At a time when it costs up to $100 to fill a gas tank, but as little as $10 to charge an electric car, buying an EV may seem like an obvious choice. But EV economics are complicated and you need to be savvy about a lot of unfamiliar factors before you can stick it to the oil companies.
Buying a new car to drive an EV you have to buy an EV, an often pricey proposition. Even after you sell or trade your current, conventional car you could easily be in the hole $10,000 or more. It'll take you several years to just break even, as my CNET Cars colleague Craig Cole calculates here, even assuming a scenario where you buy a very cheap EV, live in a place with cheap electricity and always charge at home. That's a lot of "ifs" to make the purchase of a new EV an economic slam dunk.
This is not a new concern: I can't count the number of people I know who bought a hybrid or other fuel-efficient car at a net cost far higher than they could ever save on fuel with it. One friend insisted on trading in their Porsche Cayenne for a Cayenne Hybrid, even after I penciled out that it would take them 111 years to break even.
To be sure, a pure electric car will save you far more on energy than that Cayenne Hybrid example, but an EV's initial purchase price and potentially higher insurance and elevated repair costs can blunt its economics. On the other hand, conventional cars have a litany of maintenance costs that EVs don't incur, like fluid changes and more frequent brake service.
A lot of people buy an EV to save the environment as well as money, a noble motivation that returns their investment via both fuel savings and environmental dividends. It's beyond the scope of this article, but think about overall environmental ROI and ask yourself if there's a more effective way to deploy the net funds you'd spend on an electric car: Installing rooftop solar or building out a top-notch Zoom room to cut out most of your business air travel are a couple of examples that can be considered using a good carbon-footprint calculator.