll probably want to know what they charge (cost) per kilowatt-hour, and how that compares to what you pay per kilowatt-hour at home. Comparing charging costs across stations will probably become an exercise similar to keeping track of the price of a gallon of gas at different retailers.

Your Bolt's at-home charger is portable, and you can take it with you if you have a place to plug into at your destination. Commercial charging stations have their own charge cords, so you don't need to carry anything with you in your car to use them. The Bolt's at-home charger is a small, brick-sized module with a cord on each end. On one end is a very short cord that plugs into both the charger and into an electrical outlet. As I already described, you change this cord as necessary depending on the kind of electrical outlet you're plugging into, and that selects the charge level, Level 1 or Level 2, automatically. The charger comes with all the necessary cords (and hence plugs) and changing them is easy. On the other end of the charger is the permanently attached charge cord that plugs into your car. It's about 22 feet in length, which is usually plenty long, but you'll need to make sure your electrical outlet is sufficiently close to where you park your car. By the way, it's fine to park and charge your car outside. The charge cord plugs into the charging port on the Bolt's front left fender. Other models could be different and probably are. You can keep your car continually plugged in when it's parked at home.

The instructions warn you to not plug your charger into an extension cord, but that's mainly because the cord might not have wire that's sufficiently large to carry the current drawn by the charger, and most people won't know how to assess that. Best is to plug into a permanent outlet, but if you need to use an extension cord in a pinch, make sure the wire gauge is between 10 and 14. With wire gauge, smaller numbers mean beefier, larger diameter wire, which is better. Further, shorter extension cords are better than longer ones, and a very long cord needs to have larger gauge (smaller number) wire.

I should have said this earlier, but this article isn't intended to be an advertisement for the Chevy Bolt, but rather a discussion about whether an electric vehicle is right for you. Because my experience is with the Bolt, that's what I describe here. But the basic concepts, and economics, are the same regardless of which vehicle you buy. For example, charging levels are standardized across the industry, as are connector jacks (that the charge cord plugs into) on the car, with the caveat that Tesla uses a different connector. The connector standard is currently being changed to adopt Tesla's connector universally, but that isn't something to worry about. Small adapter plugs will be available to switch between different types of connectors.

At the moment the Bolt is the most affordable EV on the market, so it might make the most economic sense. Indeed, the Bolt pretty much owns the low end of the EV market. If all you've ever heard about is high-priced electric vehicles, the Bolt's price might surprise you and renew your interest in EVs. The Nissan Leaf will cost a bit more than the Bolt, and I've heard it's not as good a car. There was a time when I would have bought a Leaf if one had been available. I'm really glad one wasn't.

Most other EV offerings, including Teslas, get pricey quite fast. Many people have surely written off EVs for that reason, although gasoline cars have become pretty darned expensive too, post pandemic, and there aren't many very low cost options remaining. The cheapest Tesla starts at a little over $40K. Most people probably don't realize how affordable, relatively speaking, a Bolt can be. My Bolt EUV's MSRP was a little under $29K. I paid $30K, which was as high as I was willing to go in a market where you really don't have much negotiating leverage. Fortunately, the dealer and I came to see eye-to-eye on this over the course of a 15 minute phone conversation. All this should improve as sanity returns to the car market.

The 2023 Bolt is eligible for a $7,500 income tax credit. That brings my effective purchase price down into the low 20s. But beware: Not all EV models are eligible for the full tax credit. It depends on how much domestic content they contain. The IRS has information on the web that identifies qualifying models. Do your research before you purchase. Your dealer needs to fill out a form at the time of purchase, sending a copy to the IRS and giving a copy to you. You use that when you do your income taxes the following spring to claim your credit. And beware of this, too: The credit you receive can't be more than the amount of tax you owe in the year in which you purchased the car. Basically, that's "total tax," line 24 on Form 1040. So you might not get the full $7,500. Check your most recent tax return for an idea of how much tax you typically owe.

Where EVs really shine is in their fuel efficiency. The Bolt will cost about a third as much for fuel as a reasonably fuel efficient family car. I like to think about my car's fuel efficiency as, conceptually, "miles per gallon," even though there are obviously no "gallons" involved. This is useful for comparing an EV's fuel efficiency with a gasoline car, and can be computed based on the prevailing cost of a gallon of gasoline, the cost you pay per kilowatt-hour (KWh) of electricity, and how many miles your car goes on a utility KWh.

This can be a little tricky, because while the car—the Bolt, anyway—reports miles per KWh, it's using KWh out of the car's battery, not the number of KWh you purchased from your electric utility to put into the battery. Of course, it's the latter that you actually care about, because that's what you're paying for. Because of inefficiencies in the charging process, the number of KWh going out your electrical outlet to the car (and appearing on your electric bill) is more than the number of KWh that end up in the battery to power the vehicle. Because the car is using KWh out of the battery, it's exaggerating miles per KWh from your point of view as a purchaser of electricity.

So, whereas the car might say I'm getting 3.9 miles per KWh (which is what it reported for my first 10,000 miles), the true amount is probably more like 3.4 miles per utility KWh. I estimated this by using a power monitor on my electrical outlet during a couple of thousand miles of Level 1 charging. Level 2 charging is supposedly more energy efficient, and so at Level 2 the gap between what the car reports and what you actually consume could be lower. But I have no way to measure that just now, because my power monitor device only works on a 120-volt outlet. Note that some aftermarket EV chargers report how many KWh they're sending to the car, but the charger that comes with the Bolt doesn't. A charger that tells you how may KWh are sent to the car would allow you to precisely compute the cost of fueling your car, if you cared.

By the way, I have reason to believe that an EV's fuel efficiency is significantly better in city driving than at highway speeds, although I've not yet had an opportunity to quantify that systematically. My driving so far has overwhelmingly been on the highway. My driving patterns are dramatically different May through October compared to November through April, so I should have a chance to make comparisons later on.

Here, then, is the "mpg" calculation I use, which, again, is just to conceptualize fuel efficiency similar to how we do with a conventional vehicle. Divide the cost you pay per KWh by the (usually estimated) number of miles per KWh, making a reasonable adjustment from what the car reports. Even better, use the exact number if you can compute it using the car's odometer and a charger that reports total utility KWh. I use 3.4 miles per KWh, as described above, even though my car says I'm getting 3.9 miles per KWh. Since I seem to be paying 12 cents per KWh (see below), I get 0.12 / 3.4 = 0.035. That is, it costs me 3.5 cents per mile for electricity. If I'm feeling really conservative, I estimate that I pay 4 cents per mile. But not today. Now divide the cost per mile into the price of a gallon of gas. If gas is $3.00 per gallon, then: 3.00 / 0.035 = 85. Voilà! I get 85 miles to the gallon! Or so I tell my friends. At these particular price points, the cost I pay to fuel my car is comparable to your gasoline powered vehicle getting 85 miles to the gallon.

Notice that because we're comparing the EV to gasoline powered vehicles, the "mpg" of an EV improves as the price of gasoline increases, and its mpg decreases as the price of electricity increases. The price of electricity is generally much more stable than the price of gas. Right now gas where I live is $3.42 per gallon, which means my "mpg" has gone up to 97! A fuel efficient family car might get 30, so I pay one third as much for fuel. The economics of fueling your EV are likely to be similar, but will depend on which model you purchase and what you pay for electricity.

And of course, none of this can be done until you own the car. So there's that. But my doing the calculations with my Bolt could give you a general sense of EV efficiency. Most people will pay way less to fuel their EV than their gasoline powered vehicle

If you want to do your own calculations, you'll need to know how much you pay for electricity. The slightly naive approach is to just divide the total cost of your monthly electricity bill by the total number of kilowatt-hours on the bill, to get the overall cost per kilowatt-hour. But what you actually want to know is the cost of a marginal kilowatt-hour, which means the cost of the next kilowatt-hour you consume, because that's what you'll be using to charge your car. So the first thing to do is to subtract any fixed costs that appear on your bill, such as the constant $14.50 account fee that appears on mine every month, before dividing by total kilowatt-hours.

That's a good start, and should get you in the ballpark. It's hard to know how to proceed from there. Some utilities might increase the cost per kilowatt-hour for consumption above some specified base amount. Some might impose a demand premium for consumption during peak demand times of the day, or you might voluntarily be on such a plan. That's a reason overnight charging can make economic sense for some people, by charging outside the peak demand window. (You can tell the car to delay charging to a cheaper time of day.) My bill lists a multitude of items, all poorly explained, that make up the total cost, with no defined way to know how they vary month to month and with changing consumption. I ended up comparing my bills from before I purchased my car to those that included a couple of thousand miles per month of car charging, and determined that, as far as I can tell, the cost of a marginal kilowatt-hour for me is 12 cents. That's two cents lower than my working assumption early on, which made me happy.

I completely understand that you might be uninterested in these sorts of calculations. I'm pretty geeky in that regard. You might simply take it on faith that it will cost a good bit less to fuel your EV than your gasoline powered vehicle, and you'd almost certainly be right.

Such energy efficiency might factor into your deciding whether an EV is right for you. If you drive a lot, it could be a really big incentive. If it costs me 3.5 cents per mile to drive my Bolt, and I drive 20,000 miles per year, that's $700 per year for fuel. If the reasonably fuel efficient car I'm replacing costs 11.4 cents per mile for gasoline to operate, that car costs $2,280 per year to operate—a huge difference. I'm saving $1,580 per year. But if you drive a lot less miles, your savings will be less dramatic. For me, the true savings is only $590, because I'm replacing a Prius that gets 53 mpg (verified lifetime average, which is amazing), or which costs 6.5 cents per mile. On the other hand, my wife now drives the highly efficient Prius, whereas she was previously driving a 15 mpg F150. Our EV savings thus cascade through our entire vehicle "fleet."

Regardless of how many or how few miles you drive in a year, the lifetime cost of fueling your EV will sooner or perhaps later save you a lot of money. EVs are generally cheaper to maintain, too, because overall they're much simpler machines than gasoline powered vehicles. There are no oil changes, for example. Because I've always changed my own oil, that's especially nice. The single-speed transmission in an electric vehicle is far simpler than the transmission in a gasoline powered car, and far more efficient. The air conditioner is run by electricity, not by a rotating drive shaft sticking out of an engine and requiring a belt and pulleys. There's no alternator. And so forth.

Before we completely leave the subject of fuel efficiency, I want to warn you about an EPA rating attached to all electric vehicles, which will appear on the sticker of your new car: MPGe, or "miles per gallon gasoline-equivalent." This number is almost useless for most consumers. At best, it can be used to make vehicle-to-vehicle efficiency comparisons, but it doesn't really tell you much else. It doesn't give you an intuitive sense of what it costs to operate your car, the way my faux mpg calculation above does. MPGe isn't based on the price of electricity or gasoline, but rather on the amount of energy in a gallon of gasoline, then converted to electrical energy, and finally to how many miles you can go on that amount of energy. It's all pretty abstruse.

My Bolt's MPGe is 119, which might lead one to believe it's like getting 119 mpg in a gasoline powered car. Suffice to say, it isn't, or at least not at current gasoline prices. I'd ignore MPGe completely unless you're comparing different models of cars to get a sense of which one is more fuel efficient. For example, the all-electric F150 Lightning has an MPGe in the mid-70s, from which you could surmise it's only two thirds as fuel efficient as the Bolt. On the other hand, it would be far more fuel efficient than a conventional pickup.

Regardless of how many or how few miles you drive in a year, the lifetime cost of fueling your EV will result in large eventual savings, assuming you keep the car until it's worn out, which is what I do with all my vehicles. To reiterate, EVs are generally cheaper to maintain, because overall they're much simpler machines than gasoline powered vehicles, as described above. Again, there are no oil changes.

But how long will an EV last, exactly? One concern you frequently hear is about battery life. EV batteries are generally warranted for 8 years or 100,000 miles. But then what? It is true that a battery's capacity diminishes as it ages, but modern EV batteries tend to hold up quite well. A large survey of Tesla owners found an average capacity reduction of around ten percent at 150,000 miles. Not bad. That would be like my Bolt's rated range of 249 miles declining to 224 after 150,000 miles. I would be delighted by such a result. The car would still do everything I want it to do. We don't presently know how much it would cost to replace the car's battery pack a decade or more down the line, or even if that's a practical thing to do, but it might not even matter.

Another reason an EV might be right for you is that you have a strong interest in reducing your carbon footprint. A critique you'll sometimes hear from the ideological right is that EVs don't actually reduce carbon emissions, because a lot of our electricity generation still relies on fossil fuels (including, still, a good bit of coal), and because manufacturing car batteries is extremely energy intensive. But studies have shown that EVs nevertheless emit significantly less carbon than gasoline powered vehicles over their entire life cycle (which includes battery manufacturing), and even accounting for the energy mix currently powering the U.S. electrical grid. And crucially, the grid mix is continually getting cleaner, and will for decades to come, as more and more renewable sources come online. An electric vehicle will position you to take advantage of that.

Most sane and sensible people will find driving an electric vehicle to be a pleasant experience. EVs are of course very quiet, and the feel is solid and satisfying. And the acceleration is phenomenal—far better than any V8 gasoline powered vehicle I've ever owned. That's because electric motors have far higher torque than gasoline engines, and respond instantly. If you've never driven one, you'll surely be surprised. Even if you drive sensibly, you'll be glad for that acceleration when you're passing on the highway. (The Bolt is governed to have a top speed of 92 mph, but you get there very rapidly.)

I've not yet used my Bolt over a winter, but you can expect an EV's range to be less when the weather is cold. That's because battery capacity—the total amount of energy the battery can store and deliver—is less in cold conditions. Lithium batteries also have to be sufficiently warm in order to safely (meaning to not damage the battery) and efficiently charge. Thus the battery packs in EVs have built-in heaters, and the car will use some amount of charge current to warm the batteries as necessary. It's generally best to keep your car plugged in all the time when at home, but especially during the winter. Battery warming, plus running the electric cabin heater, could make the car a bit less energy efficient during the cold months. I'll try to quantify that this winter.

I now have over 10,000 miles on my Bolt, and I'm quite pleased. You might find that an EV is right for you, as it absolutely is for me. Being an early adopter could make sense if you can find a car at an attractive price point, and if you can answer "yes" to the three criteria I laid out at the beginning of this article. If it's time to replace or augment an existing vehicle, maybe you should consider an EV. Regardless, electric vehicles will increasingly become the norm over the coming decade. EVs are the future, and there's no getting around that.

Copyright (C) 2023 James Michael Brennan, All Rights Reserved

The latest from Does It Hurt To Think? is here.