OTR: Electric Vehicles

 I saw this article this morning and it pretty well sums up why I won't be buying an electric car anytime soon.  https://www.businessinsider.com/electric-car-road-trip-highlights-issues-driving-cross-country-charging-2022-6

Why?

1. Base cost of the vehicle. Any decent car is expensive these days, but electric cars are around $10,000 more expensive than gasoline powered cars. Yes, you avoid gas stations and oil changes, but you're still paying for electricity.

2. Infrastructure. You have to recharge the vehicle and that means adding a charging station to your garage. Depending on what you need / want, that can be a minor electrician expense or the need to add electrical capacity to your residence. Plugging the car in at night to a regular outline will likely not give you a full charge if the battery is drawn down. On the road, you have to find one that is available and fast. Many of the charging stations out there aren't yet set up for high speed.

3. Range. If I'm just back and forth to the office (40 miles each way), an electric vehicle is fine. But if you're making a longer trip, you're going to need to stop about every 300 miles and hope there is a high speed charger available. My Tiguan can go about 500 miles on a tank of gas -- that's about as much as I can drive by myself in a single day. Getting from home to see my in-laws likely would mean sweating out the last half hour of the drive. I normally will make that trip with one bio break. Having to park and recharge the car for a half hour (or more) is not worth it.

4. Durability. I like to keep my cars for ten years or so. Post-Covid, maybe longer because the miles aren't piling up like they used to. I'm not convinced that electric cars have that durability yet.

Chicago to New Orleans is between 900 and 1000 miles -- around 14 to 15 hours of driving. In my Tiguan, I'd likely be stopping in Tennessee for the night. The reporter indicated that the trip took far longer than expected (although the linked article doesn't give numbers that reflect reality). It sounds like, to be safe, you're stopping for extended charges at least three, and probably four, times. That's going to require good planning. I've read articles that advise people to just plan to have a sit down meal while the car charges. Well, yeah, but when I'm going somewhere, I'd like to get there --  and while leisurely meals are something you probably should do on vacation, that also means you need to find an available charging station near a decent place to eat. You also want to hope that your hotel has a charging station -- and another guest doesn't plug in and head to bed.

So while the prospect of $6 a gallon gas certainly has me looking for options, I'm still not sold on electric cars quite yet. Yes, there are some tax incentives and other means to reduce up front cost, but I think we are still very early in this lifecycle. I'm not ready to be an early adopter.