Is it Cheaper to Own an Electric Car?
The benefits of electric cars are becoming well known among the general public now, as electric vehicles, or EVs, are becoming more popular. The environmental benefits of electric cars are somewhat obvious, as they have no tailpipe emissions for the lifetime of the vehicle, so they are much cleaner than gasoline and diesel vehicles even accounting for dirty electricity generation and emissions from building them. But the benefits of electric vehicles for Joliet and Plainfield drivers go beyond just that. While electric cars remain generally more expensive than gasoline and diesel vehicles to buy for now, they are substantially less expensive to run and maintain. Let’s get into the details below, but keep our payment calculator handy.
Are EVs Cheaper Than Gas?
Here is why an EV will always be cheaper to run than a standard vehicle:
- No Gasoline: Kiss your gasoline stops goodbye. The price of gasoline will matter a whole lot less to you, as you’ll simply never need it for your car again. Electricity does cost money, but because it is much easier to generate than gasoline is to dig up out of the ground and refine, electricity is cheaper than gasoline by an enormous margin.
- Advanced Propulsion: Electric motors use electromagnetism to spin a shaft, a process which even in current production vehicles on the road now is commonly above 80% efficient. Internal combustion engines of any type can’t physically come close to that, as the explosions that power them produce more heat than propulsion. Electric motors deliver roughly double the efficiency of even high performance engines. This all means electric motors require half the energy to produce the same amount of forward propulsion.
- Low Cost Energy: To get the most out of an EV, you’ll install a Level 2 charger in your garage. This charges your vehicle overnight, when electricity is cheapest and the grid is at its least used, allowing you to wake up to a fully charged vehicle for pennies on the dollar. If you have solar, wind, geothermal, or any other at-home renewable energy source, that price can go down to zero. Unless you have an oil well and gasoline refinery, this is not possible with gasoline.
- Mechanical Simplicity: While energy costs and electric motors are responsible for a lot of the cost savings on an EV, the big obvious ones over the long term are all the mechanical systems that don’t need maintenance or replacement because they just aren’t there. Oil changes, tune ups, alternator replacements, and so much more are simply not a thing on electric vehicles. EVs replace hundreds of moving parts in the engine with, effectively, one. EVs still have cooling systems, braking systems, and so on like normal cars, but they are dramatically simpler. Batteries are also lasting longer than predicted, with many now 10 year old batteries having lost less than 15% of their overall charge ability.