Just to round out my last EV update.
I hadn't shared the total fuel costs for the month of November.
Apparently, we spent $60 total to fuel (electric and gas) the Volt/hybrid and $61 to fuel the gas car.
That was $61 to drive the gas car 550 miles.
& $60 to drive the hybrid 1,769 miles.
So, there you go.
I was going to say that we hadn't even bought any gas this month. But I see that we topped off the (Volt) tank at some point after Thanksgiving. The cool thing about that is we won't have to stop for gas on the way to or from the Bay Area, for Christmas. We knew we'd be driving back for Christmas, and so we just filled up the tank all the way. I have been using a 1/10 tank of gas here and there for extra cold mornings and to keep the car heated (electric range is not quite enough always, in the cold). But should still have 400-ish gas miles left and will use about 200 of those miles for Christmas festivities out of town.
Edited to add: The negative $45 was a work reimbursement I received for October work miles. Which reminds me, I received a $10 reimbursement in November, to further reduce my fuel costs for that month.
Fuel Cost Update
December 15th, 2018 at 05:12 pm
December 15th, 2018 at 06:16 pm 1544897812
December 16th, 2018 at 06:52 am 1544943178
December 16th, 2018 at 03:18 pm 1544973504
December 16th, 2018 at 04:06 pm 1544976405
The Volt has like the highest owner satisfaction of any car ever, and it also has a gas engine so is the best of all worlds. I also think it looks a lot nicer.
The Leaf has battery degradation issues, on top of the small range. In contrast, I've never heard of any battery degradation with the Volt.
The one thing I like about the Leaf is that is it more roomy. Feels more mid-size on the inside and has a real 5th seat. (The newer Volt has a 5th seat kind of sort of, but no one can actually sit there). We were very seriously considering buying a Leaf because of all the battery issues the older ones with the smaller range are really cheap on the used market. We had been thinking about it seriously for a year or two, but ended up having extra money. If money is no object, the Volt wins by a landslide. We only considered the Leaf when it came to having a $5,000-ish car budget. I wasn't going to spend $10k or $20k on a car with so many issues. But you can buy an older Leaf for $5,000 that is "like new" and fully loaded. We did seriously consider for our son, before he was gifted a car.
The Volt is so much better than we even realized. We had no idea how it would get 50+ mpg on the gas engine. We really thought we'd just use it for commuting and use our gas sipper for out of town driving. But we are using it for everything, so have already decided we will probably buy a second Volt. In the meantime, we are going to run this one into the ground crazy fast, if we don't spread it out a bit. On the flip side, it sounds kind of crazy to put our eggs in one basket, so we wanted to wait a year to save up some cash and to make sure we aren't being too rash.