Answers to questions about our electric car, battery life, charging, road-tripping, and more!
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About a year ago, I posted about what it's like to own a fully electric car as our sole vehicle. I wrote about the factors we considered before buying it (our driving habits). I also listed some pros (better for the environment, fewer moving parts, much cheaper to run, increased consciousness of our driving habits) and cons (limited range, the expense of eventually replacing the battery, and not having a back-up battery). Click here to read the whole post!
Today I wanted to post a modified version, with more FAQs, inspired by both your questions and random misinformation I've seen floating around. Let's get to it!
What kind of car do you have? Does it use any gas?
We own a 2016 Chevy Spark EV, which we bought used a couple years ago. It is fully electric: no engine, no transmission, no gas tank, no oil changes, just a battery!
How long will a single charge last (mileage wise)?
When our car is fully charged and the conditions are average (not too freezing or windy), it has an 80-mile range. This is one of the lowest-range EVs you can actually get— for instance, a Nissan Leaf from the same year has a range of 107 miles, while the newest Chevy EV, the Bolt, has a range of 247 miles! Still, our car has suited us just fine, because we only use it to drive around town.
Do things like heat/air impact battery life?
Unfortunately, yes! Although the number of miles we can drive isn't impact too much by air conditioning, both very cold weather and running the heat cause the battery to drain more quickly. (Driving into high winds, which are also common in the winter, give us worse "gas mileage" too.) It's usually not enough to make practical difference, but if we're having an unusually long day of errand-running, it definitely eats into the extra miles. (For instance, one time due to extraordinary circumstances, Zach had to drive me all the way to the far edge of the metropolitan area and back twice in one day, in addition to going to work, on a day when the high didn't get above 10ºF. He had to charge four times!)
How do you charge it? Did you have to install a special outlet in your house?
On an everyday basis, we charge our car by plugging the cord into a regular outlet, as if it's a lamp or a vacuum cleaner. It's kind of crazy to me that you can charge a car using an everyday outlet, but it's very convenient! (EVs just slightly older than ours needed a 220 outlet, like a dryer uses, but this is no longer standard.) This makes EVs inaccessible to people who don't have outdoor outlets, but for anyone with a garage or simply an outdoor plug-in of any kind, it works well.
We also sometimes charge our car at chargers around the area, when necessary (see next question). The fast chargers can charge up our low-range car in less than ten minutes, and usually cost a fee (roughly comparable to gas prices). The slower chargers can take a couple hours to fill up a car, but are free (for instance, some towns have a slow charger near their business district so you can shop/eat out while your car charges).
How often do you have to charge it? Are you finding it more or less convenient to find fueling stations?
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| Fueling up at a fast charger, located at a Walmart |
With that said, sometimes we decide to drive somewhere further away (a couple of hiking spots we like are a bit out of the 40-mile-one-way range), or we have a day when we're driving more long distances than normal, and then we have to actually sit down and plot out our route. This is definitely more work than jumping in a gas car and knowing that there will be gas stations everywhere, and we hope that electric infrastructure will continue to improve. We use PlugShare to tell us where the chargers are— it's a useful app/website that explains how to find the chargers and what style/brand they are, as well as allowing you to mark when a charger is occupied or if it's having technical difficulties.
The St. Louis metropolitan area has fewer chargers than most cities of comparable size, but we're still able to visit most places with no trouble. The longer we have the car, the easier it is to tell at a glance if a new hiking spot requires a charge or not— and if so, where we'll stop to fuel up.
To be honest, most of these points would be moot with nearly any other electric car, since almost every EV has a higher mileage than ours. But even with our limited 80-mile range, we have a ton of options!
What happens if you run out of electricity on the road?
This is definitely a downside. There is no back-up battery option. The car starts dinging at you, flashing up all sorts of warnings, and if you get close to the end of the charge, the car starts shutting down nonessential systems and driving slower and slower. This has happened to us once when we were counting on charging at a bank, only for the charger not to work, forcing us to drive some extra miles to charge at a casino. It was nerve-wracking, but we made it! In the meantime, we have Triple A, which includes a special towing service for electric cars: they will take you to the nearest charger, wherever it is.
However, the more we've driven the car and pushed the limits, the more we have a sense of where we can go, which chargers are reliable, and so on. It definitely takes some getting used to, but it works for us. (Plus, pretty much any other EV has a longer range than ours, which would eliminate these problems!)
How does traveling work? Have you tried any road trips?
When Zach and I were discussing whether or not to buy electric, we had to analyze what we really wanted from a vehicle… and something we came to terms with is that even though we love to romanticize road trips, we simply don't take them very often. We agreed that with the money saved from using an electric car on a daily basis (see "Is an electric car really cheaper to run?" in Part Two, coming soon!), we could always rent a car if we wanted to take a longer road trip. So we bought a car for around town, and it works very well for that purpose.
That said, we did try to plan a road trip to Nashville last year: we plotted out the charging locations, planned to stop overnight in a hotel, and set out with a sense of adventure. Sadly, the family we were visiting all came down with Covid, so we had to turn around in central Illinois! The next time we headed to Nashville, we opted for the easy route and simply swapped cars with my sister: she got an electric car to cheaply drive around town, and we got a gas car for effortless road-tripping. It's not an option for everyone, but it worked well for us.
What would you do in case of a power outage? Do you have a back-up generator?
Several years ago, power outages were very common throughout winter and summer storms, but we haven't had a major one in well over ten years. Still, if the power ever went out for more than a couple days (Zach can get to work and back a few times on a single charge), we'd ask one of our gas-car-owning friends for a ride. (If the electricity was out long enough to make an electric car unfeasible, we'd have much bigger problems to worry about!)
Have you had any unexpected trouble with the car?
Yes: over the past two summers, when the temperatures consistently rise over 95º during the daytime, our battery starts drawing a lot more energy than usual, and often charges all day even when the battery should be full. We took it to a mechanic to look at, but they couldn't figure out what was wrong, and some deep-dives into Reddit threads revealed that this is just a common problem with our particular model. So it shouldn't be a problem with another EV model.
Other than that, it's been great.
Why didn't you buy a hybrid?
The main reason is that hybrids still have all the troubles of gas cars we were trying to get away from: namely, lots of moving parts and failure points, as well as a dependence on fossil fuels. Plus, hybrids are higher-end cars, so for a comparable manufacturing year, hybrids are much more expensive than EVs. We decided that, in view of our driving habits, an EV made more sense.
What are the challenges you have identified with electric over gas?
I've gone over many of them above, but to summarize:
1. Requires planning for special circumstances, such as short trips or days that involve multiple far-reaching errands.
2. Can't road-trip easily.
3. Limited options if your plans go wrong (such as a charger you were counting on being broken).
4. You have to pay an "alternative fuel tax" once a year that requires you to physically show up at the DMV with paperwork and give them $81 (which is much higher than the amount of gas tax we'd pay if we had a gasoline car. whomp whomp).
The first three of these challenges boil down to the same thing: electric infrastructure is still in its infancy, and so logistics can be challenging. Eventually, charging stations will be as common as gas stations, and these problems will disappear. (And, as I've mentioned several times, nearly any other EV model wouldn't have as many logistical difficulties because of their higher range.) The fourth challenge is just me being salty because if they're going to fleece us with a luxury tax they could at least make it easy! ;)
In the meantime, though, we consider these challenges to be well worth overcoming, when the reward is a nice, reliable car with lower carbon emissions that's super-cheap to drive and maintain. For more on these pros, see Part Two, coming tomorrow!
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