My Five Favorite Things About Driving an Electric Vehicle (EV)

I've been driving an electric vehicle (EV) for about nine months now, and I love it! Why, exactly? Good question. Here's my somewhat rambling answer:

Efficient

A modern, economical ICE (internal-combustion engine) car can travel upwards of 40 miles on a gallon of gasoline. That's great... until you realize that only works out to about 25% of the energy in that gasoline being turned into forward motion. Not a whole lot, in other words. Most of the rest of that energy is converted to heat, which then has to be extracted from the engine and tossed overboard through the cooling system (i.e., the radiator).

Contrast this with an EV, which puts 90-95% of its energy into moving you down the road. That's how a car like a first-generation Nissan LEAF, whose 24KWh battery can hold only three quarts of gasoline-equivalent energy, can travel 82 miles on a full charge, or 120 MPGe (miles-per-gallon equivalent). Try getting 120 MPG in a gasoline car!

Reliable

Admittedly, your typical gasoline engine is an amazingly complex piece of engineering. Thousands of parts all working together in harmony to get you down the road.

Until they don't.

Even if all those thousands of parts hold together, and none of them break, sooner or later a gasoline engine is going to wear out, typically within 100,000-150,000 miles, unless it's meticulously cared for, which might get you to 250,000 miles. It's just the nature of the beast. Every five thousand miles or so, you have to change the oil to get rid of contaminants and replace lost viscosity.

In an electric car, the drivetrain has about a dozen moving parts, if that. This adds up to a drivetrain that could easily go for a half-million miles before wear becomes perceptible.

While older EVs have lost some battery capacity over the years, this is becoming less of an issue as the technology improves. I suspect that by the time I need to replace the battery in my Nissan LEAF, I'll be able to buy a bigger batter than the car shipped with, giving me more range than ever.

Torque, Torque and More Torque

Ever wonder why your ICE car has "gears"? How about that "clutch" or "torque converter"?

Short answer: because it needs them.

Long answer: If you tried driving a car with the gearshift in "L" (or first gear on a manual transmission) you'd get up to maybe about 15 miles an hour before the engine went to "redline", or the top safe rotational speed of the engine. Beyond that, either the engine computer steps in to slow the engine down, or the engine starts to tear itself apart. Either way, you won't be going very far very fast.

To solve this limitation, your car has a multi-speed transmission that keeps your engine turning at a safe and useful speed no matter how fast (or slow) you're driving.

Unfortunately, this adds new limitations. If you're driving a car with an automatic transmission, and you need to accelerate in a hurry, you may have a lag of up to two seconds from the time you floor it until you start to go faster, whether you're driving an automatic or a manual. Two seconds can be an eternity if you're in a bad situation you need to get out of now.

In an electric car, all that complexity goes out the window. No gears. No clutch. No torque converter. Just step on the accelerator and you go faster. Now.

Cheap to Drive

On a real-world basis, an EV is cheaper per mile than a gasoline engine, hands down. Where I live, I pay no more than 20¢ a kilowatt-hour for electricity, and that's in the middle of a blistering Arizona summer day, when everyone has their air conditioning running full tilt. Off-peak, it's typically 10¢, and having an EV qualifies me for a 5¢ rate between 11pm and 5am year-round. YMMV, but check with your electric utility to see if they have an EV program.

Aside from the cents-per-mile cost, there's that curious lack of maintenance. No oil changes, no transmission fluid changes, no brake jobs... Yep, that's right. I've seen Nissan LEAF drivers with 90,000 miles on their original brake pads.

This is due to regenerative braking, where the car converts the kinetic energy of motion back into battery charge, instead of the massive waste heat that friction brakes create.

Quiet

Stop me if you've heard this one:

My Nissan LEAF is so quiet...

How quiet is it?

It's so quiet it needs a noisemaker so pedestrians know to get out of the way!

This is NOT a joke. I'm dead serious. The Nissan LEAF actually makes a whooshing noise out of its external speaker until it's going twenty-five miles an hour.

In the US, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) has mandated that, starting in 2019, any electrified vehicle has to make some warning sound until it reaches 19 MPH, or anytime it's going in reverse.

The point is, EVs are astonishingly quiet. At a stoplight, they're dead silent.

So Basically...

There's a lot to like about driving an EV. Next time you get a chance, take one for a spin. You'll be glad you did!