There’s a lot of debate online about electric vehicles these days, and like most online debates, it is mostly a combination of outright lies from shills and opinion from people who have no first-hand experience. I have now owned an electric vehicle for more than a year, and I’m happy to pass on my experience to you.
I will not be commenting on the particulars of my specific electric vehicle. As with gasoline-powered vehicles, there is wide variation in build quality and design details with electric vehicles. I’m going to stick to the things that are really about the EV experience, specifically.
First off, fueling my electric car has been much, much cheaper than fueling a gasoline-powered vehicle. Even with gasoline prices being as (subjectively) good as they are right now, recharging my electric car at home is dramatically cheaper. Now, if you don’t have a way to charge an electric car at home, charging would become very inconvenient and I would not recommend that you switch to electric until, perhaps, the Aptera comes out, but even then, it would depend on how you expect to use your vehicle. However, even if you could only use public chargers, you probably wouldn’t spend more on fuel than you do now, and EV’s produce significantly less carbon, stink, and noise than gasoline vehicles.
Electric vehicles are more expensive to buy than gasoline-powered, but the savings I get from charging my car at home made up for that difference before the car was a year old. That includes the cost of buying and setting up a charger in my garage.
In terms of convenience, charging at home is much more convenient than fueling up at a gas station. We usually end up taking a trip about once every two months that requires using a public charger. I prefer that to gassing up once a week at a public gas station (with an important caveat that I’ll cover below). In addition, I’m spending much less time and money on getting my vehicle serviced. Quite literally, the only service for the first 50,000 miles is getting the tires rotated. The most convenient car service is no car service.
The performance of an electric vehicle leaves gasoline vehicles in the dust. Even a budget EV is going to have better acceleration than most sporty gas cars. For example, a Dodge Charger with either the SXT or GT trim has approximately the same 0-60 time as a Chevy Bolt. The launch edition Aptera will have a 0-60 time of 4 seconds, which is faster than a Maserati Ghibli S Q4 and many other high-end sports cars. The 0-60 on the quickest Tesla is 2.3 seconds! The top speed on an EV is typically far enough above the US highway speed limit that it doesn’t matter. When I have to drive my gasoline vehicle to work, it makes me feel sad. It is also less safe because accelerating into traffic is dramatically more difficult with a gasoline vehicle. If you spend enough on a gas car to get decent acceleration, you’re into the financial territory of an EV but with added complication and expense.
Public charging does have a problem, though. If you are making a long drive on a peak travel day, like right around Thanksgiving or Christmas (so the chargers will be busier than usual), and if the weather is cold (which makes charging take a lot longer), then it is going to take a very long time to get charged up at the public charger. It usually takes me a total of about 20 minutes to charge at a public charger, but on a cold, busy day, it has taken as much as 45 minutes when you combine waiting for a charger to be available with the amount of time the actual charge takes. This particular issue might improve as Tesla continues to make their charge network more accessible to other EV’s, but right now it is a real problem. A workaround could be arranging for a charger in a garage at the other end of your journey (i.e., at the house of the relative who hosts holidays for your family), taking your other vehicle for such trips (the average US household has more cars than drivers), or renting a vehicle; none of those are convenient or accessible enough to call a “solution”.
What I cannot speak to is what life would be like if you had an electric vehicle and a way to charge it in your driveway, but not a garage. I suspect that in very cold weather, this would not work well (due to very low charge speed and snow getting in the vehicle’s charge port), but that is only a suspicion. The fact that a charger and a garage appear to be important accessories for your electric vehicle means that it is likely that electric car ownership will be something that only middle class and wealthy people can really participate in, and that is likely to be harmful in the long run for people with less money. Of course, it would be nice if car ownership were optional in the US, but it is not.
If you are planning to buy an electric vehicle, then the approach to home charging that I recommend is to install a 240 volt outlet in your garage (probably a NEMA 14-50, but shop around for chargers before making a decision on that) rather than trying to hard-wire the charger. Even though the maximum charge speed will be less with a plugged charger, you probably will not need that slightly higher speed, and you’ll gain ease of charger install and replacement. Installing a 240 volt outlet is probably something you should leave to an expert (adding a circuit is dangerous, and wiring for 240 volts is a little more complicated than 120) but if you can do it yourself (or have a friend help), you will save a lot of money. Chargers typically have at least 20 feet of cable, but you’ll want to plan the location of that outlet carefully.