* By popular request from a number of visitors to this blog, I have updated the graphics below based on information available as of October 2016.
It's been said, but I'll say it again ... Electric cars are the future. We will soon look back at our internal-combusting, oil-leaking, carbon-polluting cars and trucks as dinosaurs, that never quite made sense, but had a long solid run, till their time was up.
If you are in the market for a new car, it only makes sense to consider an all-electric car as one of your options today. While Tesla and its superb Model S has been taking most of the limelight in the media, other cars manufacturers have been silently adding all-electric vehicles to the market that are worth exploring if you are seriously considering buying in the near future.
However ... finding all the information in one place is a real challenge!
For starters I couldn't find a convenient list of all-electric vehicles for a buyer to consider! I finally figured that the best way to make my own list was to review the California Air Resources Board's website that offers an HOV lane sticker to electric and hybrid electric cars. For more about that read my previous post.
To my surprise I got a total of 13 vehicles ranging from minicompacts to SUVs. Here's the full list ...
As ofAugust 2014 October 2016 these are the electric vehicles in the US market:
I arranged the vehicles in the order of the most important thing I consider in buying an electric car ... The range. i.e. How far can I go on a full charge? If I am seriously considering electric as an option against gas, range is pretty much the most important issue for me. A low range means I have limited options of what I can do with the car. If weekend trips out of town are not an option, that limits the usability of the car - which is serious problem. In fact with most electric cars in a 80 mile range, they tend to become one-task vehicles i.e. commute back and forth to work every day! I don't know about you, but I need a car to do a bit more for me than a single task.
If you are willing to look beyond the range issue (or if 80ish miles on a single charge works for you, perhaps you have a charging station at your workplace!) then the options become more interesting. The second thing I would consider is time taken to charge the battery fully. With a 240 Volt charger (which most people will need to install in their garage) time to recharge range from 3.5 hours (Mercedes Benz B250e) to 12 hours (Tesla Model X, S). The Teslas obviously takes longer because it has the biggest battery in any electric vehicle on the list.
Next the EPA mileage in miles per gallon equivalent (MPGe) is of course an important consideration and I was expecting to find all of them to be somewhat similar. But they are not! They range from the best of 124 MPGe (BMW i3 BEV) to as low as 72 MPGe (BYD e6).
I added some additional color formatting in the graphic above, for EPA Fuel Economy, Time to Charge Battery and Price. If you prefer seeing the graphic above sorted by Price, Time to charge or EPA mileage, click the images below:
It's been said, but I'll say it again ... Electric cars are the future. We will soon look back at our internal-combusting, oil-leaking, carbon-polluting cars and trucks as dinosaurs, that never quite made sense, but had a long solid run, till their time was up.
If you are in the market for a new car, it only makes sense to consider an all-electric car as one of your options today. While Tesla and its superb Model S has been taking most of the limelight in the media, other cars manufacturers have been silently adding all-electric vehicles to the market that are worth exploring if you are seriously considering buying in the near future.
However ... finding all the information in one place is a real challenge!
For starters I couldn't find a convenient list of all-electric vehicles for a buyer to consider! I finally figured that the best way to make my own list was to review the California Air Resources Board's website that offers an HOV lane sticker to electric and hybrid electric cars. For more about that read my previous post.
To my surprise I got a total of 13 vehicles ranging from minicompacts to SUVs. Here's the full list ...
As of
- 2017 BMW i3 BEV (60, 94 AH)
- 2017 Chevy Bolt (Not yet release ... but data was available, so included)
- 2017 Fiat 500e
- 2017 Kia Soul Electric
- 2017 Mercedes Benz B250e
- 2017 Mitsubishi i-MiEV
- 2016 BYD e6
- 2016 Chevy Spark EV
- 2016 Ford Focus
- 2016 Nissan LEAF (24, 30 kWh)
- 2016 Smart Fortwo Electric Drive
- 2016 Tesla Model S (60, 60D, 75, 75D, 90D, P90D, P100D)
- 2016 Tesla Model X (75D, 90D, P90D)
- 2016 Volkswagen e-Golf
- 2014 Honda Fit
- 2014 Toyota RAV4 EV
I then went to the U.S. DOE's www.fueleconomy.gov website by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) that allows you to compare vehicles side-by-side to get more information about them ... But wait ... They only allow you to compare 4 vehicles at a time! And to make life interesting, they broke the information out into 4 tabs!!! Why don't they just allow us to compare all the vehicles we want, with all the information on one page?!! Browsers scroll in both directions, you know!
Anyway ... I took down the three most relevant pieces of information from the EPA website for each vehicle: Miles on a charge, Time to charge and EPA Fuel economy in MPGe. Then I headed over to True Car (my new favorite website to price a car) and Kelly Blue Book to get a rough estimate of what I might pay for each one. I priced them as I would like to buy them, so the prices are NOT for the base stripped-down version, nor are they the decked-out, all options MSRP price. They are somewhere in-between. All that research ended in the graphic below.
Anyway ... I took down the three most relevant pieces of information from the EPA website for each vehicle: Miles on a charge, Time to charge and EPA Fuel economy in MPGe. Then I headed over to True Car (my new favorite website to price a car) and Kelly Blue Book to get a rough estimate of what I might pay for each one. I priced them as I would like to buy them, so the prices are NOT for the base stripped-down version, nor are they the decked-out, all options MSRP price. They are somewhere in-between. All that research ended in the graphic below.
I arranged the vehicles in the order of the most important thing I consider in buying an electric car ... The range. i.e. How far can I go on a full charge? If I am seriously considering electric as an option against gas, range is pretty much the most important issue for me. A low range means I have limited options of what I can do with the car. If weekend trips out of town are not an option, that limits the usability of the car - which is serious problem. In fact with most electric cars in a 80 mile range, they tend to become one-task vehicles i.e. commute back and forth to work every day! I don't know about you, but I need a car to do a bit more for me than a single task.
If you are willing to look beyond the range issue (or if 80ish miles on a single charge works for you, perhaps you have a charging station at your workplace!) then the options become more interesting. The second thing I would consider is time taken to charge the battery fully. With a 240 Volt charger (which most people will need to install in their garage) time to recharge range from 3.5 hours (Mercedes Benz B250e) to 12 hours (Tesla Model X, S). The Teslas obviously takes longer because it has the biggest battery in any electric vehicle on the list.
Next the EPA mileage in miles per gallon equivalent (MPGe) is of course an important consideration and I was expecting to find all of them to be somewhat similar. But they are not! They range from the best of 124 MPGe (BMW i3 BEV) to as low as 72 MPGe (BYD e6).
I added some additional color formatting in the graphic above, for EPA Fuel Economy, Time to Charge Battery and Price. If you prefer seeing the graphic above sorted by Price, Time to charge or EPA mileage, click the images below:
