“But, and this is important, you must do your homework before getting an EV. The 1,700 mile trip I sometimes take has plenty of fast chargers. Your trips may not have many fast charges. “
Yes, that’s a very important requirement. Lots of charging stations if you have shorter range.
And thanks for sharing your experience. My wife is looking for a new car and trying to decide between all electric or plug in hybrid. She mostly just drives around town.
Charging stations also have a tendency of getting sabotaged.
If that's the case then an EV is probably not feasible. If "drives around town" comes out to less than 1,000 miles or per month. If you want the nuts and bolts on the math:
1) My EV gets about 3.4 to 3.5 miles per kWh (that's after a 10% loss when converting AC to DC while charging, but does incorporate other power consumption like running the A/C in the day and headlights at night, and every now and then 70 mph driving if we go across town on the highway, etc.).
2) Then it comes down to how much power costs at your house. With Alabama Power it comes out to about 14 cents per kWh. That does not include flat monthly fees, but does include the hidden fuel rate charge (they say we're charged 12 cents per kWh, but there's also the cost of fuel the utility pays to run the power plants) and it does include the 4% state tax to total 16 cents. But reduced by 2 cents per kWh if we charge at night from 9 PM to 5 AM (an EV rate discount to encourage us to charge when the grid is least used).
So 1,000 miles per month = 286 kWh added to my power bill = $40 per month added to my power bill. Which is probably way cheaper than gas for a hybrid ... but only if you drive 1,000 miles per month.
Another cost is higher insurance premiums. My insurance doesn't have a rate rider for EV's (i.e. increased risk). But it's a more expensive car (at least EV's were 3 years ago) and thus needs more coverage. That's about $50/month for full coverage more than the liability only coverage I would have been paying if I had replaced my wife's old used gas crossover with another old used gas crossover. So for me that's part of my math.
One last thing is if your state has an EV fee when doing the annual car registration (we call it "getting your car tag" around here LOL). It's for us EV owners to pay our share of the road upkeep because we're not paying gas taxes. For us that comes out to about $200/year more (it's a higher rate X value of car than the gas car rage X value per car). I'm not complaining. It seems fair. I'm just saying it's part of the math on if an EV is worth it.
There is the extra cost of tire wear. Our EV weighs about 10% more than the gas crossover it replaced. So I assumed tires replaced 10% more frequently. That seems to be the case now that the newness has worn off and we don't drive it like teenagers with the zippy acceleration. LOL But I assumed the extra tire cost would be offset by reduced wear on brake pads (because most braking is done through regen braking). That seems to be the case. At 3 years and 81K miles our EV's brake pads are still like new.
For me the # of miles/year threshold was 8K, not 12K. But that gets into having homemade solar power, upgrading the solar the year I got the EV, and the math on how much more to upgrade the solar to get my money's worth vs how much power we consumed and if it's cheaper to not have to have a large enough solar system to provide 100% of the power, but most of it. (Back-end database programmer here, so I'm all about the numbers and the process before making big decisions.)
So far the overall energy project of solar + making the house more energy efficient (and all electric) + EV (vs leaving the house as is it was and driving gas cars) has saved our cash flow $8K across 4 years (most of that in the past 3 years after the 2022 solar upgrade and purchase of the EV). I have to make a monthly loan payment (HELOC) to pay for all of those conversions instead of paying sky high power bills + sky high natural gas bills + sky high gasoline costs like I used to. And the payoff date is 2032 (11th year of solar, 10th year of owning the EV and the solar upgrade). That's when the total cash flow savings will equal the amount still owed on the HELOC. Actually the pay off date is sooner (for pessimistic purposes I don't include the investment growth of the cash flow savings meaning that money stays in our Roth IRAs growing tax free). At that point I will have solar equipment and an EV and well insulated house and efficient HVAC and water heater that has all paid for itself and hopefully keeps saving me money. (Admittedly some warranties expire at 10 years, but some are for 25 years.)
But again, you must do your homework before replicating what I did. However, it works for you, it's really sweet to not worry about energy price inflation every time the global warmageddon doomsday cult Dims change their minds on what it takes to save the world from our carbon sins. My HELOC payment + tiny power bill + small other charges (i.e. increase in insurance and increase in car tag renewal) is about what I was paying in year 2019 for full power bill + full natural gas bill + all the gasoline we bought for 1,500 miles per month. So the energy project has made it like the past 6 years' of energy price inflation don't exist. And it makes my budget for eventual retirement (my wife's fully retired and I'm quasi-retired in my mid 50's) have one less varying factor (trying to figure out what future energy costs will be). Literally all of the energy we buy is 20% of our power (what we have to pull from the grid) + the gasoline for what little we drive the gas pickup, plus travel energy (road trip power or gasoline for the EV or truck, depending on which car we take).