Now that the possibility of owning a good electric vehicle is real, it is time to start asking whether we should own one. There are both pros and cons to weigh in this equation. To help answer the question, I’ve taken the first step of listing what I consider the most important pros and cons of electric vehicles.
Pros
Pro one – NO GAS: The biggest and most important reason to own and use an electric vehicle is that the electric vehicle does not burn gasoline. This is awesome and even revolutionary for several reasons. It means that you are no longer contributing to the mind-numbing rate with which we humans are using up the limited amount of oil we have on this planet. It also means that you are not directly contributing to global warming or air pollution because of your car’s exhaust, because your car has no exhaust at all. Nationally, it means that our country will be able to shake off the shackles of depending on another country to supply a critical resource that we cannot live without, as we are (and will continue to be) able to generate our own electricity. On a more personal note, it means that you no longer have to pay for gasoline at the ever-increasing pump prices – prices that will soon grow higher than you can bear, if they keep up the current trend. Electricity is much cheaper.
Pro two – NO TRIPS TO THE GAS STATION: As a side effect of not using gas, and as a direct result of being able to plug in to recharge from your home’s electrical supply, a driver of any electric vehicle does not have to stop at gas stations to refuel. Your car refuels while you sleep. All you have to do is remember to plug it in, which can easily become part of your routine whenever you arrive home. Think how much time you have wasted, overall, pumping gas into your car. That’s over now.
Pro three – NO OIL CHANGES: Pure electric cars (as opposed to hybrids) have very few moving parts. They do not need oil lubrication. Therefore, the car has no oil in it, and needs no oil changes. This is excellent news for both the environment and your pocket book, as it means you are using even less oil to run your car. It also makes for easier maintenance. You don’t have to do the oil change or take it to a garage to get the work done. As a result, you win back even more of your time. That’s fewer hours of your life wasted dealing with your car, and more hours to spend doing whatever you want.
Pro four – BREAKS DOWN LESS OFTEN AND NEEDS LESS MAINTENANCE TO KEEP WORKING SMOOTHLY: Electric cars have a simpler engine with fewer moving parts – and fewer total parts, for that matter. There is a lot less that could possibly go wrong. Therefore, things go wrong less often. This is good for your pocket book because you don’t have to pay for repairs or new parts. This is good for your life because you don’t have to waste time fixing the car or arranging to have it fixed.
Pro five – NO BURNING FUEL TO IDLE: Whether you realize it or not, you waste a lot of gasoline fuel idling the car. It happens whenever you stop at a red light, in heavy traffic, and whenever you sit in the car with the engine running. A gasoline car burns more gas just to keep that engine going. An electric car does not. Yes, if you have some other draw on the battery going, such as running the air conditioner or listening to the radio, you will still be pulling some battery power. However, the engine itself only needs power to go – it needs nothing to sit idle.
Cons
Con one – LIMITED RANGE WITH NO REFUEL NETWORK: Electric cars have a limited range on a single charge. Of course, gasoline cars also have a limited range on a single gas tank refill. The difference is that you can find a gas station and refuel your gas car quickly and easily, no matter how far from home you travel. By contrast, the current chance of finding a convenient place to plug your electric car in as you travel is somewhere between slim and none. This limits how far from home you can comfortably range with an electric car. While this may change in the future, it is the current reality.
Con two – SLOW REFUEL TIMES: At present, batteries take hours to charge at household current levels. Even at faster Level 3 charging, batteries take half an hour or more to go from empty to 80% full. This could be a disaster in an emergency situation where you need your car to go now, but it’s nearly empty. Forgetting to charge the car overnight could strand you at home, and probably on a day when arriving on time is extra critical. It could also create annoyances by mandating long rest stops on a long road trip (once a recharging network makes said long road trip possible). It might also make running the batteries all the way to empty much more of a crisis situation than running out of gas is.
Con three – EXPENSIVE BATTERIES: The large special lithium-ion batteries used in the current crop of electric cars are extremely expensive to make, at least for now. As a result, an electric car costs a lot more to purchase than an otherwise-identical gasoline car would cost. Furthermore, the batteries wear out with age, and eventually need replacing at great expense. Although the total costs of replacement parts are lower, replacing a battery at current prices would be a huge hit on the wallet all at once.
Con four – LIMITED SELECTION: At the moment, the electric cars either currently available for purchase or planned to debut in the next calendar year (excluding custom electric retrofit jobs) are all either 2-seaters or 4/5-door sedans. There are no large family vans, pickup trucks, station wagons, SUVs, or other popular car types. If you have real need of something other than a sedan or 2-seater, you simply cannot have an electric vehicle.
Con five – NEW AND UNPROVEN: Except for one Tesla model, ALL the new breed of electric vehicles have been on the road less than a year. In fact, most of the coming crop haven’t reached the public yet. Totally new cars are more likely to be lemons than slightly-modified updates to proven car models. In other words, buying a first-generation new concept car is a risk.
Conclusion
Although there are some serious drawbacks to jumping in and purchasing an electric vehicle now, you should notice that these cons will disappear completely or at least relax significantly over time. As people adopt electric cars, an electric “refuel network” is likely to develop, just as a gasoline “refuel network” developed in response to people owning gasoline cars. Dealers will make more models to fit customer needs, and the models that are coming out now will be tested in the real world and perfected. The industry will continue research and development, and will find ways to reduce the price of the batteries and refuel the batteries faster (or swap batteries on the fly, perhaps).
At the same time, all these pros will continue to be true. In fact, the price of gasoline will continue to rise while the price of electricity will not (or at least, not at the same rate), so the price of electricity will look more and more attractive all the time. While a refueling network will mean a different sort of trip to the gas station, such a trip would only be necessary on occasions when you are going on long trips away from your home base plug or when you forgot to charge your car overnight and can’t stay home waiting for 6 or more hours. For most people, those situations would be rare, so trips to the refueling station would happen very seldom – certainly much less often than currently. The other advantages will continue unchanged because that’s just how electric cars work.
Therefore, it is definitely a good idea to own an electric car. The question is not whether you should own an electric car after all. The question actually is WHEN you should acquire your first electric car.
