Why Switch to an EV?

March 22, 2022

Why Switch to an EV?

As gas prices sky­rock­et, the inter­est in EVs is also sky­rock­et­ing. Tes­la report­ed­ly has seen a dou­bling of orders in the past few weeks. Oth­er EV man­u­fac­tur­ers have not report­ed in, but their demand has prob­a­bly gone up as well. 

Pow­er­ing an EV is much cheap­er than pow­er­ing a gas car. Before the recent price increas­es, the aver­age Amer­i­can spent an aver­age of $131-$176 per month on gas. In the past month prices have gone up anoth­er 50%, so Amer­i­cans are now spend­ing $197-$264 per month on gas. 

An elec­tric vehi­cle usu­al­ly costs about $25-$35 per month to pow­er but can be pow­ered for free at no cost pub­lic charg­ers avail­able in many loca­tions. Charg­ing at off-peak hours or using pow­er from rooftop solar also brings down the cost. 

Why are EVs so cheap to pow­er? Is elec­tric­i­ty that much cheap­er than gas? The main rea­son is that EVs are much more effi­cient than gas cars. Gas cars use about 12–30% of their ener­gy for propul­sion. The rest is wast­ed as heat and noise. A cool, qui­et EV uses about 77% of its ener­gy for propul­sion. This makes for an inex­pen­sive source of trans­porta­tion, as well as a cli­mate friend­ly vehicle. 

Peo­ple are inter­est­ed in sav­ing mon­ey on gas and pro­tect­ing them­selves from future gas price surges, but many do not know about oth­er huge advan­tages of EVs. 

Reduc­ing Car­bon Emissions 

25% of Col­orado car­bon emis­sions come from trans­porta­tion, with anoth­er 11% from oil and gas. If we could elim­i­nate these emis­sions, we could go a long way towards net zero, and save 20,000 lives a year lost from breath­ing car exhaust. 

EVS are not zero car­bon. They require car­bon for man­u­fac­tur­ing and the elec­tric­i­ty that pow­ers them often comes from fos­sil fuels. How­ev­er, because of their greater effi­cien­cy, they use much less elec­tric­i­ty than a gas car uses gaso­line. A Tes­la Mod­el 3, for exam­ple, has the ener­gy equiv­a­lent of a 132 mpg gas car.

 

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Graph show­ing 2020 car­bon emis­sions bro­ken down by sector.

In addi­tion to effi­cien­cy, the clean­ness of the grid deter­mines how much car­bon an EV cre­ates. In Col­orado, sad­ly, over a third of our pow­er comes from coal. An EV in Col­orado pro­duces about ½ of the emis­sions of a gas car (tak­ing into account man­u­fac­tur­ing emis­sions). How­ev­er, our grid is becom­ing clean­er over time. An EV bought today will pro­duce few­er emis­sions each year. To fig­ure out how clean an EV could be with 100% renew­able ener­gy, we can look at Wash­ing­ton State, which uses about 90% renew­able ener­gy. An EV in Wash­ing­ton pro­duces about 1/5 of the emis­sions of a gas car. Of course, you can imme­di­ate­ly get Washington’s 1/5 rate if you install solar on your roof or buy elec­tric­i­ty from solar or wind sources. 

An EV pro­duces more car­bon emis­sions to man­u­fac­ture, but this is quick­ly recouped in 6 – 18 months by the low­er elec­tric­i­ty emis­sions. Future EVs will pro­duce few­er car­bon emis­sions in man­u­fac­tur­ing because the EV bat­ter­ies of today are 95% recy­clable and will be used as raw mate­ri­als for future bat­ter­ies, and because bat­ter­ies are get­ting more effi­cient.  

Safe­ty 

Very few peo­ple are aware of how safe elec­tric vehi­cles are. At first glance, it seems strange that a dif­fer­ent pow­er­train would make a car safer. EVs are safer for a vari­ety of reasons. 

EVs are safer in an acci­dent. The Tes­la cars have the low­est prob­a­bil­i­ty of injury of any car ever test­ed by NHTSA (Nation­al High­way Trans­porta­tion Safe­ty Admin­is­tra­tion). Tes­la has delib­er­ate­ly put a lot of work into safe­ty, but oth­er EVs are safer too. The IIHS (Insur­ance Insti­tute for High­way Safe­ty) com­pared EVs and gas cars that had the same design, but dif­fer­ent pow­er­trains (like the Hyundai Kona gas vs. elec­tric). They found that injury claims for EV ver­sions were 40% low­er than for gas versions. 

EVs are safer in acci­dents for sev­er­al rea­sons. First of all, the bat­tery is a large, heavy slab under the cab­in. This means that EVs have extreme­ly low cen­ters of grav­i­ty and the car is even­ly weight­ed front to back. As a result, EVs are much less like­ly to spin out and are eas­i­er to con­trol. The 1000 lb. bat­tery also makes them almost impos­si­ble to roll over. The Tes­la Mod­el X SUV was the only SUV that NHTSA had ever test­ed that would not roll over. 

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The frunk or front trunk is extra stor­age and all crum­ple zone, which you can fill with shrimp or any­thing else you want!

A gas car has the engine and many oth­er hard, stiff parts jammed beneath the hood. This means that the front does not crum­ple very well , com­pared to many EVs, which have vir­tu­al­ly noth­ing under the hood (only con­sole parts, 12 v bat­tery, etc.) and a frunk (front trunk) stor­age com­part­ment. If an EV has a frunk, the front crum­ple zone is eas­i­ly crum­pled, and takes the force and accel­er­a­tion of an acci­dent much bet­ter than a gas car’s front. 

Sim­i­lar­ly, a gas car has a large fuel tank in the back, which has to be strong in order to reduce the chances of leak­ing flam­ma­ble gas dur­ing an acci­dent. An EV does not have a fuel tank, so the trunk area works much bet­ter as a crum­ple zone. 

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There is no fuel tank, so there is extra stor­age under the trunk.

There is a mis­con­cep­tion that EVs catch on fire eas­i­ly, which is prob­a­bly a result of the media report­ing EV fires and ignor­ing the 150 gas cars per day that catch on fire. In real­i­ty, EVs are much less like­ly to catch on fire. Autoin­sur­anceEZ found that EVs had 25.1 fires per 100,000 sales, com­pared to 1,529 gas car fires per 100,000 sales. You are 61 times as like­ly to have your gas car com­bust instead of your EV! 

Longevi­ty 

Elec­tric vehi­cles haven’t been on the road very long, but we can get an idea of how long they will last by look­ing at fac­to­ry test­ing of the major parts. A gas car has dozens of expen­sive parts, includ­ing the very expen­sive engine. An EV is a much sim­pler sys­tem. The major expen­sive parts are the bat­tery and the motor. Both these are fac­to­ry test­ed by run­ning them 24/7. A motor will be run con­stant­ly or a bat­tery will be charged to full and dis­charged repeatedly. 

In fac­to­ry tests at Tes­la, the motors test at a mil­lion miles and the new­er bat­ter­ies test at 300,000 miles to 500,000 miles, with the newest iron-based bat­ter­ies test­ing at a mil­lion miles. If the expen­sive parts of your EV last 1,000,000 miles and you only have to pay for small­er repairs like a bro­ken win­dow motor, that means your EV will last 66 years! Of course, real life might be dif­fer­ent from fac­to­ry test­ing, but the few EVs that are used for high mileage pur­pos­es like rentals seem to be still going strong after hun­dreds of thou­sands of miles. 

Both EV and gas cars have brake sys­tems, but EVs use brakes much less often than gas cars because regen­er­a­tive brak­ing does most of the work. The brakes in an EV last for a very long time. Even brake pads rarely have to be changed. 

Main­te­nance and Total Cost of Ownership 

As a gas car own­er, you prob­a­bly see reg­u­lar oil changes and reg­u­lar main­te­nance as an inevitable part of own­ing a car. Main­te­nance is expen­sive and a has­sle. An EV, how­ev­er, has very lit­tle main­te­nance. Many EVs have no main­te­nance sched­ule. Main­te­nance for an EV usu­al­ly con­sists of tire rota­tions or changes, wind­shield wiper flu­id changes, and cab­in fil­ter changes. 

Along with the cheap pow­er­ing of the car and the long lifes­pan, this makes EVs cheap to own, oth­er than the ini­tial cost of the car. A Tes­la Mod­el 3, which many peo­ple think of as a lux­u­ry car, actu­al­ly has a 5‑year total cost of own­er­ship that is less than a Hon­da Accord, and, depend­ing on the cost of gas and elec­tric­i­ty where you live, less than a Hon­da Civic. 

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An EV bat­tery and two motors. An EV is a very sim­ple system.

The many advan­tage of EVs and their low envi­ron­men­tal impact are why peo­ple call EVs the cars of the future. The recent sky­rock­et­ing of gas prices has made many peo­ple more inter­est­ed in pur­chas­ing these cars. If you’re inter­est­ed in try­ing one, you can find a list of avail­able EVs (like this one) and go to deal­ers and EV stores to test dri­ve them. If you do, you will see that not only do they have many impor­tant advan­tages but they are much more fun and respon­sive than a gas car! 

For more infor­ma­tion or ques­tions about elec­tric vehi­cles, con­tact Dri­ve Elec­tric Col­orado.  

This blog post was writ­ten by Julia Moravc­sik, events coor­di­na­tor for the Den­ver Elec­tric Vehi­cle Asso­ci­a­tion, head of the Auto­mo­tive Group for Cit­i­zens Cli­mate Lob­by, work­ing with Coltura and 350 Col­orado, and who is try­ing on many lev­els to advance edu­ca­tion and leg­is­la­tion to sup­port cli­mate change solu­tions like EVs and ben­e­fi­cial electrification. 

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