BUYING ELECTRIC AND HYBRID CARS
While hybrids and electric cars are great for the environment, they are not without problems. The drain on your wallet can be a real issue. This article discusses the financial aspects of buying an electric car and offers some tips for saving money when shopping for your car.
The decision to purchase an electric or hybrid car is a difficult one we cannot fully answer in this article. Instead, we will focus on whether or not it’s worth it to buy an electric car. To determine if it’s worth buying an electric vehicle, we must first establish the actual savings compared to a conventional car.
Electricity for a car has several sources, including electricity from your local power company and electricity generated from renewable resources. Unfortunately, the U.S. does not have nearly the infrastructure for this latter alternative that we need to make it feasible. Only about 2% of electricity in the United States is generated from renewable resources. That number continues to dwindle as more coal plants are built and alternative energy projects are abandoned.
When buying an electric or hybrid car, the most common is to purchase an electricity-only plan. This is because many power companies offer very inexpensive plans on how much a customer can use every month or year. When you add all of your users together over a year, you receive a bill just as if you had purchased the typical energy plan of your electric company. This makes it much easier to figure out what your monthly charge will be and whether or not it is worth paying for an electric car in the first place.
These cars are typically charged at home and usually range 60 to 100 miles per charge. Unfortunately, with most driving habits, a vehicle will need to be charged every day, which can take up valuable time out of your day. You will also have to pay to charge your vehicle at an electric or hybrid car charging station that is available for public use. This can cost anywhere from $3-$10 per charge, depending on the location and the time it takes to fill up the battery.
While there are savings associated with purchasing an electric vehicle, they are not nearly enough savings to make a case for replacing vehicles that run purely on gasoline with electric cars.
