We were curious whether EV ownership/leasing correlated with rooftop solar panel ownership, and also whether driving an EV encouraged people to drive more efficiently or even conserve energy more at home, so we surveyed thousands of EV owners. Guess what the results were.
When asked for the top reasons the EV drivers got their cars, we got similar responses as in previous years. The largest portion of buyers in every group referenced the environmental benefits. As before, Tesla buyers in the various markets were more likely to select “fun & convenience” and “I love new tech” than other EV drivers.
A few days ago, we wrote about Tesla earning the Top safety score (TOP SAFETY PICK+) from the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS). I had publicly asked them last month why they hadn’t yet tested the car and was happy to get a reply that they were working on it. I’m not surprised how things turned out.
The Tesla Model 3 won the IIHS’s TOP SAFETY PICK+ award, which means that the car achieved the top score in all 8 test categories. You cannot get a better score. While this is a tremendous achievement, it’s also not surprising. The Model 3 already achieved the best safety score ever from the NHTSA, and we know that it is the safety leader due to abundant crumple zones, market-leading active safety features, extremely strong doors and a similarly strong roof, a low center of gravity that keeps the car stable, and tremendous traction control.
Cracking the code of what people want in their electric vehicles is not that complicated, even though analysts at Edmunds seem to think otherwise.
In an article published by the San Diego Union Tribune, a market analyst at Edmunds said that electric car buyers “don’t seem to be EV fans, they seem to be Tesla fans.” She also said that, “It’s been really hard for any other company to crack the code of what people want in an EV.”
I’ve had an obsession with financial software for some time, something that I probably inherited from my father. I remember when we got our first Apple II in 1978 and he used it for investments and budgeting. When he moved to an IBM PC (which I bought for him at a discount since I was an IBM employee from 1984 to 1998), he fell in love with Managing Your Money. I moved to Quicken in the mid 1990s. I’m trying to spend less time tracking my finances and more time writing, so I’m moving to more cloud-based methods of tracking my finances. But I noticed that I had 15 years of data on my auto spending available as part of this obsession. I didn’t have it easily tied to my 7 cars, but don’t think of this as a review of any car, but as a general survey of the fuel, maintenance, and repair cost for 7 cars over about 400,000 miles.
There’s an important caveat with electric cars. Although electric vehicles have zero tailpipe emissions, they draw their power from a wide variety of energy sources. Bloomberg reports, “Trading in your gasoline-guzzling car for an electric vehicle is a lot like shifting the emissions … [as] EVs run off electricity, and that electricity” can come from both clean and dirty energy sources.
Electric vehicles offer large cost savings over traditional gasoline-burning vehicles. That’s simply because electric vehicles use electricity as fuel instead of gasoline. Electricity is much cheaper than gasoline, making it much cheaper to recharge a car than to refill a car.
Paul, Vijay, and I keep writing about practical reasons to buy a Tesla. But let’s get real, below are 10 legitimate reasons to buy a Tesla.
Every time someone buys or leases an EV, fossil fuel’s stranglehold lessens. That’s the cost differentiation between EVs and ICEs. The individual benefit, as I am enjoying, is autonomy and the opportunity to have free electricity for cars and homes. EVs are thinking people’s cars, yes, and it takes planning and work, but we’ll have a better life and planet for it.
