Today’s Washington Post had yet another article by somebody explaining why they didn’t buy an electric car.
Am I the only one who finds that weird? Do we see published stories about the great National Parks that the author hasn’t visited? Detailed reviews of restaurants the author would have liked to have dined in? Or travelogs about the wonderful luxury hotels they’ve driven by?
You get the drift.
And yet, “Why I didn’t/won’t/can’t/shan’t buy an EV” is a surprisingly robust genre. Once you realize that it exists, you’ll soon see that it’s pretty common.
For this particular story, maybe it was the author’s high-anxiety writing style. Maybe it was all the angst-y, over-the-top comments from the general public.
Or maybe I’d just had my fill of the unnecessary us-versus-them-ism.
Because, when you boil it down, there are two types of people in this world: Those who divide people into two types, and those who don’t.
For whatever reason, I was motivated to leave a comment. So here’s my comment on that WaPo article, copied in word for word.
There is a compromise: PHEV. That’s a plug-in hybrid electric vehicle.
My wife bought a Prius Prime.
We haven’t bought gas since the middle of August.
The Prius Prime is a nice balance of electric and gas. It has enough battery to do somewhere around 30 miles as a fully-capable EV. With no range anxiety. When the battery is discharged, it’s just a regular gas Prius.
It doesn’t have a huge battery. So it plugs into a regular 20 amp household circuit. And with that, it takes maybe five hours to recharge.
When you think about it, a huge battery is kind of a waste, most of the time. Most people do most of their driving pretty close to home. Give them a way to do the first 30 on electric, and you make a real dent in their gas use. Without demanding the materials needed for a 300-mile battery.
Anyway, it was the right choice for us.
We’ll probably fill the tank some time next month. Or maybe not. Depends.
I’m reading all this angsty stuff about the decision to go electric, and all I can say is, you’re making it way too hard.
Go look up what’s happened to the price of batteries over the past decade. There’s a reason that Tesla went from a rich man’s play toy to a car for the masses. It’s called a more-than-ten-fold reduction in the cost of batteries, over the last decade.
All this stuff about, Oh my God, the battery replacement will bankrupt us — that’s so last-generation. Look up the current data before you decide to stress about something that’s increasingly a non-issue.
