A Decade of Driving Electric—EVs Have Come a Long Ways Baby

We’ve been driving electric for more than a decade now.

Seems like it was only yesterday when my wife and I leased our first electric car, but it was practically pre-history as far as Electric Vehicles (EVs) are concerned.

There are far more EV models available now than then, their range has greatly improved, and we now have a nationwide network of fast chargers for those occasional out-of-town road trips. In short EVs have come a long, long ways from those early days.

Here are the EVs we’ve driven during the past decade.

Nissan Leaf
Chevy Volt
Chevy Bolt I
Chevy Bolt II

We liked the Chevy Bolt so much—it’s a real electric car that can go the places we want—that we bought one when the lease expired on the first one. (The Bolt, which beat Tesla’s Model 3 to market, proved that the legacy manufacturers could build practical EVs if they wanted to.)

How would I summarize our experience with EVs? We’re not going back to gassers or gasoline-powered cars. EVs are simply better. Of course they’re cleaner and cheaper to use, but importantly they’re much more fun to drive. They make driving fun again.

Since the fall of 2014 I’ve written extensively about our experience driving electric, why we did it, and how it’s worked for us. (I am not going to recount those articles here. There will be links below.)

2015 Nissan Leaf

We began our journey with a low-capacity, low-range Nissan Leaf. Ostensibly it had a 24 kWh traction battery, but only 22 kWh of that were usable. On a good day, it had a range on a level road of about 100 miles, often less.

Nissan Leaf20141201 0072 01 — 2015 Nissan Leaf EV charging at home.

Bakersfield’s at the bottom of the San Joaquin Valley. If you wanted to drive east, west, or south you have to climb out of the valley. That takes a lot of juice—juice that was in short supply with the Leaf.

You don’t notice it when driving a conventional car because the engine is so inefficient and you have so much powerful fuel in the gas tank. In an EV with a very small “fuel tank” you have to watch your fuel carefully. This necessitated “drafting” behind heavy trucks in the truck lane when climbing the “grapevine” toward Los Angeles. It also required stopping at the top of the pass and recharging before heading down the other side to the Los Angeles Basin.

Note. This is an update of a previous article posted 15 August 2023 on our experience with Electric Vehicles.

In 2014 there were also very few places to charge—even in California. In those days, we searched out RV parks with 240-volt outlets and truck stops with kiosks for overnight truck parking. We carried a bag full of cables, adapters, and a powerful mobile charge cable so we could charge anywhere there was an outlet.

We made it work. And we had fun. Nancy, my wife, misses those days. They were of necessity slower. We would drive an hour and then have to charge. We brought our lawn chairs and a picnic basket. We made each trip an adventure. We had plenty of time to walk around, read, and nap. By driving the Leaf we got to see a side of California most never see.

We still had a gasser—a conventional car—for longer trips the Leaf couldn’t do at all. Then we replaced our gasser with a Volt.

2014 Volt

In 2016 we bought a used Chevy Volt. Unlike the Prius, the Volt wasn’t really a hybrid. Chevy called it an extended range EV with a gasoline engine backup. For much of the time we owned it, we drove it as an EV. On longer trips we’d drive about 30 miles on electricity and then the remainder on premium gasoline.

Chevy Volt 20161013 151621 — 2014 Volt extended range EV on our first road trip to the Sierras.

The Volt was a surprisingly well built car. Being a former GM employee who wasn’t happy about his experience with the company, the Volt called for a reappraisal of my attitude toward all things GM. The company could actually build good cars—when it wanted to.

Still, we didn’t keep the Volt long or drive it much. After one year we downsized to one vehicle: sold the Volt and returned the leased Leaf. We went all electric and haven’t looked back since.

2017 Bolt

We jumped to a 2017 Chevy Bolt as our sole vehicle at the cost of a cell-phone plan. It was night and day compared to the Leaf. The Bolt had a “big” battery for the time (60 kWh of usable capacity), a spacious cabin, and refined appointments by our economy car standards. It was hard to imagine that it was a Chevy.

In a small car–Chevy calls the Bolt a “compact utility vehicle” or CUV–a 60 kWh battery is more than enough. And as California began building out its fast charging infrastructure, it was beginning to be possible to go anywhere in the state with a Bolt. Not quite anywhere, but close to anywhere.

We drove that Bolt places we probably shouldn’t have. But it worked—and got us in and out—once requiring us to drive off road in a remote area. Yes, off road, up hill without four-wheel drive. It was that or a very long walk out. We had no choice, but the Bolt delivered.

We were so happy with the Bolt that when the lease was up, we decided to buy one and keep it as long as we wanted.

2020 Bolt

Since we bought the 2020 Bolt we’ve driven it 42,000 miles and have no plans to stop driving it until something better comes along in our price range. It works for us.

20201021 Horseshoe Meadow Paul 10 — 2020 Oasis Blue Chevy Bolt on the road to Horseshoe Meadows.

While many 2020 Bolt owners never got a new battery during the great battery recall, we did. The battery in our Bolt was one of the flawed ones. Being the nerd that I am, I identified the cell that was failing and took it to the local dealer who replaced the battery under warranty.

We’ve already driven 23,000 miles on the new battery and it works even better than the first one.

Your Mileage May Vary

On average, we get about 4.2 miles/kWh in the Bolt in both highway and city driving. That’s much better than the early Leaf delivered and far exceeds the efficiency of many modern EVs. Some of the new EVs on the market are huge SUVs that are lucky to get 3 miles/kWh, often they get less than 2 miles/kWh. The Bolt runs rings around these monsters on efficiency.

To charge at home, we use a 40-amp Level 2 ClipperCreek that we installed in 2014. It’s worked almost flawlessly in the decade we’ve been using it. On occasion it has mysteriously tripped off, but it has otherwise restarted on its own or I’ve gone out and restarted it. The EVSE (Electric Vehicle Supply Equipment) delivers 32 amps at 240 volts to the car or ~7 kW. That’s more than enough for this size car. We typically charge overnight about once every two weeks.

I calculate that we do 90% of our charging at home. We’ve consumed 19,000 kWh from the local utility since we installed the ClipperCreek. All told, we’ve probably used 21,000 kWh driving nearly 100,000 miles on electricity during the past decade.

Cost Savings

Obviously, we don’t pay for gasoline. We buy electricity instead. And electricity in California is among the most expensive in the continental United States. Has driving on this very expensive electricity saved us money?

That’s a tricky question, requiring a number of assumptions. Here’s what I know. We’re currently paying $0.48/kWh during peak and $0.44 during off-peak hours! But it hasn’t always been so. We’ve paid an average of $0.22/kWh since 2014. I know that because I am a nerd and have been keeping monthly records of our utility costs for decades.

I also know what the average cost of gasoline in California has been during the past ten years courtesy of the EPA: $3.60/gal. That’s the average. It’s been more than $5/gal at times. It’s cheaper elsewhere, but that’s the average here during the past decade.

Our last gasoline-powered car was a Prius—of course. We averaged 41 mpg over 30,000 miles. That’s not the EPA mileage or Toyota’s promotional number. That’s the real-world average over all that time. As I said I am a nerd. I have a log of it.

So we paid ~$4,600 for the 21,000 kWh of electricity we’ve consumed at home and on the road. If we’d driven the Prius for 95,000 miles we would have paid ~$8,500. We saved almost $4,000 over the past decade by not driving the Prius on gasoline. We’ve replaced two sets of tires, two sets of wipers, the accessory battery, and some washer fluid. That’s been the extent of our maintenance.

Now, if we’d driven a car with the average mileage of new vehicles in 2023 of 27 mpg, gasoline would have cost us ~$12,800 over that period—almost three times more than what we paid for electricity. In comparison to driving our EVs, we saved $8,000.

We would never buy a car with such woeful mileage as the 2023 fleet average for light duty vehicles. My recommendation now to friends, family, and to anyone who will listen is never buy a vehicle that gets less than 100 mpg. That’s shocking to some, yet well within what’s available today.

During the past ten years, we’ve averaged 4.2 miles/kWh for all the pure EVs we’ve driven. That’s equivalent to more than 140 mpg. So it’s eminently doable today to drive a car that exceeds 100 mpg on a regular basis.

Of course, these are just averages. Your mileage may vary.

EVs & Electricity Consumption

In 2000 we embarked on a major energy efficiency renovation of our home. Previously we were consuming about 5,000 to 5,500 kWh per year. This was typical for homes in our neighborhood and it characterized PG&E’s baseline utility rate for our area. The first tier or block of the utility’s rates are the lowest, from there rates increase in each succeeding block as consumption increases. These tiers are politically set by the state Public Utility Commission and vary by climate zone within the state.

Annual Electricity Consumption Gipe Nies Household

After our conservation efforts (new windows and increased insulation), we cut our consumption to ~3,000 kWh per year, substantially less than the utility’s baseline consumption for our area.

Inexplicably, our consumption rose to ~4,000 kWh per year a few years just before we launched our EV adventure with the Nissan Leaf in 2015. It’s possible that those years were hotter than normal or we kept the house cooler than usual or some combination of those events. Cooling is the biggest consumer of energy for homes in Bakersfield, California.

Our first year with the Leaf, we consumed 1,300 kWh to charge the car at home. During Covid, we drove our Bolt much more than usual before or since. We took weekly trips to explore this part of California since we couldn’t do much else. (See Pandemic Peregrinations in an EV.) We averaged ~2,600 kWh per year charging the Bolt during Covid.

We’ve powered our EVs with a total of 19,000 kWh by charging at home for ~2,000 kWh per year.

Altogether, we’re consuming about 4,000 kWh to heat, cool, and light our home per year, and we’re consuming another 2,000 kWh per year to drive our EV for a total of 6,000 kWh per year. The addition of EVs has increased our annual consumption by about 50%.

Still, our total consumption, including the EV, remains substantially less than the average residential consumption in California’s hot interior valley. In 2020, the average consumption in California varied from 4,000 kWh per household per year in San Francisco to nearly 10,000 kWh per household per year in Fresno two hours north of Bakersfield. Both Fresno and Bakersfield are in the San Joaquin Valley.

Conclusion

Driving electric has worked for us. It’s been fun, saved us thousands of dollars we would have paid for fuel, and we’ve done our part to clear the polluted air of the San Joaquin Valley, one of the most polluted regions in the United States.

We plan to continue driving electric.