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It’s wonderful that you can self sustain your home and your EV. It’s also nice that you can afford to install solar, buy an EV and an ICE vehicle and I assume install a charging station? Most folks can’t. People would have to go into huge indebtedness to do all that. How about those that live in the country? Also how about an EV in say a hurricane? We were without power for a week after Hurricane Idalia. The nearest charging station to us is like 25 miles away. Wouldn’t do us any good unless we wanted to use the power of the EV battery to keep running to the charging station. Not feasible. If folks in a city want their EVs...they should go for it. If someone doesn’t, especially in the rural areas, they should have to or be forced to.

For starters, I agree 100% with your sentiment that the government shouldn't be forcing people to go EV or subsidizing them. I'm not making the rules, I'm just looking at the rules and figuring out what's best for my family. (Analogous to flat tax/fair taxers still getting as many tax credits and deductions as we can until we win our argument for a flat tax.) That being said, if you're in a good situation for an EV (i.e. can charge at home, don't live in freezing cold weather, married and need 2 cars anyway so one can be an ICE, etc.) then even with Trump-era good gas prices (I like year 2019 as a standard, since 2020 gas prices had the coved anomaly) we're looking at people driving at least 15K miles per year can financially benefit from doing most of their driving in an EV. With this past year's Biden gas prices that number is down to at 12K miles an EV makes sense financially. (Less miles than that for me since we have solar giving us most of our power for free.)

If you want details on how I avoided most of the up-front costs it's at https://freerepublic.com/focus/news/4127577/posts?page=51#51. The numbers are a bit out of date. For example, instead of being out of pocket $3,200 I'm now at the point where's the net savings in my cash flow is $2,900 (which means $2,900 more that has stayed invested in our Roth IRAs). When the EV is paid off 3 years from now, my net cash savings will be $6,600 (assuming 3% inflation rate in gas and power rates). At that point the solar tax credit refunds will be done, but the $850/month I was paying anyway in year 2019 (for power bill + natural gas bill + gasoline at the pump + $400 to a car savings account) will quickly pay down the HELOC.

3 years after that I'll resume putting $400/month into the car savings account for eventual car repairs (most notably battery replacement not that I have an EV, which in today's prices would be $11K for my EV, I'm sure inflation will make it more). Thus I'll be using only $450/month to make the HELOC payment + tiny power bill. And that'll easily keep paying down the HELOC because the HELOC balance will be low (which means payments will be low too). The $450/month (or $850/month during the years I'm using the $400 car budget) is basically my energy costs from year 2019. I basically have protected our budget as though the past few years of stupid energy price inflation from the Dims doesn't exist and replaced them with fixed costs equivalent to my Trump era energy costs. Instead of asking how I can afford it, the question is how could I afford not to do it? (For those of us in a good climate for solar and EV.)