Volt's savings are a real gas

I recently bought a used plug-in hybrid car, a Chevy Volt. After the federal tax credit and Washington licensing fees (EVs are currently exempt from sales tax), it cost about $8,000. I already had a home charger for Jenelle’s Chevy Bolt. If I had needed to install a 240-volt EV charger at home, that would have cost about $2,000 to $3,000 more.

Over almost three months, I’ve put a little over 1,800 miles on the Volt, using it as my primary car. It’s a plug-in hybrid, not a pure electric, so it only has a battery capacity good for 36 miles of total range before the gasoline engine kicks in. However, the gas engine is good for about 240 miles of total range, so I have no electric vehicle “range anxiety” and can take any trip without special planning for charging.

There have been a couple of times when I’ve had to travel to Mount Vernon or Anacortes during the day. After the round trips, the battery has been low, so I’ve used the public charging stations at Pier 7, and behind the La Conner-Swinomish Library, to top up the battery. Most of the time, I just plug it in when I get home and unplug it before bed.

I’ve only bought one tank of premium gasoline. Eight gallons of gas cost $36. It gets a little over 30 mpg in gasoline mode, so, of the 1,800 miles I’ve driven, around 250 of them were electric.

Using electric power, the Volt gets about 3.75 miles/kilowatt-hour (kWh). For 1,550 electric miles, I’ve used 413 kWh at a cost of about $0.15 per kWh, averaging in the slightly more expensive public charging sessions, for a total of $62 spent on electricity. For those keeping track at home, that means I’ve spent about $62 for electricity for 1,550 miles, and about $36 on gasoline for only 250, for a total fuel cost of $98.

Driving the same 1,800 miles in my gasoline-only car, a Ford Thunderbird that gets about 22 mpg, would have used about 82 gallons of gasoline – more than 10 times as much. That fuel would have cost almost $370 – almost four times as much.

Even with my very short Shelter Bay-to-La Conner commute and short local trips, I’m saving $90 a month on fuel. If I had a slightly longer commute, the Volt would easily pay for itself within the 6 years over which one normally finances a car, from fuel savings alone.

But wait! There’s more! The Volt’s gasoline engine isn’t running most of the time. Changing the synthetic oil once a year (about 7,200 miles) in the Thunderbird would cost about $200 per year. In the Volt, at 1,000 gasoline miles a year, it’ll cost less than $30 per year. Other gasoline-engine maintenance issues will also be reduced proportionally. The electric drivetrain hardly requires any work. There’s no question that I’ll be spending less on routine maintenance.

All of this adds up to some time savings, too. I’m spending less time plugging in and unplugging the charger than I’d be spending if I was still standing next to a fuel pump all the time. Fewer oil changes and trips to a mechanic for maintenance will add up to more time I can use to write these articles.