What Do You Save With Electric Vehicles During High Gas Prices?

I often Tweet or write about the inevitability of the transition to electric vehicles (EVs). Every time I do, the inevitable (and often) angry responses are predictable:

• Too expensive.
• The infrastructure is not there to make them viable.
• What about the battery life and the harm to the environment associated with them?
• You are still using fossil fuels to charge them (Sure, but it is domestic and there are increasingly more renewable energy sources in the grid).

I have responded to these narratives in a previous article. One of my pieces even responded to the “you are an elitist” narrative by showing how a shift to EVs could actually level the playing field for low-income and marginalized communities. This morning, I realized that it might be useful to frame savings from EVs in simple budget numbers that the average person understands.

Before I go down that road, I will go ahead and state clearly the disclaimers. The upfront costs of an EV are about $10,000 higher than than conventional gas-powered cars according to Kelley Blue Book, and the charging infrastructure is not where it needs to be. Earlier this year the Biden Administration announced aggressive plans to improve the nation’s EV charging infrastructure, and over time, I anticipate that upfront costs will decrease. A recent MSNBC article notes that EVs have lower maintenance, fuel, and tax costs which do offset upfront costs. Mike Winters went on to write, “A U.S. Department of Energy report shows that after 15 years, electric cars generally cost less than similar gas-only models, when you factor in the price, maintenance, financing, repairs, the federal tax break and fuel costs.”

The U.S. Department of Energy Alternative Fuels Data Center has a useful Vehicle Cost Calculator website. Other private sites have these calculators as well. Using ChargeVC.org’s calculator, I entered hypothetical numbers assuming 30 miles per day, 0.157 avg. cost per kilowatt hour, and gas costs of $4.50 per gallon. The savings were around $2000 per year. I can share my own household budget experience too. We currently have 3 cars in our household, and I commute about 35 miles one way for work. Before purchasing an EV in 2021, I budgeted around $600 per month for fuel costs. After that purchase, I slashed that budget to $300 month. I have not needed an oil change in over a year. There was a generous tax break in April, and I use the Georgia toll lanes at no cost, which ends up saving about $100 per month. CNBC recently conducted a pretty thorough comparison based on the estimated gas mileage performance of modern cars. To be clear however, an EV may not be cheaper in all situations, and for many people, charging times equate to lost productivity.

For me, savings are not just about “dollars and cents.” We also save our climate system. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), greenhouse gases continue to increase at a rapid pace. The NOAA Annual Greenhouse Gas Index (AGGI) is a low uncertainty metric that included high-quality global data. According to the NOAA website, “The AGGI in 2021 was 1.49, which means that we’ve turned up the warming influence from greenhouse gases by 49% since 1990. It took ~240 years for the AGGI to go from 0 to 1, i.e., to reach 100%, and 31 years for it to increase by another 49%.”

With two teenage kids, the savings from transitioning to EVs is like an investment in their future well-being on the habitable planet we know of.