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Does An EV Really Make Sense for our Household and Business?

My wife owns a small coffee shop business so she makes regular trips for supplies.  I have a consulting business and I often use my car for travel if the driving time is 3 hours or less.  Sometimes I’ll drive as long as 5 hours if it saves my clients money versus airfare.  We have been affected by the economy just like everyone else and when I looked closer at our expenses, gasoline was high on the list.

For the last 4 years, we owned a Jeep Grand Cherokee and a Ford Taurus.  We averaged 9,000 miles a year in the Jeep but due to mostly city driving, it only got 12.5 miles/gallon.  At a price of $4/gallon, that calculates to $2,880 for gasoline each year.   The Ford does about 14,000 miles annually but with more highway driving, it averages 20 miles/gallon.  Using $4/gallon again, that calculates to $2,800 a year for gas in the Taurus.  Our total annual expense for gasoline at $4/gallon is $5,680.  If I use the recent drop in gas prices to about $3.50/gallon, our total gas expense is just under $5K a year at $4,970.

Unfortunately, our Jeep got to a point where it needed more repairs than the car was worth and last June, we scrapped that vehicle.  We decided to use the Ford Taurus and a bicycle for the summer months while we saved some money and took our time looking for an appropriate vehicle to replace the Jeep.  This set the stage for our adventure with electric vehicles.  With the announcement by Nissan that they were going to start selling the Leaf in Illinois and the installation of charging stations by Walgreens, we added the Leaf to our list of vehicles to research.  Since I already had a positive experience test driving a Leaf, we decided to consider that vehicle as seriously as any of the others.

When I studied our driving habits and looked closer at the length of the trips we take, I found that very few trips were more than 20 miles and rarely do we drive more than 50 miles in one day.  With that in mind and the amount of money we have been spending each year on gas, I decided that an EV made sense if the purchase price was under $30K and the cost of electricity to charge it was under $0.05 per kW/Hr.