Step 1: Evaluate your driving needs
The average Iowa City resident drives 14.7 miles a day, which is well within the average 270-mile range of today’s EVs. To understand your personal driving needs, track your daily miles driven over a week or a month. This will help you identify your average driving distances and find the EV that best fits your needs. PlugStar maintains a current database of all EVs on the market, including their driving range and sticker price, to help drivers choose the best EV to suit their needs.
EVs come in two types: full battery and plug-in hybrids (also called PHEVs). Each has different advantages. Full battery EVs rely entirely on electricity to power their motors and have far fewer moving parts than a gas-powered vehicle, resulting in much lower maintenance and fuel costs. PHEVs have an electric motor and a small gas engine. When the battery is depleted, the vehicles switch to the gas engine. This gives the vehicles greater range and the option to either plug in for a charge or refill at a gas station. They have many of the maintenance needs of a gas-powered vehicle.
Step 2. Consider which benefits most interest you.
Many drivers are aware of some of the most significant benefits of EVs: cars powered by electricity can cost between a quarter to a third as much to "fuel" as vehicles powered by gasoline, and produce less than half the total emissions of gas-powered vehicles, even when accounting for the vehicle manufacturing and areas that use coal in their electricity mix.
There are many other great benefits to EVs, though. The low center of gravity and advanced safety features improves handling, responsiveness, and ride comfort. Because all electricity used in the United States is produced domestically, EVs reduce dependence on foreign oil and support local jobs within the local economy. Because full battery electric vehicles do not have oil filters, spark plugs, and other disposable parts to be regularly replaced, and because the batteries can be repurposed and recycled, EVs reduce material sent to the landfill.
EVs also offer many conveniences based on the ability to recharge at home, allowing drivers to wake up each morning with a fully charged vehicle rather than standing at an outdoor fuel pump in hot and cold weather to refill a tank. Newer EV models can even come equipped with Vehicle-to-Home technology that allow them to act like a backup power generator during an electricity outage. And even EVs without these systems can still be used to recharge small devices like phones and laptops during an outage.
In Iowa, EVs have one extra special advantage: wind power production peaks at night, when the winds at turbine height blow the strongest. Because most EV charging takes place at night, EVs get the benefit of all that clean wind energy, which they then use during the day. In effect, EVs function as dispersed battery systems that help balance the grid: fueling up with energy when it is easiest and cleanest to produce and using that energy when it is most needed.
Step 3. Understand common concerns.
A common concern about EVs is whether they are affordable for the average consumer. While some high-end EVs do have costs similar to other luxury vehicles, rapidly evolving technology and efforts by car makers to introduce a range of EVs have brought down prices significantly within recent years. Even with the end of federal tax credits, many EV models are within price parity of their gas-powered equivalents. A gas-powered Hyandai Kona, for example, costs between $27,000-$36,000 depending on the vehicle features, while the Kona EV costs around $33,000. Similarly, a gas-powered Chevy Equinox costs between $30,000-$35,000, while an Equinox EV costs $37,000, and a gas-powered Ford Mustang costs between $34,000-$70,000, while a Mustang EV costs $43,000. In each of these cases, the EV model is more comparable to a mid-level trim package than a significantly more expensive vehicle class.
Other common concerns include the impacts of winter temperatures on electric vehicle range. Like all other vehicles, the energy needed to power heating systems in the car will reduce how far a driver can go on a single tank of gas or on a full battery. In a typical EV, this translates to an average 40 percent reduction in range in cold temperatures, which is a more noticeable reduction in range than is typically observed a gas vehicle. Many drivers find even when impacted by winter temperatures, however, they are able to fully recharge their EV overnight or at public charging stations to meet their daily driving needs.
Many people also worry about the impacts of highway driving speeds on battery range. Higher rates of speed will deplete the battery more quickly, similar to how higher rates of speed will consume gas more quickly in other vehicles. The growing number of DC fast chargers (also called level 3 chargers) along highways and Interstates help fill these range reductions by allowing drivers to quickly recharge and return to driving.
There are also concerns about the impacts of mining for the mineral components critical to EV batteries. Many of these concerns are based on images that circulate on social media showing strip mining operations for manufacturing processes that are unrelated to EV batteries. Although there are environmental impacts associated with lithium mining, most lithium mining is surface level mining processes that are similar to desalination plants and less environmentally intensive than other subsurface or strip mining operations. Rapidly evolving technologies, including advanced processes to extract lithium from seawater and advanced circular battery recycling processes, offer a pathway toward an even smaller environmental impact. In fact, some estimates suggest as battery recycling matures, the need for further mining may be eliminated by 2050.
Step 4. Find the EV that fits your needs and lifestyle.
Once you have a better sense of your driving needs, use PlugStar’s interactive Shopping Assistant to help you choose an EV that fits you! Shift2Electric’s EV Info List is another great resource for researching EVs.
