I recently bought a 2021 Chevy Bolt electric car, and I’m embarrassed by how much I love it. As my friend and Ecocities author Richard Register says, better cars make worse cities. Cars move the design of cities to the speed, size, and rhythm of the car rather than the speed, size, and rhythm of the human body. I still believe that building human-scaled cities is perhaps the most overlooked path to planetary well-being. At the same time, I’m stunned at how great my electric car is.
Last spring, I noticed that there were very good deals popping up on the highly rated Chevy Bolt electric car. I decided to buy one to explore the myths of electric cars that swirl through social media. A significant portion of Americans have a political and cultural identity that requires them to hate electric cars.
I also rented a Kia EV6 and drove it 1,000 miles on a weeklong trip through New England touring colleges with my son, Eliot. The EV6 is a step above the Bolt in price, size, and self-driving features. Here’s what I learned after driving electric cars exclusively for the last six months.
Cost to Buy
Elon Musk and Tesla gentrified electric cars. Cars like the Chevy Bolt democratize them. Used electric cars are great deals these days. I got a 2021 Chevy Bolt with 12,500 miles for $12,500 dollars after the $4,000 tax credit for used electric vehicles. To get the tax credit, you have to buy it from a dealer and the car has to be over two years old. There’s also a $7,000 tax credit for new electric vehicles.
My car has an eight-year, 100,000-mile warranty on the battery and a 36,000-mile bumper-to-bumper warranty from GM on everything else. It feels like a new car. There are also great deals on Teslas being sold by rental car companies, but they are often higher priced ($15,000 to $25,000) and with higher mileage (25,000 to 50,000 miles). And who wants to make Elon Musk even richer?
Cost to Drive
Yearn for $1 per gallon gas? Try an electric car. My electric car gets 4 miles per kilowatt-hour (kWh), and my electricity costs 16 cents per kWh—so it costs me 4 cents per mile. Let’s say your gas car gets 25 miles per gallon; 25 miles in your electric car would cost you $1. Switching to an electric car is like having $1 per gallon gas.
Solar panels are cheap these days. The cost of the solar panels needed to cover a year of driving (the average Iowan drives 15,000 miles per year) costs as little as $380—a one-time cost to generate your own vehicle fuel forever. Fairfield HVAC guru Brian McDonald recently bought a Ford Transit electric van for Ambient Systems, his HVAC business. He says the cost of his monthly loan payment is less than the monthly gas bill for his old gas-guzzler van.
Range Anxiety
My work requires me to drive 1,000 miles a week. My one-way weekly commute is 300 miles. How much range does an electric car need to be practical? My car has a range of 259 miles, which I find to be plenty. If you mostly drive around town, anything with over a 250-mile range will be more than enough.
Most days I charge at home and wake up with a full “tank” of electricity. I produce some of the electricity I use in my car with my own rooftop solar. Since cars sit parked about 95 percent of the time, there are plenty of opportunities for charging.
Long trips require some planning. Electric cars have several apps you can use to plan charging stops. I like an app called A Better Routeplanner (ABRP). It gives me options on where to stop for a charge and includes amenities like shopping, rest-rooms, and parks. I use the app PlugShare to find charging stations and check their status (i.e., in use or broken). A charging station near my work in Illinois gave away free EV charging electricity for a year from a new solar electric system providing shade in their parking lot. There are still many free public charging stations and you can find them with PlugShare.
When you’re traveling long distances away from your home charger, you will have to learn how to get a charge from the wide variety of charging stations. Most times this involves downloading an app and setting up an account. This can be a problem if you don’t get phone service at the location. It can be the most difficult part of traveling long distances with an electric car. There are dozens of companies that offer charging services, and they all have their own apps. Often you can’t just use a credit card at the pump like you would with a gas car. The apps tend to be buggy. A national standard requiring all charging stations to take credit cards without having to install an app would go a long way toward taking the stress out of long trips in electric cars.
Charging Basics
Batteries use DC power. Your house uses AC power. There are two kinds of charging: AC and DC. AC chargers provide AC power to the car, which uses its own internal charging system to convert the AC into DC for the battery. My car came with a 120-volt adapter that turns any 110-volt outlet into a charging station. A 110-volt outlet is limited to adding about 8 miles of range per hour of charging. It takes 24 hours to get a full charge. Think of it like plugging in your phone at night to charge.
I installed a 220-volt charging station at my house that cost about $750 after the 30-percent tax credit for home EV chargers. It adds about 30 miles of range for each hour of charging, so I easily get a full charge overnight.
Since cars sit parked most of the time, and electricity is everywhere, there are plenty of opportunities for charging, with more are being added all the time.
In EV lingo, 120-volt chargers are called level 1 chargers, and 220-volt chargers are called level 2 chargers.
There is one more kind of charger that can be used on long trips to quickly recharge your car. These “superchargers” provide DC electricity directly to your battery, so there’s no need to change from AC to DC in the car like with level 1 and 2 chargers. They can charge a car to 80 percent in as little as 15 minutes. My car takes 30 minutes to an hour to charge at DC chargers. I find by the time I stretch my legs, use the restroom, and check email on my phone, my car is charged. Many grocery stores and Walmarts have DC chargers, so I can do my weekly grocery shopping while my car fills up. More and more gas stations also have charging stations.
In EV lingo, DC chargers are called level 3 chargers and are almost never installed in homes. Level 3 chargers are expensive ($10,000 to $50,000) and require a higher-capacity electrical connection than most homes have.
Comfort and Performance Compared to Gas Cars
One of the most surprising things I learned about electric cars by driving one for 1,000 miles each week is that electric cars are better from the perspective of comfort, performance, and overall driving experience. Compared to other small cars I have owned, the Bolt has more space inside, way more pickup and acceleration, and a better feel behind the wheel. It’s kind of a hybrid of using a smartphone and driving a car. The software in the Chevy Bolt is elegantly designed. You get instantaneous information about how much energy the car is using, and that makes me a better driver.
Here’s where electric cars really shine: they are a pleasure to drive.
Environmental Benefits
I never thought I would see the electrical grid move towards renewable so quickly in my lifetime. It’s being driven by huge reductions in the cost to generate solar and wind energy. In Iowa, 60 percent of the electricity is generated by wind power. The line for projects waiting to connect to the grid in the U.S. is three times the size of the current U.S. electrical grid. Globally, more solar was added in the past year than in the previous 68 combined.
This leads to the strategy of electrifying everything—home heating, home cooking, transportation, industrial processes, and transportation. This way, as the grid gets more green and renewable, millions of connected devices automatically get more green too.
When cars are parked, their batteries could be used to store excess wind and solar power for the grid, or to provide power for the grid during peak times. Your car could power your home during a power outage. I have my car set up to do this, but for most people these are future benefits.
Much like a smartphone, many of the functions and capabilities of an electric car are defined by software. It’s possible to provide some of these capabilities to the existing fleet of electric cars through software updates. For $300, I set up my electric car to provide backup power to my house in the event of a power outage. My electric car battery is huge—if it’s full to start, it can run my fridge and gas furnace for 30 days or my fridge alone for 60 days.
What about old EV batteries? Well, it turns out they last a lot longer than was originally thought. And when their range is diminished for car use, they can have a decades-long second life smoothing out the ebbs and flows of renewable energy in off-grid systems and providing peak power on the grid. I use old Nissan Leaf electric car batteries in an off-grid electric system in Hawaii, and my friends Michael Havelka and John Freeberg use Leaf batteries in their off-grid systems in Fairfield.
In Summary . . .
Most of the disadvantages touted for electric cars are overexaggerated and the benefits underappreciated. Electric cars cost less to run and repair, have better driving feel and responsiveness, and give far better feedback to the driver about fuel economy. A used electric car is priced comparably or less than the equivalent gas car and has the performance and flexibility to be your main vehicle. Don’t think of an electric vehicle as something second-rate to a gas car. An electric motor is far simpler and more reliable than a gas engine. Regenerative braking means your brakes last forever. There is nothing in your house that runs on gasoline if it’s possible to run it on electricity. You don’t have a gas engine-powered blender. In theory, electricity is thousands of times more available than gasoline, and in practice, there are plenty of opportunities to charge.
Lonnie Gamble has worked and taught in the renewable energy field for more than four decades. He is a founding faculty member and former director of the Sustainable Living Department at Maharishi International University. He still dreams of a social revolution facilitated by society harnessing the power of the sun, wind, and flowing water.