Shock Me
“Shock me, make me feel better.”
So goes the lyric from the old KISS standard…but even with shockingly high gas prices, I don’t feel any better about buying an electric vehicle.
Of course, the first problem with electric vehicles is cost. Even with a variety of government incentives and subsidies keeping their cost artificially low, the average price of an electric vehicle in the United States is around $50,000. This is more than double what I paid two years ago for my then 3-year old used RAM 1500 pickup truck…and buying a similarly equipped Ford F-150 Lighting will easily cost me every bit of that. Add another $10,000 if you want the “extended range” battery, which is rated at about 320 unladen miles. At today’s gas prices, my electric truck will need to save me approximately 259 tanks of gas before I break even on fuel savings. That doesn’t factor in the cost of installing a Level 2 charging station, or the increased electric bill I will see from charging my EV. Right now, I fill up about three times per month on average, so based on these numbers, it will take me a little over seven years to break even on the expense of the electric truck, versus the cost of gasoline for my current one. In other words, if I financed that electric truck for 60 months, my break even point won’t come until after I have had to pay off the entire cost of the vehicle…plus two more years of driving. Actual savings don’t kick in until after that point.
Anything you can do, I can better.
The other problem with replacing my trusty RAM with an EV is performance. Despite advances in EV technology, even the best-case estimated range of the F-150 Lightning falls well short of what my dinosaur-burner can do. For example, about a year ago I hitched up a 2,000 pound rented U-Haul trailer, loaded up my mother’s 3,800 pound Dodge Journey, and towed the whole rig 250 miles without needing to tank up. The F-150 Lightning can’t even make that drive in one shot (unladen) without the $10,000 extended battery, and even then it’s a good bet you’re going to need at least one stop to recharge your laden EV. If you can find a fast charging station, it might only tack 30 minutes on to your drive, but absent that fast charger, you can count on spending more time charging and less on the road. (Read an eye-opening article about EV performance here.)
However you slice it, electric vehicles are still not a viable choice for most Americans. (They’d buy more of them if they were.) Of course, the current administration is doing its level best to jack up gas prices in its attempt to leverage people into EVs, but it is running out of time almost as rapidly as Americans like me are running out of patience. Electric vehicles are still inferior performers both economically and on the road, and…even under the economic sanctions being imposed on us by our own government…if Americans make a big move to EVs anytime soon, I’ll be shocked.
Works better, costs less. Are you shocked?
