June 2021. This website addresses the following questions: Can an EV meet your daily needs? How reliable are EVs? How far can you drive? How do you charge an EV for daily driving and on a road trip? How much do EVs reduce emissions? Post are based on our experience with the EVs we’ve driven since 2013. Posts are organized by topic: Tesla Model 3 under the “3” tab; Rav4 EV under the “Rav4 EV” tab; etc.
4 things to know about EVs:
1: 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.
2: 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 20-25 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 were 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 more evidence of how bad air pollution is for our health, and the health of our children.
3: Electric cars are cleaner, and get cleaner every year. In 2020 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, EVs get cleaner, and the air gets cleaner.
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.