Speaker 1: If you're considering buying an EV the biggest mistake you might be about to make is obsessing too much on range. Sure. Long range EVs do appeal to our sense of worst case edge scenarios. But do you really need to go that far on a charge?
Speaker 1: Obviously you cannot equate an EV with a gas engine car, but to be honest, a lot of us kind of do that subconsciously, [00:00:30] but they're so different in four key ways, the obvious one we're talking about range 300, 400, even 500 miles on a tank of gas. No problem with combustion cars, but attaining those ranges with an electric vehicle is much trickier. Then there's fueling time. It takes what three to four minutes to recharge a combustion engine car at more locations than you could ever use. But with EVs, you typically hear them say, you can get 80% of whatever their range is put [00:01:00] back in the battery. Maybe as much as a half an hour. And the charging locations are rare enough that it still helps to have a mapping application that helps you find one. You don't need that for a gas station, then there's weight or the weight penalty, a full tank of gas is what maybe a hundred pounds so trivial that no one ever talks about it.
Speaker 1: And as it does its work, it gets a little lighter. The battery in a little Chevy bolt that weighs almost a thousand pounds. And as it does its work, it doesn't [00:01:30] get lighter. It stays heavy and has to use more of its reducing battery capacity to move around its dead weight. And finally, there's of course, a cost penalty. There's no real range cost for a engine car. You just keep putting in more fuel at the retail usage level, but the additional cost of more range in an EV is a serious amount of the MSRP to go from 149 mile Nissan leaf to the 226 mile version in the same trim adds [00:02:00] $6,600. That's about what I paid. I last used car and none of these even takes into account the future issue, the environmental time bomb of EV batteries when they start to be scrapped at scale, just as we have mountains of scrap tires and rusting cars in junk yards today, one day two, there will be vast amounts of huge EV batteries. We have to reckon with recycle and properly do so we'll be smarter about it in the future than we have been about tires and junk cars. [00:02:30] I get it, but the more right size batteries we buy in our cars today, a little less of a time bomb. We start ticking toward tomorrow,
Speaker 1: But all this said, we all want more, right? A recent study, a castl of all parties found that 319 miles of range is the tipping point for most us consumers who are not considering an EV to get them to consider one, put another way. The average us car gets about 40 miles a day, put on it, match that [00:03:00] up with that castl number. And that means a consumer who would only have to charge maybe every 6, 7, 8 days kind of a luxury.
Speaker 1: Now, on the other hand, there are some very good reasons to want big EV range. And I hear you on these, maybe you drive long distances. You know, there are very few EVs registered in the long-legged states like Wyoming or Montana or North Dakota, where just driving across your property to get to the highway is almost as long as many of us [00:03:30] drive to get to work. Or maybe you want long-range capacity for emergencies like regional power outages, where you can't charge the car for a while and maybe have to have evacuate, or a combination thereof. EVs in general are a pretty tough sell if you're concerned about those situations. And then of course, there's the big one lack of home charging. There are haves and havenots in the EV picture. The haves have private charging at home. The havenots are left to Jostle for an electric tee at the work at [00:04:00] the mall or at a roadside charging Oasis. And that's not fun. And so, as you can imagine, that person wants to have as much range as they can get to have to Jostle as seldom as they can,
Speaker 1: But whoever you are get real about your needed EV range. Now we all know the common fact toy. The average American is driven what 14, 15,000 miles per year, according to the us bureau of transportation statistics, okay, that's just under 40 miles a day. And [00:04:30] that rolls up commuting, shopping errands and averages in long range, pleasure trips. You take pretty infrequently. The most recent us census survey indicates our average commute time in the us is about 27 and a half minutes. And since that is done in commute traffic, it's nowhere near 27 and a half miles of actual driving. But the bureau of transportation statistics also indicates that just 15% of our trips are commuting to work a much larger percentage. 45% [00:05:00] of trips are being taken for shopping and errands. And those are much shorter trips for most of us. Now, all these numbers are calculated averages of many different situations and people, but the point is that most of us need much less EV range than we think we do to cover almost all the driving we do and only have to charge every second, maybe every third day.
Speaker 1: Now we all love to Futureproof and cover those edge cases, right? That explains a lot of things in the auto market, like the proliferation of four wheel drive [00:05:30] cars that never leave the pavement or third row seating that goes mostly empty its whole life or towing capacity to pull around that boat. You never got around to buying EVs are not the kind of tech products you can easily upgrade either. It's not a computer where you can drop in more Ram or a phone where you can pop in a chip to get more storage. So I get it. You want to get it right at the beginning and make sure you look at plugin hybrids, which may be all the EV you need a Toyota RAV4 prime, for example, can do 42 miles, [00:06:00] all electric, likely as much as you'll drive in a day, but with a much smaller battery and lack of range, anxiety, that's common to all plug-in hybrids. If you're realistic about the EV range you need, you might get into an electric car sooner and for less money, those are both good plus doing so sooner. Lets the benefits of electric car accrue over a greater period of time in your life, in the environment and for your budget.
