AppId is over the quota
AppId is over the quota
By John O'Dell October 14, 2011
Supporters of electric cars have declared Sunday to be National Plug-In Day and have been organizing grass-roots convoys -- parades, if you will -- to show off the growing number of EVs in the country. As the owners (well, lessees) of a 2011 Nissan Leaf, my wife and I will be participating in one of them, boastfully displaying a placard that says our cayenne red hatchback has traveled 1,970 miles oil free since we picked it up at the dealership at the end of May. I can attend the parade because it is being staged in the town in which I live, so I won’t stress the Leaf’s battery charge getting there and going home afterward.
The country's big event is being held in the city of Santa Monica, on the coast just west of Los Angeles, but I won’t be attending that one. It is a 108-mile round-trip from my house and that’s a distance the Leaf cannot tackle without a lengthy recharge of its battery pack. So instead of adding to the 180 or so electric-drive vehicles -- cars and trucks with plugs -- that will be plying the streets of Santa Monica on Sunday, my wife and I will be driving our Nissan Leaf five miles to the city library in Orange, CA., to participate in a more modest procession of around 30 EVs. There will be similar parades of plug-in vehicles in two-dozen cities across the country – organized by local chapters of the Sierra Club, Plug In America and the Electric Auto Association.
As a Southern California teenager, I often made a pilgrimage to the beach on New Year’s Day to bask in our usually warm winter sun and think about relatives stuck in the snowy Midwest. Now, as an EV driver, I’ll be dedicating my participation in Sunday’s parade to those EV owners who live too far away from one of the events to participate and to the wanna-be EV owners whose driving distances or financial situations make today’s electric cars impractical or impossible.
Although to hear some enthusiasts talk, the day will show America that the electric car has arrived, I’m not sure that’s the case. Instead, I see it as a chance to let people put eyes on the electric cars they might have read about -- or heard about on TV or their favorite Internet news amalgamator -- but that many have never seen because there still aren’t that many out there. Perhaps the parades, speeches and other events will get people thinking, and talking, about a future in which oil is for home heating, for industry, for the military and for commercial transportation, and we exercise the privilege of personal transportation in vehicles that don’t squander that particular resource.
If an onlooker asks me what I think about my EV, I’ll say that I really like it and that it meets all my expectations -- because I didn’t expect too much. I don’t believe that today’s electric cars are mainstream vehicles. They won’t be until they can overcome the handicap of expensive batteries that can’t provide much more than 100 miles of range on a single charge (it varies, depending on the vehicle’s weight, speed, the terrain and ambient temperature, size of the battery pack, the battery chemistry the manufacturer chose, and a few other factors). But as a second vehicle for households that can afford one, an EV starts making sense.
My wife uses our Leaf during the week -- her job is much closer to home than mine so she never comes close to exhausting the previous night’s charge -- and I’m the designated driver on weekends. We use it for almost all of our weekend transportation -- shopping, going out to dinner or a movie, visiting friends-- and the gas-burner sits in the driveway under a car cover except those times we take a trip that’s longer than 70 miles. So far, since getting the Leaf on May 22, we’ve had to purchase only a couple tanks of gas. That’s a far cry from the days when it was four to six tanks a month to keep two gasoline-powered cars running (a caveat here; I work from home a lot, and when I do drive into the Edmunds.com office in Santa Monica I use our third car, a 2007 natural-gas powered Honda Civic that allows me single occupant access to the freeway carpool lanes and has more than sufficient range for a round trip between fill-ups.) The savings in gasoline alone almost makes the Leaf’s monthly lease payment.
I’d also say that if you really want to maximize the savings and the feeling of doing something good for the environment that you get from owning an electric car, adding a home solar system to produce most of the electricity for your EV is a good way to go. We put one in almost 20 months ago, long before we decided to get the Leaf EV. While we now have the car and have to charge it several times a week, we hardly notice its impact on an electricity bill that is averaging just under $20 a month so far this year. We were paying Southern California Edison Co. an average of $160 a month for the year before the solar system went active.
All this was made possible by all of you out there -- we got close to $11,000 worth of federal tax credits and utility district rebates when we installed the solar system and $12,500 in state rebates and federal tax credits when we acquired the Leaf. That’s another drawback of electric vehicles -- and green energy. At this point, they are affordable to many only because of the incentives provided by government. Without those incentives, I’d certainly not be driving a Leaf, or any EV, down to the city library for Sunday’s parade.
Call me biased, but I think the expense is worth it -- I’d much rather see tax dollars spent encouraging the spread of energy efficiency and reduced oil use than on wars, government-paid healthcare for members of Congress or a few dozen other things that I consider wastes of taxpayers’ dimes. So even if you don’t agree with me, thanks for the help. And if you have been toying with the idea of adding an oil-free vehicle to your personal (or business) fleet, drop by one of Sunday’s parades and talk to a few of the people who already own and drive one. It just could be enlightening.
John O'Dell: is an AutoObserver Senior Editor. Follow @AutoObserver on Twitter.
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