I need a new car, and I really want to go full electric. I’m wondering if anyone regrets buying one? What are the downsides?
Last time I had to buy a new car was 2022.
Based on my driving habits and needs total cost per km driven was 3 times as high for electric.
Most of it being purchase price of the car. There were no used electric cars that has the winter time range so I had to compare a used gas vs new top of the line electric.
Fisker Ocean owners that paid full sticker price I am sure.
So… the work i do requires a truck. I bought a lightning last year. The electric part i loved. Charging at home was awesome. FL sucks on charging stations outside of major cities though and are expensive. In the end i went back to Ram mostly due to how horrible ford’s onboard software is. Everything else about the truck was great. I’ll give manufacturers another 3-5 years to get things figured out and hopefully by then prices will be reasonable and things will work properly.
No regrets, coming up on a year …
- if you can charge at home, it’s a no-brainer, but I know people who say it’s no big deal to go to a charger every week
- level 2 charger was $400 + electrician was same as a stove circuit, so less expensive than I expected. I could get away with less
- you don’t need trip chargers nearby, but you do want them on route you’re likely to road trip. The closest one I’ve used is 100 miles away
- you really need to be able to use Tesla Supercharger network. It makes travel so convenient
I did get range anxiety for a while, but never an actual problem. 1,200 mile road trip fixed that. The first leg from VpBoston to Virginia, my excellent (Tesla) trip planner scheduled charging stops of 10, 10, and 4 minutes, whereas I’d normally expect two stops and a meal, so not really noticeably longer. The final leg was a bit tougher, returning from upstate NY, but mostly because a lack of chargers. It ended up no big deal
what do you do if you just straight up run out of charge out on the road?
We have a Nissan Leaf (30kWh) which has been great. No regrets.
The things you worry about before buying (range, battery life) are absolute non-issues. For optimal battery longevity you don’t want to use a fast charger very often, so just charge it at home which is generally more convenient anyway. You can make exceptions occasionally when you need to.
We use it for city driving, for which the range is more than adequate and we mostly only charge it every few days. We haven’t yet attempted to take it on a proper road trip; so far we just borrow a friend’s hybrid if we need to do that, basically to avoid having to think about charging.
