Drive Green, Save Green

Electric vehicles (EVs) are an important tool for reducing global warming emissions and other harmful pollutants. The vehicles themselves don’t emit any pollution, and when charged from renewable sources like wind and solar, they are a virtually emission-free form of transportation.

These environmental benefits hold enormous appeal for consumers, and national sales of pure battery EVs have increased every year since 2010, with 2016 on pace to be another record year. Nevertheless, EVs still only account for a small fraction of total vehicles sold – and that’s due, in part, to consumer concern about their costs. But today, EVs are cheaper than they’ve ever been before, leading us to wonder: Do consumers who want to go green on their daily commute really need to take a financial hit in order to do so? So yesterday, we released Drive Clean and Save, a report co-authored with Environment California Research & Policy Center analyzing the true costs of owning an EV versus a comparable gas-powered one in California.

To do an apples-to-apples cost comparison we looked at four vehicle models for which both an electric- and a gas-powered version exist (the Chevy Spark, Ford Focus, Kia Soul, and Volkswagen Golf) and compared costs using a cost analysis tool developed by the Argonne National Laboratory, a research arm of the U.S. Department of Energy. We found that consumers who buy an EV instead of a gas-powered vehicle should not only recoup fuel costs over the lifetime of their vehicle, they should expect to see cost savings of thousands of dollars. And those savings will take place whether gas prices stay abnormally low, or go up over time.

The savings are result of a few factors: the low cost of charging a vehicle from the grid versus buying gas; the helpful incentives (both state and federal) available to EV buyers; and the low maintenance costs for EVs reflecting their fewer moving parts and fewer fluids to change. Add these savings up, and they more than compensate for EVs’ higher upfront prices.

Right now is an exciting time for clean technologies; not just EVs but also solar panels, wind turbines, efficient LED lightbulbs, and energy storage. All have seen dramatic price reductions and technology improvements in recent years. And while these developments have certainly taken place in part due to ingenuity in private industry, the speed of progress would not have been possible without smart public policies to drive adoption and increase economies of scale. These clean technologies are on the verge of dramatic increases in adoption that could help solve our biggest environmental challenges, but whether these breakthroughs happen fast enough is in large part up to policymakers.