acensor said:
If we drove 30,000 or 50,000 miles a year, or as I say, if we didn't have good cars we rather like, the answer would be different.
. . .
ANYWAY,Without doing the analytic numbers that I did, she recently came to the conclusion that it doesn't really make compelling sense for us to jump on the EV train right now. Perhaps we'll be sorry we waited if there's a gas crisis and lines at the pump or gas soars to $7 three years from now.
Or maybe we'll be glad we waited when 5 years from now the MiEV or whatever's available is only slightly higher cost and has twice the range and all the bugs worked out and chargers are all over the place.
I'm a little dissappointed as owning and driving an MiEV would be fun, but in OUR situation a bit too much of a frivolity for now.
This is an entirely rational decision, especially as you already have cars that are well-suited to your needs. Dollars and cents, today's EVs aren't a screaming deal - they're just the best deal we've seen to date.
I think many of us who are buying at this stage just enjoy the EV driving experience and/or really believe in the technology's potential and want to participate in starting the "virtuous circle" that we hope will kick-start a self-sustaining EV market. In my case (as with many I'm sure), it's a bit of both. The bottom line for me is that I've always been fascinated by EVs and promised myself for years that I'd buy one as soon as it was a viable proposition for me. The i-MiEV at ~$23k (after credits) and 60-70 mi. range checked all the boxes, and I pre-ordered early in 2012. After the $7.5k credit, it's still pricey compared to a Yaris (ugh), but not mainstream cars like an Accord or a Miata (so I'm not really spending more, just differently), and it's very cheap to operate and maintain, so it's no great extravagance, and that's good enough - I didn't buy it to save money, I bought it because I prefer driving it to the alternatives, and don't have to pay any great premium for the privilege.
As to high annual mileage being a factor favoring an EV purchase, I'm not so sure. A drawback of current EV tech is the Catch-22 of battery economics - the less you drive the car, the less you save (the point I think you were making), but the more often you charge it, the faster the batteries degrade. This isn't some theoretical nicety - you need to keep in mind that your EV's range today will not be its range in 5 years. Driving 30k mi./yr. in an EV means lots of charging cycles (a deep cycle every day, really, but probably some opportunity charging as well for safety margins), and probably utilizing more range than is sustainable as those cycles start cutting into that range.
The truth is that lots of short runs are terrible for ICEVs, never giving their hideously complex chemical burning innards time to warm up to full purr. But that workload is perfect for EVs. They are most effective in short commuting, shopping, errands, etc. - not a daily 40 mile round trip commute on the freeway. Those short hops might not add up to a lot of miles, but they represent a lot of utility, and a lot of waste when performed with an ICEV.
