Your Garage as a Gas Station

I had evaluated electric vehicles previously to determine if they actually were more efficient than cars with internal combustion engines, and found that (at the time) they did have a lower carbon footprint and would save me considerable amounts on fuel costs. Of course, that was before gas prices dropped nearly 33% in a single week - however I knew the prices were being artificially deflated and would eventually push back up. An added bonus remained that I would no longer be late to work because I had to navigate out of my way and fill the tank.

I was able to take a Leaf out for an extended test drive and make sure it fit my commute - which it did. I couldn't find another auto manufacturer that actually had an EV on the lot aside from Tesla, so the Leaf was the only auto at my price point. Luckily there are many Nissan dealerships in my general area and I ended up picking a Model S Leaf that I have been driving for a few weeks now.

One great thing about an all-electric auto is that your garage is transformed into a "gas station," and you never need to leave your house to refuel. Bear in mind this does not necessarily mean you can use your normal 120V outlets to charge the car (using a Level 1 plugin-in charger) - you will at the very least need a dedicated circuit for charging, lest you blow a fuse from too much load. On my 24-hour test drive I quickly found out that the 120V outlet in the garage was on the same circuit as the master bathroom; when the car's 120V charger was powering up the battery it was consuming 11.3A of power, and a typical hairdryer will eat 12.5A. The combined 24A of load will trip your typical 15A circuit breaker quickly.

Ultimately a 6 kW, 240V/30A (Level 2) charger is necessary for home charging since even a dedicated 120V outlet will require 21-ish hours to go from empty to 100% charge. Normal usage often requires a 10.5 hour charge with 120V, which can easily be done in 4 hours with a Level-2 charger. The good news is that while the chargers offered through the dealership appear to be fairly expensive, Home Depot and Amazon will sell Level-2 30A chargers for under $500. If you add in the cost of an electrician adding a 40A 240V dedicated circuit, you can have a 6 kW charging station for under a thousand bucks. The daily cost per kilowatt will be the same, and while there are some who worry about peak/off-peak charging hours most residential agreements seem to bill based on volume, not based on time of day. 6 kWh at 2 AM is billed the same as 6 kWh at 2 PM.

The technology is changing rapidly. Level 2 chargers are rapidly eating from 20 amps to 30 amps to 40 amps, and Tesla is building a nationwide Level 3 charging network based on renewable energy. It's hard to say how all of this will play out... in 5 years we may have sedans with a 400 mile range... in 10 years we may have self-driving cars in metro areas... in 20 years 25% of new car sales may be EVs. Ari Jay's comparison between the Leaf and the Tesla S85 is a great example of the current state of the market - in the end both cars are great, to serve two different purposes and two different drivers. We're getting past early adoption, sliding past the peak of inflated expectations and heading towards the trough of disillusionment. Sure people are getting a bit anxious on range and worried about cost... but on the other side is mainstream adoption, and the widespread infrastructure to support electric vehicles and cross-country road trips.

The Gear-Headed Mentality

The old Saturn Ion that I had been driving is nearly ready to give up the ghost. After nearly a decade on the road, it is time for it to be put to pasture. Even now the car is getting 30 miles per gallon, a completely respectable rate. Still, so much of my traveling is just limited to the daily commute and running errands -
and it is time to look at something more efficient than a controlled explosion eighteen inches from my knees.

The first issue I encountered when shopping for an EV was that dealerships still seem to be getting accustomed to selling all-electric cars. Several salespeople outright refused to speak to me about the Leaf, and instead passed me off to other sales reps. I couldn't find a single salesperson who would let me drive a Ford Focus. After I pried a bit further, it seems like the more "senior" sales staff believe that EV buyers are too high maintenance - the buyers don't understand the range issues, they fear higher return rates, they get cold feet and back out of the deal. Even the sales staff that would talk to me pressed very hard for a commitment, wanting faux signatures and asking for money down prior to delivery. I spoke to lot managers about the Leaf turnover rates, since I felt they had a more accurate sense of how inventory was moving, and they seemed to think the actual return rates were much lower than the rates the sales guys were assuming. For one lot, out of 15 Leaf sales only 1 had been returned.

If you troll the EV forums you find that there is some hint of truth to the conception that potential all-electric owners are a high-maintenance bunch. Several complain that they had to wait a whole 5 minutes in a maintenance bay, others are incensed at the 87-mile range, and many aren't quite ready for the anxiety of finding a charger when they need one. If you are planning on using an EV as a secondary commuter car the stress can be much less, however an all-electric primary car can definitely give you an ulcer. Electric vehicles definitely require a cultural fit right now, which may be why there is such friction between buyers and sales people.

As odd as it might seem, Focus/Leaf/i-MiEV/Soul/i3 owners are more akin to Corvette than to Corolla owners. A happy Leaf owner frets over charging temperatures, battery chemistry, wind resistance, regen strength, residential electrical codes, LED vs. halogen amperage - and enjoys doing so. Just as a Corvette owner is worried about properly gap'ing spark plugs, an EV owner is worried about electrolyte conductivity. If you wouldn't enjoy obsessing over the winter tires of a 'Vette, you likely wouldn't like obsessing over the optimum tire pressure for maximum EV range.

In all honesty, I've never been a car guy. I know that the engine belts form a mobius strip to allow for even wear... and... there are cables? And various and sundry liquids? Not sure. However, the mechanics of an EV are much simpler to understand, which lets dullards like me become car guys because there is
so much less to know. As is entirely too apparent, I'm more than happy to obsess needlessly about the baubles of technology... and so I think I can make the shift from the mainstream "it just works" mentality to the gear-headed "how does it work" mentality. Mainstream adoption may not be there for EVs just yet, but wannabe car guys have the perfect inroad now.

Out of Gas

I took a Nissan Leaf for an extended test drive today - I borrowed it last night and will return it tomorrow morning. It was definitely good to take an all-day test drive... there were a few things I didn't expect to encounter but are helpful to know.

First off: the range. I drive approximately 53 miles a day just to work and back, and I'm driving in a midwest winter. The temp wasn't terribly cold - it was above freezing - but I needed to run the defogger for most of my trek. I drove in "Eco" mode the entire time as well, and made sure to take advantage of the regenerative braking. While Nissan quotes the driving range between 75 and 84 miles, a single 26.5 mile trek ate 40% of my battery. This places my winter driving range closer to 66.25 miles, assuming a linear discharge of the battery. That ain't good, and is a full 12% less than the advertised range.

I am pretty fortunate to have EV charging stations at work, otherwise I'd be sunk within a year. Right now the plan is to use the regular 240V charger at work, and trickle-charge the battery at 120V at home. This means I need to charge for 4 hours once I arrive at work, and charge for 10.5 hours at home. Not terribly convenient, but doable. If I wasn't able to recharge at work I would definitely be sweating it on the trip back.

For a while I weighed the difference between the S and SL models (the low and high end), but I didn't find a compelling reason to move to the SL. True, the SV/SL models offer CARWINGS, however it uses an old AT&T 2G network that is scheduled to go dark by the end of 2016. There is also the navigation console and full Bluetooth support which is nice... but... meh. Overall I didn't find a compelling reason to upgrade from the base S model, other than adding the quick charge package.

The Leaf is tempting. I will definitely need to change my driving habits and will have to always be mindful of the nearest charging station; already I've petitioned work for additional EV spots. However, if I am willing to bend over backwards I believe I could make a switch to all-electric.

Are Electric Vehicles Really Better than Combustion for Commuters?

I have a pretty regular commute of about 50 miles a day. The wheels are about to fall off my ten year old auto, which still manages around 30 MPG given my highway driving. I'd like to swap out cars prior to abandoning it on the side of the road, so I started to wonder if now was the time to go with an all-electric car.

I've never liked the idea of hybrids. I'd rather mess with a combustion engine or an electric motor, not both. Electrical systems are crazy enough as-is without a gas-powered mobile generator strapped to it. Luckily electric vehicle prices have also come down significantly, with a base-level Nissan's Leaf going for under $22k. With that kind of price tag, I started to wonder how much better an all-electric car might be compared to a hybrid or an efficient combustion engine.

I started to measure my gas consumption and prices at the pump, and keep a running total in a Google Doc Sheet which I'm happy to share. After a month of driving, I started to calculate what the cost and the CO₂ savings might be. I took current fuel costs and compared them to what an efficient combustion or hybrid car might be, then found some analogous kilowatt-hour data to draw comparisons to an electric vehicle. Here's what I found for a four-week period:

	Current Car	Efficient Car	Electric Vehicle
Total Fuel Cost	$119.52	$95.43	$40.81
Avg. Miles per Gallon	29.52	37
CO2 Created	802.59 lbs	640.65 lbs	511.62 lbs
Monthly Savings		$26.25	$85.74

So an EV would reduce your fuel costs by 66%, however it would only reduce your carbon footprint by 36%. By comparison the "efficient car" reduces both fuel costs and carbon footprint by 20%. One would think that an electric vehicle would trounce a moderately efficient car in carbon dioxide production, but that doesn't appear to be the case.

Now, this is all based on an assumption that my data is sound... and maybe it should be reviewed by some more objective eyes. I'm effectively ignoring fuel transport and refinement costs (including battery production) - that's a rabbit hole I don't want to go down. I determined the CO₂ output of gasoline engines using stats from U.S. Energy Information Administration and carbon output per kilowatt hour from the Environmental Protection Agency. Based on that info, I was able to determine the impact of either EV or combustion cars. This makes a few assumptions and generalizations for the different types of fuels being burned, such as ethanol mix and coal/natural gas combustion of power plants. Nissan's own "Feel Electric" Android app makes slightly different calculations than my own, using an "EPA formula" that equates one gallon of gasoline to 33.7 kilowatts per hour. It also does not add CO₂ emissions from power plants into its equation. Using Nissan's formula, the savings for a week's worth of driving was slightly different than mine:

If we assume my cost calculations are correct and we add the additional engine fuel costs to a 36 month lease, how would monthly car costs compare? Let's take a look assuming $2,399 due at signing, adjusting if more is due by prorating the amount across the term of the lease:

	Ford Focus	Ford Focus Electric	Nissan Leaf S	Tesla Model S	Chevy Spark	Mitsubishi i-MiEV	Kia Soul EV
3yr Lease	$256.74	$202.00	$199.00	$890.28	No Lease Listed	$216.47	?

Note this makes a combustion car about $50 more a month than a comparable electric vehicle. The Kia is an interesting EV, unfortunately no Kia dealerships in my entire state carry one. From here we can narrow down affordable leasing options to the Focus, the Leaf S and the i-MiEV. Let's compare these three across the features I consider mandatory:

	Ford Focus	Nissan Leaf S	Mitsubishi i-MiEV	Kia Soul EV
Price	$202.00	$199.00	$216.47	?
AC Power (kW)	107	80	49	81.4
Horsepower	143.38	107.2	65.66	109.076
Battery Capacity (kWh)	23	24	16	27
Average Range (mi)	76	84	62	93
ABS	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Traction Control	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Bluetooth	Yes	Yes	No	Yes
Quick Charge	Optional	Optional	Standard	Standard

The i-MiEV seems a little underpowered and overpriced by comparison, however it did have several other amenities that the others lacked including more charging options. The Focus did offer considerably more power than the Leaf at a comparable price point, at the cost of average driving range. Another big difference is that the Focus has a water-cooled battery enclosure, while the Leaf's batteries are currently air cooled. This may extend the overall life of the Focus batteries, however this may not be a big issue for a 36 month lease.

The Kia Soul appears to be the stand-out performer, however it is off the list due scarce availability. I attempted to give the Focus a test drive, but after searching I found that I would need to travel 8 hours and cross three states to find one. That means the Leaf is the only one I can test drive, even though it ranked a close third by comparison.

The take away message is that the cost savings may be enough to trump a comparable combustion car by significantly lowering fuel and maintenance expenses for commuters with a predictable travel schedule. The environmental impact isn't as huge as I expected... however I'm just measuring greenhouse gasses and not contributors to smog, runoff or noise pollution. We may not have to weigh that impact however - the economics now seem to carry the day for EV's.