Michael Janke

We needed a car – one of ours died.

Our goal was to find an around town car with low operating & maintenance costs. preferably lightly used and domestically manufactured. A used Chevy Bolt fit the bill. Many have had replaced and re-warrantied battery packs; they have decent range and are reasonably priced.

At $0.16 and over 4 miles per kwh, the incremental cost to drive the Bolt is dirt-cheap — $0.04 per mile in summer. If I had a car that could get 30mpg around town and gasoline stayed at $3.00/gallon I’d be spending $0.10/mile for fuel. And unlike an EV, petrol car gets worse mileage in city traffic. In our use case not only do we have a lower per-mile cost, but we don’t have to bother with (or pay for) a whole bunch of the maintenance inherent to internal combustion cars. Brakes will last much, much longer, no oil changes, etc.

Downsides

Charging at public charges isn’t as smooth as it needs to be, and because they have a significantly higher per-kwh rate, the cost advantage sometimes disappears. In some parts of the country higher electricity costs also negate much or all of the per-mile cost savings. Both internal combustion and EV’s use more energy in winter – EV’s getting hit much harder.

In Minnesota we have a regulatory agency that keeps Minnesota’s utility costs rational. This reduces long term risk of price fluctuations. We are able to charge overnight at home – very convenient compared to standing outside at a gas pump or charging station. Those who cannot are at a disadvantage. But other advantages – low maintenance, insane acceleration; quiet, smooth power delivery and elimination of the annoying, near-constant gear shifting that comes with modern 8 and 10-speed transmissions remain.

If we were using an EV for road trips, we’d have to spend more time planning routes, more time at refueling stops, etc. That would be inconvenient compared to a petroleum powered car. We still have a couple of petrol vehicles for road trips.

In short, for an around-town vehicle that gets 4 miles per kwh and can be charged at home for $0.13/kwh, an EV is a no-brainer. You’d be dumb to buy a gasoline burner in this situation.

Environmental Impact

Where we are in Minnesota, electric production is skewed towards a combination of low-carbon renewable and no-carbon nuclear power. Over half of local power generation is carbon-free, with some legacy coal and natural gas still feeding the grid. Some parts of the country have a cleaner grid, some not. In parts of the country that brag about how much coal they burn, the environmental advantage of operating an EV isn’t as great.

Regardless of grid power source, over the total vehicle life EV’s have less impact on the environment that fossil fueled vehicles; and it’s quite obvious that no amount of EV’s can possibly damage the environment as much as fossil fuel extraction already has. There is no scenario where pollution related to EV power sources, mineral extraction and manufacturing could possibly do as much damage as the obscene amount of pollution already caused by sulfur dioxide, acid rain, particulate emissions, greenhouse gasses, the Exxon Valdez, and the criminals that were running BP when they intentionally shortcut safety measures and destroyed tens of thousands of square miles of ocean in the Deepwater Horizon shitshow.

There’s also concern over environmental damage and working conditions in mining operations related to battery manufacture. Those concerns, while valid, also apply to environmental damage and working conditions in the industry that powered the world for most of the industrial revolution (coal) and the world-wide oil industry. One needs to consider the obscene amount of money spent and millions of lives destroyed by nations who plundered, pillaged, and started wars to maintain their oil supply; and one needs to consider the impact of installing and propping up the murdering, torture-loving, bone-sawing, human-rights violating dictators that are a common feature of oil-rich nations.

For some, those impacts are not a concern.

Of course if Facebook is your science advisor and Rupert Murdoch owns your primary news source, you have access to a different set of ‘facts’ than I do.