Hard to miss the old Buick as EV savings compound daily

As longtime readers know, Jenelle bought an all-electric Chevy Bolt a couple of years ago. We’ve driven it about 18,000 miles. It replaced a Buick SUV that had about 85,000 miles on it. The total cost of the Bolt out of pocket, after the trade-in and the electric-vehicle rebate, plus the cost of adding a 240-volt (Level 2) charger to our garage, was about $25,000.

The Buick got about 20 mpg, so we’ve saved 900 gallons of gas. Gas has been around $4 a gallon here for most of that time, so that represents a savings of $3,600. The onboard meter has been reporting that the Bolt gets about 3.5 miles per kilowatt-hour, so we’ve used about 5,100 kWh of electricity at a cost of about $650.

We also haven’t had to do oil changes or the 90,000- and 100,000-mile service work the Buick would’ve needed, which probably represents about another $2,000 of savings. Total two-year savings have been a little under $5,000. Over 10 years, energy cost savings alone will be about $15,000. Add in the maintenance savings, knowing that the Buick would likely require more expensive maintenance after it passed 120,000 miles, and the savings on fuel and maintenance alone will pay for the Bolt.

It probably would have taken at least 10 hours a year to arrange and manage the Buick’s maintenance. Also, fueling it took about 10 minutes per fill. Nine hundred gallons divided by about 15 gallons per fill equals another 60 hours, or 30 hours a year. Fueling the Bolt takes seconds, to plug it in inside the garage after parking. We’ve only had to use public charging stations twice.

What’s the value of that? Think of it this way. A human lifetime is about 700,000 hours. Of that, we spend a third asleep. Figure a couple of hours a day for hygiene and eating, and we only have about 400,000 hours of time during which we’re awake and have options. If we then account for work or school for 60 years (age 5 to 65, more or less) at 55 hours a week (including commuting) for 44 weeks a year (factoring in long school breaks and vacations), we only have 255,000 discretionary hours in a lifetime. Over 10 years, we’ll get to use 400 of those hours for something other than routine car maintenance, by owning the Bolt instead of the Buick.

I still drive a gasoline Ford locally. It cost $75 to fill that car up last week. Last year, I looked at the possibility of riding an electric bike around La Conner, to reduce gasoline and maintenance costs for my local mileage. I concluded that the hill our house is on doesn’t make any bike a practical option.

However, the federal rebate on EVs has now been extended to used cars, so I took advantage of that this week. We’re now a two-car electric family, with the addition of a plug-in hybrid, a 2014 Chevy Volt. For short distances, it runs on battery power only. I can charge it with the charger we already have for the Bolt. It has a gas engine, so it’s not quite the time-saver the Bolt is, but its trip computer says it’s averaged 117 mpg over its life. I like the sound of that.