2023: The Year of the EV

When things go spectacularly wrong, we call it a “perfect storm.” We don’t have a similar saying for many conditions coming together to make things right. But we ought to: That’s what’s likely to happen in 2023 with electric cars, or more generally, electric vehicles, known as EVs.

Conditions are ripe for millions of consumers to abandon forever the polluting, high-maintenance and planet-killing Rube Goldberg device called the “internal combustion engine” (ICE). Those who do will enjoy quieter, simpler, lower-maintenance and much cheaper driving, often with better performance. Dense cities will enjoy drastically reduced smog, pollution and traffic noise. And many drivers will be able to “gas up” in their own garages, without ever leaving home.

Three powerful new conditions favor electric car sales this year. The first is President Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act. It provides $370 billion in federal subsidies to curb greenhouse-gas emissions and promote electric driving. Many of its subsidies go to ordinary consumers. Properly exploited, they bring down the prices of electric cars, high-power quick-charging stations in homes and businesses, and solar arrays to generate independent power for driving, sometimes at zero marginal cost.

The second favorable condition is also totally new. This year, the global auto industry is finally ready.

This year, it’s not just Tesla offering great but overpriced cars at the hidden cost of aggrandizing and enriching an egomaniacal celebrity. This year, most if not all major automakers will have new electric models.

New electric cars will come from GM and Ford, BMW, Mazda, Toyota, and Hyundai, among others. Whole new companies, such as Rivian and Polestar, will have new electric models this year. The gamut runs from pickup trucks (made by Chevrolet, Ford, and maybe Tesla), through small sedans and crossover vehicles, to luxury and performance cars that can shut any ICE vehicle down. To get a feel for just how various and attractive this year’s EV offerings will be, watch this thirteen-minute video.

The third and final favorable condition is a leap in consumer understanding. Last year’s big inflation let consumers feel in their pocketbooks the disadvantages of gasoline as an energy source for driving.

Gas prices over $5 a gallon are gone now, but not forgotten. Consumers now know that the US, for all its technological prowess, commands only a small fraction of global oil reserves. They also know that oil is a global commodity, priced by global supply and demand. So control of drivers’ cost per mile of driving on gasoline depends on the whims, wars, and production of nations like Russia, Saudi Arabia, other Gulf States, and Venezuela. All of them are run by despots who, to put it mildly, don’t share our goals or values. As all this sinks in, consumers are starting to look at EVs with fresh eyes.

It’s not just the high gas prices alone. After all, they’ve come down a bit from their recent peak. It’s the uncertainty. Do you really want your cost of driving—and thus an important part of your cost of living—to continue to depend, for the life of your next vehicle, on the likes of Vladimir Putin, Prince Mohammed bin Salman, and Nicolás Maduro Moros?

From the standpoint of sheer economics, the Biden Bill (Inflation Reduction Act) makes a huge difference. For example, the Chevy Equinox, a compact crossover, will reportedly sell for “around thirty grand.” [Set the timer at 2:00.] It will reportedly qualify for the first half of the $7,500 federal purchase subsidy in 2023, and for all of it in 2024, for a net price of around $27K in 2023 and $23K in 2024.

These days, it’s hard to get a good used car for that price, let alone a brand new car with totally new electric technology that will likely cost you three or four times less for energy. And the Equinox, like all pure EVs, will come without pistons and rings, rods, valves, a crankshaft, a camshaft, a timing chain, a distributor, a radiator, a transmission, a differential, and a gas tank, all of which can break down and increase maintenance costs.

Another thing that new EV buyers will come to appreciate is independence from gas stations. If you install a charging station in your home, or if your apartment complex has stations available, you’ll never have to go to a gas station again, except on long trips. (Well, hardly ever: only if the car breaks down, which EVs do far less often than ICE cars.) Rather than heading out to gas up in too cold or too hot weather, or into a dangerous part of town, you’ll simply plug into your garage overnight.

The Inflation Reduction Act provides tax credits of 30% of the cost of in-garage chargers, up to $1,000. My own Level-2 Charger (240 V, 20 A) cost me about $540. At 4.8 kW, each hour of charging adds about 14.4 miles of range to my Volt, or about 19.2 miles of range to my wife’s Tesla.

Then there’s the price of driving energy. As of the day after Christmas, the national average cost of a gallon of gasoline (all grades) was $3.20. If an ICE car gets thirty miles per gallon, that means it costs over 10 cents to drive a mile. But at the national average residential retail cost of electricity, 11.1 cents per kWh, it costs 3.7 cents to drive a mile on electricity in my Chevy Volt (at 3 miles per kWh) and only 2.8 cents (at 4 miles per kWh) in my wife’s Tesla.

That means the cost of driving a Volt one mile is just over one-third that of driving the ICE car, and the cost of driving a Tesla a bit over one-fourth. If you drive 30,000 miles a year, burning 1,000 gallons of gas, you would spend $3,200 on fuel for the ICE car and would save over $2,000 per year with the Volt or almost $2,400 with the Tesla, year after year. And if the cost of gasoline ever goes up again to $5 per gallon (or more!), the annual cost of driving the ICE car would rise to $5,000, so you would save about $3,900 per year with the Volt or over $4,100 per year with the Tesla.

But the best thing that EVs provide is peace of mind. When you drive on electricity, the price you pay for driving each mile is regulated by your local Public Utility Commission, based on your local utility’s actual cost of producing the electric energy. It doesn’t depend on the global supply and demand for oil, far less on the whims, wars and production of despot-ruled petro states. And as your state’s power grid comes to depend more and more on lower-cost renewable wind and solar power, instead of increasingly scarce and expensive fossil fuels, your energy cost per mile is likely to go down, not up.

Finally, there’s the cost of maintenance. EVs cost far less to maintain than ICE cars because they have far fewer and simpler mechanical systems. The electric motors that drive the wheels double as generators (in regenerative braking and in serial hybrids like the Volt). They have far fewer parts and systems than any ICE. They are far more symmetrical and therefore more vibration-free. And what controls the power from the battery is basically high-power transistors. Have you ever known a transistor to break down?

So about the only EV parts that may need maintenance are the battery, the brake pads, the tires and the windshield-wiper blades. And the brake pads get less use in an EV than in an ICE car because electromechanical regenerative braking takes up much of the slack in slowing and stopping the car.

It gets even better. If you invest in a solar array to power your home, you can drop your energy cost of driving down to zero. That’s what I’ve done.

My state (New Mexico) offers so-called “net metering.” That means I pay for only the excess electric power that I use but that my solar array doesn’t generate. So far, I’ve never used up all the power my array generates, at least averaged over any whole month. (I’m retired and don’t drive much; your experience may vary.) In addition, I get a “renewable energy credit” (“REC”) of 4 cents per kWh for every kWh that my array generates, whether I use it or not.

As a result, I’ve not paid my power company (PNM) a penny for electricity since I installed my 6.4 (nominal) kWh array in 2013, except for a month when a lightning strike or power surge blew fuses in my array while I was away. And though I have burned some gasoline in my serial hybrid on rare long trips, it amounted to less than a tankful over a year. (To reduce vehicle weight and allow tank space for “freshening” the gasoline when it gets stale, I keep only three to four gallons in my serial hybrid’s tank.)

The Inflation Reduction Act’s subsidies are complex. They’re designed in part to encourage Americans to manufacture EVs and their batteries. So subsidies depend on how much of the lithium in the batteries and (separately) the rest of the car are made in America. But the new law has eliminated the old numerical threshold for EV-production, which once phased out subsidies for Teslas and some Chevy EVs after 200,000 cars were sold. Now the subsidies apply to all EVs, no matter how many, that meet the American manufacturing requirements.

So, on inquiry, millions of drivers will now find that they can benefit from federal subsidies on the EVs they buy. Even used-EV buyers can enjoy a subsidy of up to $4,000 per car. In addition, the high-level chargers they install, and the solar arrays they install to power their homes and charge their EVs, will all get federal help. Many of these subsidies are now arranged to provide actual point-of-purchase price reductions, rather than just a tax credit that requires waiting until next April’s tax-time to enjoy the help.

Last but not least, our whole society will reap a huge dividend as EVs reach a critical mass on our roads. Greenhouse gases will abate. Smog will subside. Traffic noise will lessen dramatically. And no one will die, by suicide or accident, from carbon monoxide effluent from EVs.

With all these benefits, it looks as if EVs will come of age this year. The initial-purchase-price subsidies will bring prices within a range acceptable to most consumers. This year will also offer consumers a wide variety of EVs and hybrids to choose from, and both domestic and foreign brands can enjoy the subsidies. (The subsidies depend on where the car and its parts are manufactured, not who owns the brand. Many foreign makes have American factories and/or use American-made parts.)

Modern EVs have decisive advantages over ICE cars in saving our planet, ease of use, ease of “refueling,” simplicity, reliability, quiet, comfort, startling performance, and peace of mind. As word spreads about these advantages, 2023 will jolt their sales as much as the new Chevy Blazer EV is reported to jolt from zero to sixty in four seconds, using its “Wow!” mode. [Set the timer at 3:00]


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