Electric Vehicles to Save Money
Posted on January 25th, 2010 by Nicole Price
Regular readers are probably aware that I like electric vehicles and that I have spoken about them before as viable alternative to gas guzzlers. And really apart from their benefit to the environment, there are several economic considerations that make electric vehicles a good choice if one is looking to buy a vehicle. The reasons that I think electric vehicles save money are:
- They don’t use any gas. They use electricity and rather than fill up at a pump, you recharge at home; much like your cell phone.
- You don’t notice any particular increase in your electricity bill even with regular recharging. So basically it feels as though you are running your vehicle free, without any payment made for fuel. These total up to substantial savings. I have owned an electric vehicle for a couple of years now so I know how nice it felt to sail right past the gas pump; particularly when the fuel prices were so prohibitively high just a while back.
- There are no moving parts, and therefore little or no maintenance required. There is less likelihood of having to take the vehicle to the shop for repairs.
- You get a tax credit when you buy an electric vehicle; which in many cases is 10% of the vehicle cost. So your retail cost for purchasing the vehicle comes down substantially after that tax credit. The sales tax is fully deductible as well.
- Many major car companies are doing a lot of research and development into electric vehicles, and are likely to come up with better, improved EVs in the near future according to recent reports. What this will do is improve and enhance the driving range (the main perceived drawback of an EV is the fact that you can have only a limited number of miles to drive before you need to charge it for several hours) and reduce the charging time and bulk of the battery pack. Check out the news about this green vehicle that can go 100 miles on a single charge.
- EVs are very silent so it costs you less in terms of driving fatigue.
As of now, I would say that if one needs a city car or one in which to do a lot of local running around, an electric vehicle really fits the bill.
Electric cars are the way to go in terms of energy efficiency. Even Warren Buffett is betting on this with his China investment. Though I think they are still working on the technology in terms of power, refilling and so on. May take a while yet.
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If you watched Top Gear before, you might be agreeing that electric powered car is not the best solution in this century. The best solution will be hydrogen powered car like Honda manufactured. It extracts hydrogen from Water (H2O) for resources. I personally think that it will be a success because batteries for electric powered vehicles are too heavy and the electric current is not stable which leads to inaccurate usage estimation. Electric powered vehicles is great but it might not be best solution for this century. Perhaps it will become the best solution if we have much advanced battery technology in future.
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I really love electric cars. I wish Americans weren’t so resistant to change. They would prefer to waste our natural resources and, frankly, spend more money just to prove to themselves (aka. lie to themselves) that they can do anything and not damage the environment.
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Electric powered cars for sure is definitely the future and it 100% saves more fuel than the petrol based automobiles. Good thing that the big companies such as Toyota, Honda and Ford are already selling their Hybrid Cars on the market. The preservation of the planet must start with Electric powered vehicle.
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I think such vehicle will surely help with environment too. I hope to see such vehicles
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I love to idea of Electric cars and plan on getting one in the near future. Thanks for the wonderful post.
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I like electric cars too but I believe in the short term – hybrid is more practical – at least until battery technology improves.
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I Aggree with
ProgPrince and Monkey99.
Actually batteries for electric cars work as those of mobile phones and these, being small energy acumulators, do not work always well. Can the electric cars batteries do so at this stage?. I strongly dought. .
(I wonder why the movements of our mobile phones within our pocket cannot produce energy to feed or recharge automatically the phone battery. Is it lack of research, only?)
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