April 2023. This website addresses the following questions: Can an EV meet your daily needs? Do EVs reduce emissions? How reliable are EVs? How far can you drive? How do you charge an EV for daily driving or for a road trip? Posts on topics such as Climate, Charging an EV, or Vehicles (Our EVs) can be found under the tabs along the upper right.
4 things to know about EVs:
1: Reduce Pollution. There are nearly 300 million cars on the road in the United States. The average person drives 35 miles a day in a car that gets ~25 miles per gallon. As a result, we burn almost 400 million gallons of gasoline, every day (384 million gallons per day). And that’s just cars and light trucks. Burning a gallon of gas produces 20 pounds of CO². So that’s 20 pounds times 384 million = 7 billion pounds of CO². Add in mining, production, and transportation of fuels and we’re over 9 billion. That’s Billion with a B. 9 billion lbs that we pump into the atmosphere every day. Just in the United States. Burning gas also produces nitrogen oxides; volatile compounds from unburned or partially burned fuel; carbon monoxide; sulphur dioxide; and other toxins like benzene, 1,3-butadiene, acrolein, and formaldehyde. Car exhaust is bad: nobody would let their child sit in a garage with a running car, but we treat the atmosphere as if it’s a limitless reservoir that we can fill with billions of pounds of harmful compounds every day. Research continues to provide new evidence of how bad air pollution is for our health. It’s time to do something and make a change for the better.
2: Electric vehicles are cleaner, and get cleaner every year. In 2020 and again in 2022 more electricity in the United States came from renewable sources of electricity like hydroelectric, geothermal, wind, solar (20%) than from coal. On an almost yearly basis pollution from generating electricity goes down. As a result EVs get cleaner, and the air we breathe gets cleaner.
3: Power your car with domestic energy. No matter where you live, driving electric cars increases reliance on domestically produced energy. Powering your car with domestic energy keeps more money in your local area. Domestic energy = Independence.
4: Today’s EVs can get you where you need to go.
Background image credit: NASA/ESA, Thin Blue Line
About the author: Steve Noctor grew up in the great state of New Jersey and now lives in California.