If You Have An Electricity Outlet Where You Park, An Electric Car Is More Convenient Than A Gas Car! – CleanTechnica

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When I read the beginning of Carolyn Fortuna’s article a few days ago about the US tax credit for EVs being at risk and why now is the time to jump in and buy an electric car, it hit me again that most people don’t realize how much more convenient EV life is than gas-car life.

Many people are concerned about whether they could live with an electric car instead of a gas car. What they don’t realize is it’s much more convenient to live the EV life than the gas car life.

Time is precious. People are constantly craving more time. The first thing people worry about when they think about going electric is how long it takes to charge, or how far the car can drive before having to charge. What they don’t think about right off the bat is that they can spend just about 3 minutes a month charging — plugging in and unplugging. Whatever the exact time is for an individual, it’s far less than the time it takes to pull off the road into a gas station, select the fuel type, put the nozzle into the car, wait for it to gas up, pay, and get back onto the road. Heck, one or two of those steps could take as long during one stop as all of the brief moments plugging and unplugging an EV during the course of a month.

Believe it or not, after plugging in an electric car, you don’t have to stand there and watch it charge.

In the article I wrote earlier today about a survey from the Global EV Drivers Alliance (GEVA), it was noted that lower operating costs was the #1 reason the 27,000 surveyed drivers loved EVs. Of course, that includes the cost of charging, which is typically cheapest at home (and overnight if one has time-of-use electricity pricing). And if one includes time costs, convenient home charging wins again and provides just more economic rationale for going electric.

If someone needs some convincing or just needs to understand the situation better, you could put it like this to them: would they rather have a phone with a large gas tank in it that they had to take to a gas station off the highway once a week to refuel, or would they rather have a normal phone with a bigger battery that they can plug in at home as they wish but only really need to charge overnight every other day or so? I think it’s obvious what most of us would choose. I can’t imagine anyone choosing the former option unless they were stubbornly trying to prove a point and stick by their belief that a gas car is more convenient — it obviously is not if you have home charging. As some said even several years ago when EV batteries were much more expensive and EV range worse, if it was the other way around and we were all driving EVs and there was a push to switch to gas cars, no one would switch, because the benefits of EVs are already much greater than the benefits of gas cars.

Keep it simple. Go electric, and plug in at home once every 2–3 days.