Hell froze over and I got a week of peace and calm. There's probably a million things I could/should have done. But... Treated the week as a long overdue staycation and didn't do much of anything productive. I felt like I was figuratively gulping in the fresh air but I guess it was also quite literal. I had to pinch myself that our staycation destinations all had clean air on the days we planned. Was trying to keep it flexible, but locked in reservations one day and it still worked out. (The air quality has been very patchy). We had a difficult time spending any of our vacation funds. I did some rough math and an old average of $100/month for car gas will now give us 8,000 miles of driving. We enjoyed this incredible freedom. If I want to drive to the beach every single weekend, cost of fuel is no longer a limiting factor. On Tuesday we took advantage of a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity and had Muir Woods (redwood forest) mostly to ourselves. It was *amazing*. We didn't see another soul once we left the main trail, and had a picnic spot all to ourselves for lunch. I had been starving for some beach time and so we hit the beach afterwards. We did end up stopping for a refuel on the way home. We drove 254 miles, stopped and added about 55 miles of charge, and still had 65 miles left when we got home. Third completely different drive, still getting that 260-mile range on one charge. We learned two things worth sharing: We played it a lot more loose this trip, just stopping for some fuel on the way home. It's a charger we would use a lot on drives from the Bay Area, so it was nice to check out this one (different location, different route home). All we did was run an errand and grab a couple of grocery items while we were there. I'd say we spent about 15 minutes in the store and then spent a minute or two discussing if we had enough to get home, deciding yes and unplugging. We ended up charging for 17 miles and gaining about 55 miles. & honestly, we didn't even have to charge 1/2 that long to get home. Felt more like a gas car trip. In the short run, we have infinite free charges and will probably be stopping more, but long term when it's not free, it's just going to be much shorter stops. We had spent so much time in the car, it was nice to stop and take a break. {As a side note, MH wanted me to mention our car had one of the slowest charge times. I had no idea, but that's good to know. Like I said before, every single car model is different. If faster charging is really important, almost any other electric car will be faster}. We did some windy steep hill driving and that is also worth mentioning. When I mentioned the manufacturer recommended maintenance, there was no mention of brakes. This is not an oversight. The car does have traditional brakes, but those are mostly there for sudden stopping and more emergency type braking. Most of the time, you don't use the brakes on the car. The regenerative braking system slows the car down through the engine (more like a low gear on a gas car). This braking regenerates energy and adds more range back to the battery. So... Not only did we get to zip up the hill with ease. But... We did not have to use the brakes at all to come back down. It was *amazing*. {Again, I don't get the sense this is universal for all electric cars. So just another reminder that every car is different}. The next day we went to the family cabin, midway between our home and Tahoe. It's a trip that MH had already done with DL(15). We just enjoyed the peace and quiet. We went on a hike where we didn't see a single other person. I personally would have stopped for a free charge but MH was feeling "meh" about that. I have no idea why. He usually leans toward the cheap side of things, so it was very unlike him. He was kind of saying, "We don't need a charge, and these chargers won't always be free." So wanted to live life without worrying about fuel, for this trip. The chargers are so under-utilized east of our city that they have left all of those free. It's the more utilized ones that they started charging more for around the time we bought the car. So there is a completely free charger at the freeway exit we use to get to the cabin. View from hike near cabin, no other people that day: Total driving 2 days: 400 miles. Total fuel costs 2 days: $5 Thursday was our anniversary and we had a low-key day at home. We ordered in a nice dinner. Because the kids had school, we left Saturday for one more trip/hike, this time with kids. The road to Tahoe was closed. If not, I think we would have gone all the way and tested it out. But our plan was to go visit Camp, which was mostly closed for this season. It's probably about 10 miles away from Tahoe. We got our camp fix, and there is a nice isolated hike. Our timing could not have been more perfect. We saw a couple of people hiking back down as we hiked up, but that was about it. We had the top of the mountain completely to ourselves. I would have stayed longer, but MH seemed to be more in a rush. For the best, because we saw at least 20 people coming back up as we hiked down. It was clearly a popular lunch spot. We had debated packing lunch for the third time that week, but decided "meh" with the longer drive and earlier start. But we didn't start too early and had missed the early morning crowd too. {We hadn't expected it to be crowded because we've never seen too many cars there when we camp during summer. Even though the parking is very limited. Was one reason we left that hike for the weekend. We saw more people than cars, not sure where all these people were coming from}. Of course, the "up the mountain" 100 mile drive wasn't doing much for our electric range. I believe it was estimating we only had 90 miles left on the car once we got to our destination. We weren't worried about it at all knowing that it would use very little of that energy to go back down. The stories are true: We had more range when we got home than we did at the top of the mountain. So... 90 miles downhill generated more energy that it used. It's hard to believe it until you see it for yourself. We did stop for lunch and a free charge. The lunch took longer than the charge. We had two convenient options: a charger right by camp or the charger by the cabin. We drove 190 miles. Stopped for a free charge that added 100 miles to the battery. Still had 200 miles left when we got home. Although we had consistently been getting a 260-mile range in different weather and terrain, this works out to a 290-range on one charge (if you ignore the extra charge and 100 miles). Which means... even though the uphill used a lot of energy, the downhill still put us +30 miles ahead with the roundtrip. Obviously, stopping to charge was completely unnecessary. MH ended up getting an extra free charge. It was the first time he got a survey/free charge offer. I have already redeemed two and got an accidental extra credit, so make that *3* free charges. When showing him how to access the free charge, I noticed my last free charge expires next week (on October 6th?). I asked MH not to plug in the car when we got home. There's enough range for me to drive to work all week and then we can refuel at a free public fast charger next weekend. MH does have some planned day trips with DL(15) during his time off (fall break in another week), but if they go into the mountains where the chargers are always free, I expect that we won't get through all of these extra *free charge* offers. Oh yeah, our fuel costs for our 190 mile drive yesterday: $2.06 Our higher summer electric rates end October 1. For spring and fall, just means even cheaper driving.

I don't remember why or the context, but the topic came up at work: Cleaning off your windshield at a gas station.

I made a mental note. If we no longer go to gas stations... I suppose I should buy a squeegee.

One reason we wanted to replace our gas car was that we were just piling on *all* our miles on the hybrid car. Wanted to spread out our driving a bit and want to be able to keep both cars for decades if that is what we choose to do. Wasn't going to happen at the rate we were driving the hybrid. We put on 32k miles in 2 years, which is a *lot* for us. My plan is to pile up some miles on the newer car. When the pandemic is over, we can spread it out a little more. Even if I still mostly use the hybrid for my commute, I can still take the all-electric to work in the summer/winter months when MH is off of work.

I drove both cars this week so I have some real numbers.

The bigger battery (all-electric) is more efficient and using less energy for my drive.



HYBRID Commute
Cost with summer electricity rate: $1.36
Cost with rest-of-the year electricity rate: $1.10



ALL-ELECTRIC Commute
Cost with summer electricity rate: $1.13
Cost with rest-of-the year electricity rate: $0.92

I suppose it works out nicely that I can probably just drive the all-electric on my commute during summer months (months that MH has off of work).

I will probably do another post, but I don't wanna. Life continues to be absurd.

Rather just talk about the car, it's nice to have a distraction.

I do think it's worth sharing perception versus reality. I should probably continue to share these things as they happen.

The other day I was wondering if car expenses would fall off our "Top 5" annual expenses. I looked back at 2017/2018 as better comparison years because we only had 2 cars and they were both gas cars.

Holy Cow... This is how the numbers are shaking out:
2017 - $6,299 (fuel/insurance/maintenance/tags)
2018 - $7,025
2020 - $3,000 (estimate for all of 2020)

We are saving roughly **$3,000 per year** switching to all-electric driving.

But... "It's 2020. You haven't driven much?" You say? Well, I *doubled* my commute end of 2018 and I still have my commute (which is the most of our household driving). & it will cost a whole whopping $200 per year to fuel the new car (if even that, am erring on the aggressive side). I expect same/better for 2021 ($3,000 total car expenses for the year).

That's cutting our expenses in half while driving significantly more. 🤯

I honestly have no idea what our #5 household expense will become. I glanced at it and wasn't coming up with anything else big. Utilities and Misc., which are broken out into a lot of smaller sub-categories. Will figure it out at the end of the year.

MH's friend just thinks we are giant idiots. I know is what most are thinking. I suppose I don't care, I am used to it. We are used to making unpopular decisions that just make our life better/easier.

This guy has the same gas car as MH (40mpg freeway). He is just, "NO WAY were you spending $1,000 per year on car gas!" 🤣 Seriously, how hard is it to spend $83/month on gas? With our gas prices? This guy is single and childless. He clearly has no concept of how much MH drives kids around. (Also, all those short trips were knocking the mpg down closer to 25 mpg). FWIW, we drove the gas car 8,000 miles last year. That was probably a less than average year, as we both preferred to drive the hybrid if at all possible. But it was the only car available for MH/kids' commute, and is also the car that MH took to LA. I am sure there were many other times we needed two cars or both had to be somewhere.

In other news, MH/DL did their father/son trip last weekend. After being told several times by friends/relatives with electric cars, that the car basically uses no fuel to drive back down to the valley from Tahoe... I was wondering how much fuel it would take to get up the hill though. In the end, they only went about half way, stopping at the family cabin. MH could have gotten a free charge but he hadn't used up enough electric fuel to bother. Mental note: Don't fully charge the car before that trip. He also wanted to leave room on the battery in case it did generate more charge than it used. In the end, did get some crazy #s coming down the hill but was probably only a 25% - 50% improvement (round trip) over a more average drive. The downhill did use very little fuel. The uphill used a lot of fuel. But the downhill more than made up for the uphill. Once you netted it out though, it wasn't anything terribly exciting. Especially once you factor the cost of electricity and figure you might have saved a quarter. 😁

What is interesting is that the weather was mild and the terrain was entirely different than any other driving we have done. MH drove 150 miles and had 110 miles left when he got home. So... It sounds like 260 miles is the true range. If we have gotten that twice on two entirely different trips. Entirely different terrain, weather, etc. Electric cars are weird like that. The quoted range (manufacturer) is 238 miles. Our long trip average is 260 miles. Our shorter trip average will be far above that (more range). Though the range is more relevant/important on longer trips so I understand erring on the side of driving faster/longer to come up with the range. I am sure we could come up with 238 (the "official" range) if we sped and blasted the heat.

That reminds me, MH had to make a couple of trips to take kids to school. Both times was coming up with -0- miles used. Clearly there is *some* fuel being used on these shorter trips, but too small to register on just a couple of trips. Miles driven: 10 miles total, divided by two trips. (Reminder: braking regenerates energy. It is possible that trip generates as much energy as it is using). It seems moot. At this rate, MH's employer will close up shop and kids won't be back at school until they are both licensed drivers. The electric car is made for those infinite 6-mile roundtrips that MH was making. I just don't know if those trips will still be made. We are obviously happy with freeway and long range performance: silent drives that cost pennies. It just would have been interesting to see what kind of a range we could have gotten with MH's average driving, pre-pandemic.

In other news, we sold the gas car. Another post for another day. The day before we sold it, a neighbor's tree fell and missed MM(17)'s car by inches. Also, we had a fire too close to home and black ash was raining from the sky covering the outside cars (was more significant than the general infinite rain of grey ash we have been experiencing). I feel great relief to have less "stuff" to manage. Would have felt great relief regardless, but it wasn't a good week for the outside cars.

We did our first longer distance test run.

Success!!

I suppose one big electric car adjustment is not knowing how much range you are actually going to get. It depends on a few different factors.

Things that helped us along: Some minor stop-and-go traffic along the way, and also some city driving when we drove between relatives' homes.

The thing going most against us: One of the hottest days of the year. A - this directs more energy to cooling off the battery. B - A/C is an energy suck. Best we could tell, blasting the AC was taking 7 miles off of the range. Not a lot, but adds up more on a bigger battery with longer range.

{Holy cow that AC is amazing though. A+}.

The end result:
We could have probably made the entire trip, even with hot conditions and a few stops, without a stop to re-charge.

Literally, we stopped for a free 100-mile charge and the car estimated we had 100 miles left when we got home. How is that for cutting it close? IT sounds extremely feasible to make the roundtrip without any stops. The battery might go 20 miles further in fall and spring (more mild weather). It will be interesting to see on future test runs.

Of course, in a gas car I know you can run it to empty and still drive another 20-30 miles. I don't know what the deal is on an electric car. Probably same, but it's not ideal to run the battery to empty. I don't expect we will ever cut it close.

Considering that we literally always get gas on the way to/from the Bay Area, I can tell this will not be any different (logistics) from driving a gas car. We either fill up gas when we plan for a longer trip, or we fill up on cheaper gas on the way home (most likely). The electric car is going to be the same. We might need to stop for 10 minutes to top off a few extra miles to make sure we can get home. *shrugs*

Considering we often make this kind of trip multiple times a month... We are very pleased with the outcome.

When we bought our hybrid car we were considering that the "around town" car and had no intention whatsoever to make it the "road trip" car. Then we drove it to the Bay Area the first time and the gas mpg was 50. We had no idea that the car could do that! So then that became our "drive everywhere" car. Because of that, I am not surprised at all that the all-electric is easily going to become our "drive everywhere" car. Like the hybrid, the official quoted range is less than it really is.

MH did fill up 100 free miles (free charger test run) middle of the week. The only other driving he had done was to drive 5 miles home from that charger. I plugged the newer car in when I left for work on Friday.

Saturday morning we left with a full charge. This is how the numbers worked out, and I will compare to our other vehicles.

Miles Driven: 261.2
{After paying close attention to our hybrid driving and costs, I would have guessed that 250 miles is pretty average for us when visiting our Bay Are relatives. This was a very average drive}.

Electricity Used: 58.5 kWh
Free Charge: Less: 23.25 kWh
Net Electricity paid for: 35.25 kWh
x.1059 (summer electricity rates @ home)
=$3.73

That is $3.73 in fuel costs to drive 260 miles.

Unreal!

{I guess technically it was cheaper than that because we got two free charges! But that will probably not be typical}.

It's official. The only time I ever get gas in my hybrid car is when we drive out of town. After this trip? I am removing gas fuel from our budget. It will be -$0-. Car gas will no longer have any place in our monthly budget.

Anyway, here are the comparisons:
260 mile trip Fuel Costs
All-Electric: $3.73
Hybrid: $13.90
Gas Car: $19.50

That said... We failed on our trip and spent more money.

We chose the most ideal place to stop. It was 50% or 75% off. (Free charging *all the time* ended last week, but it's still discounted and sometimes free).

We had decided to stop and eat dinner. Not that we would always do that, but it's a test run and it was just MH and I. Plus, we usually eat with our parents. We just aren't going to do that during a pandemic. So you can somewhat put this in the pandemic category.

We were still in the Bay Area and all the restaurants over there ended up being $$$$.

Downside: Spent a lot on food. $25. If there had been a Taco Bell or something, we would have been perfectly happy with that.

Because the charge was deeply discounted, we decided to stop 45-minutes for the max amount of free charge. It was a billion degrees and not much shade.

Upside: Sat and ate in completely comfortable car with A/C. It doesn't idle like a traditional car. I am well aware after 2 years with the hybrid. It is a great pandemic car, if you are sitting around in your car waiting a lot. You can turn on the car and be comfortable, without bothering anyone else or spewing exhaust.

Overall, we were happy with the stop. It was a very large shopping center and I expect in the future we would just get out and go for a walk. Maybe pick up a snack or something. Don't need to eat an entire meal every time we need fuel. & like I mentioned before, a 10-minute re-fuel would have got us home comfortably.

I believe that this charger was going to be 50%-off during the time frame that we arrived. Just as we were about to charge, a survey popped up on my phone. In exchange for answering a few questions I got a free charge. That was unexpected! MH was jealous that he did not get a survey when he charged.

Then there was a glitch and they credited me twice, so it looks like I have another free charge? I don't know. Not holding my breath on that one. But if it's still there next time I drive out of town...

I did a quicker fuel savings post (my last post). Just a more general summary if you are curious about fuel savings and a more general update. This one will be a little more in-depth.

Every electric car out there right now is very different. I think driving an electric car is a big jump (no matter how open you are to the idea) and we most definitely got there a lot faster with the hybrid car as the gateway to electric. It was literally just a day or a week before it was, “Why didn’t we do this sooner?” I will say that all of my hesitancy was dumb. Really and truly. Change is difficult.

But anyway, I share because there is really nothing similar about our two cars right now, or any of the other electric cars on the market. They all have their pros and cons.

Infrastructure is also going to vary widely where you live. In California we have great battery warranty protection and chargers everywhere. Is worth mentioning because there’s a lot of areas of the country where I probably would not buy an electric car.

Of course, mostly to the point, you have to have somewhere to charge. If your employer or apartment complex provides chargers, that’s great. I wouldn’t recommend an electric car at all to my kids, because who knows what kind of charging options they will have over the next several years. If you own a house and can charge at home, that’s the most ideal. You aren’t going to refuel in the old sense of gas stations. You are going to recharge your car overnight while you sleep. Or maybe while you shop, go to the movies, eat out, or while you are at work.

Probably the best I can do is share what I know (in more depth) about our hybrid and compare with what will change with our electric car.

Range:
Volt (“hybrid”) - 50-ish mile electric range. Just about enough for my commute. That car also has a 350-ish mile gas range. 400 miles total on one charge and one full tank of gas.

Bolt (electric) - 240-ish mile electric range

{Edit to add: We are coming up with 260-mile range on longer trips and I expect 300+ with city stop/go driving. Don't have a good handle on how far it will go city driving because have not tested more than 10 miles. I will update again when we are doing more normal driving again, it may be another year}.

Note: We mostly drive the Volt/hybrid for my commute, which is all open freeway. Stop and go traffic generates more electricity/fuel and is more ideal for electric car driving. It’s going to be interesting to see how many miles we get out of the all-electric car with MH’s more city driving. (It could go up to a 400 mile range with the right conditions). I read today someone drove from Tahoe to Sacramento (about 100 miles? downhill) and actually generated more miles than they used. Crazy! The range will depend on how you drive. I feel like I really have no idea with the Bolt yet, we have to get used to it.

My commute is roughly $1 per day, hybrid electric driving. The quick napkin math is that during summer we probably pay $6 to drive the 200 miles on the all-electric car. $5 during the rest of the year (cheaper electric rates).

Charging:
In either case, charging with a regular outlet isn’t really practical. It is for some (if you can charge at work or only drive a few miles per day), but hasn’t been practical for us. This is the slowest way to charge.

Volt (“hybrid”) - My 50 mile range will fully charge after 4 hours on our Level 2 charger (we installed in our garage). It takes about an hour to add 12 miles. It gets charged overnight, at home.

Bolt (electric) - The 240 mile range will fully charge after 10 hours on our Level 2 charger. (It can also just be charged overnight). It takes about an hour to add 25 miles. I don’t know any of the logistics/details (don't ask me why), but if we use the same chargers, we will be getting twice as much range as we had been with the Volt. More value, when it comes to free charging. A night out downtown might get us 100 free miles on a public Level 2 charger.

{Because I charge the hybrid every night for my commute, we expect we will charge the all-electric car on the weekends}.

The Bolt also has a fast charging option. It takes about an hour to get 200 miles of range with the fast chargers. Fast charging is only available on public chargers.

Apparently not every electric vehicle has fast charging capability. It was a deal breaker for us, so we were careful to get the fast charging capability.

NOTE: I didn't know this, but MH pointed out to me that the charging on our car is slower than most. Just a reminder not to judge all electric vehicles based on one vehicle. They are all so different!

Maintenance:
Volt (“hybrid”) - Virtually nothing
My car has a gas generator and an electric engine. It is absolutely nothing like a traditional gas car (under the hood). The maintenance is virtually nothing. It does need oil changes once every two years.

Bolt (electric) - Nothing
I am exaggerating a wee little bit, but really not much.
Literally the maintenance schedule on a Bolt: replace the air filters, replace/check the tires. First maintenance at 150k miles. For reals.
No oil changes. No state smog inspections.

This is kind of a general sum up of what I know going into this electrical vehicle purchase. It is by far not an all-inclusive list of all things electric car, but just some key points.

Electric fuel (our utility company) is roughly 1/3 of the cost of gas fuel (our region). YMMV. (That was pre-pandemic. MH paid $2.50 for gas the other day, so maybe we are currently at 1/2 price. Either way, I will take it. 😁 )

There's two major mind shifts with an electric car:

1 - Rethinking how you fuel (as mentioned above).

2 - Switching around what affects the "mpg" the most. Stop-and-go city driving is good and will add more miles to the car's range. (Braking generates electricity). Long freeway trips will be less efficient and you will be more subject to higher fuel prices out on the road. So pretty much the opposite of a gas car.

Edited to add:
I was just reminded of one more thing. In the Volt/hybrid, the A/C seems to cost pennies to run but the heat sucks a lot of energy. This is another mindshift. If you just use the heated seats and steering wheel, it's a much more efficient way to stay comfortable in the cold weather months. I honestly thought the heated steering wheel was ridiculous (for our climate) when we bough the hybrid. MH finally set me straight. He told me, "Don't you keep saying that women lose more heat in their hands?" {My life was changed when I learned that all I needed to do was to put on some gloves to feel significantly more comfortable. & I mean like inside}. That is my DOH moment. He's right. Most of the time I don't even bother with the heat on the hybrid. I do primarily use the heated steering wheel to keep warm in the winter months. I expect that the electric car will be similar. I don't mean in a "sacrifice" kind of way. I mean in a "I have never in my life been more comfortable during winter" kind of way. It's different but also more effective. Heated steering wheel and seats should be a deal breaker when buying an electric car. One reason we went with the premium trim is because *all* the seats are heated.

Another Edit:

One thing I didn't mention initially in this post is performance. The electric cars are both very zippy and handle hills like they are nothing. It's worth mentioning because is another reason it feels so "blech" to go back to driving the gas car. I looked it up out of curiosity.

Electric 0-30 mph: 2.5
Electric 0-40 mph: 3.7
Electric 0-60 mph: 6.3

Gas 0-40 mph: 5.4
Gas 0-60 mph: 9.5

Personally, we are both very boring/careful drivers, but it makes it *so much easier* to merge onto busy roads and freeways. For that reason, it feels safer and just makes driving easier.

If you missed it, we bought an electric car last weekend.

I had to think about it a little bit, but looking at last year numbers should be a good gauge of our gas spending. I was thinking that MM was not 16 yet (for half the year), but we did do most his driving in either his car or with electric fuel (hybrid). & I remembered I track fuel costs per car so it is easy to separate out.

Gas car fuel 2019: $879
Hybrid car gas fuel 2019: $270**
Total gas fuel = $1,149
{All of this will go away}.

Oil changes/smog checks = $125 annual

Total savings = $1,274

That's about what we paid for sales tax on the early car upgrade. I thought we might break even the first couple of years, but it sounds like it may be a lot sooner.

Of course, the electricity cost something.
Drove the gas car 8,000 miles last year. The electric fuel cost for 8,000 miles will be about $200.

We will be replacing some of our fuel spending with free electricity on the road, so I think this is a good rough estimate. Presume all the hybrid gas dollars gets reduced to -$0-. Most of that is longer trips that will be replaced with free on-the-road charging.

Net cost savings = $1,074 annually

We already found that we can get free charging throughout Northern California. It should be fine for our most frequent trips to the Bay Area. But the chargers are even more readily available between here and Tahoe/Nevada.

So we already have two test drives planned out. MH wants to do a Bay Area test run this weekend. This is just a logistics run. It sounds mostly too good to be true. I am sure it is fine, but nothing like a test run. There's a few free chargers on our route. I honestly don't even know if we need a charge on this trip, but don't want to cut it too close on a car we aren't familiar with yet. It's getting familiar with the car range on this particular drive, and using a fast charger for the first time, and figuring out the free stuff.

{In the end, MH already tested out a free charger this week. It was roughly 100 free miles. He coupled it with an errand he was going to do anyway}.

DL(15) is going a little stir crazy and said he wanted to go on a road trip. MH has been wanting to go to Reno to see a movie. It's been a, "It's dumb and I probably won't do it" thing to this point. But if it would lift DL's spirits at all, that's an entirely different animal. So if all goes well on first test run, they may go to Reno the following weekend.

Edited to add: The most significant free fast charging we found expired today. Bummer! It's not all bad. Most of the chargers on the Reno route are still free or deeply discounted. This is less so for more heavily used chargers (less free or super cheap options in the Bay Area). Reno trip is still a go (free fuel) and Bay Area trip is just getting tweaked. There's so many options, it's just going to take some time to find what works best for us. & will have to just keep an eye out as things change. A lot of more free/fast options are coming down the pipe.

I started a "Don't be surprised if we buy an EV" post a few days ago but was too slow on the draw.

It is done.

Our last car (dipping our toes in electric and saving a bajillion dollars in fuel) was our toe dip into the electric world. A hybrid of sorts (I still don't know what to call it because it's technically not a hybrid either. It's an electric car with a gas generator, the best of all worlds). This time around we spent a lot less money and it's more of a, "Holy cow this is too good to be true" purchase. Prices will probably continue to fall, but one bird in the hand is better than two in the bush.

The car was within our "infinitely saving $100/month/each to replace our cars" price range. We haven't saved up that much (meaning that it's premature) because we've only had our gas car for 5 years. But we are also adding 50k miles back to the odometer and will add more time to the back end (reset the clock for another 12+ years). The only added expense I can come up with the early trade is the sales tax, or about $1,500. I presume we will break even and save $1,500 on fuel over the next couple of years. We also won't need oil changes, etc. For these reasons and also because sitting on a large pile of cash, it's a relatively boring/prudent purchase. It is the first time we have ever prematurely upgraded our cars (we usually keep our cars until they are 15-20 years old). I did do a premature downgrade once. This is the first premature upgrade we have ever done.

In this case... We decided after about a week of owning our electric hybrid that we wanted to go all-electric. Once you go electric, it's hard to drive a gas car. Even though we invested in some soundproofing in MH's gas car and I would consider it a very quiet car, it sounded like a wind tunnel the last time we took it on a road trip. It was driving me crazy! You get used to silent. Some of our decision to pull the trigger is that it is somewhat of a medical/disability purchase with MH's hearing loss. With all this cash, why didn't we just do it sooner? If we didn't have teen drivers, it would have been done a year ago probably. Our only hesitation has been trying to figure out the car situation with 4 drivers. We should have a lot of clarity in the next 6 months or so as college decisions start to shake out. Next summer we will have a fourth licensed driver in our household.

So... We have been trying to hold off as long as possible. But... pandemic pricing is hard to ignore. I haven't been shopping gas cars, so no idea where those are at. But I expect that electric cars are being affected by lower gas prices. They dropped well into our price range and we have been thinking about it, but then several popped up this weekend with an additional 20% price drop.

We hadn’t even test driven this car yet, but it’s pretty much the all-electric version of our hybrid and is similar in most regards (it has everything we really like about our “hybrid”). We were pretty certain it was the car we wanted. When a bajillion cars popped up on deep discount this weekend, we decided to at least go for a test drive. I didn’t really want to continue the conversation for a car we might not even like once we see it in person. It was time to test drive.

I should back up though. We haven’t decided yet what to do with our gas car and have left that as something to figure out later. As talks were getting more frequent about electric car purchase, I decided to consult with our insurance agent last week. I was relieved somewhat that the cost to fully insure a car for MM(17) had gone down about 40% since I last asked. It dropped into the realm of reason. (Still expensive, but not completely absurd). There is nothing magical about turning 18 (next summer) but his insurance rates should continue to drop as that car gets older and he ideally continues to add to his good driving record. Which means it would be reasonable at all to sell him our gas car.

Back to the test drive… The prices are not crazy low in our city so we had to drive about 30 miles out to test drive one of the deals. The salesmen were all very hands-off, I don’t know how much of that is pandemic related. They honestly seemed bored by our presence. We test drove two at that location, one was *the* car. MH was more than happy with the car, and the price was good. The only thing was that there was a used car lot with about 50 Bolts (better pricing), 40 miles up the road. We tried to haggle but they just weren’t budging. Honestly, this is usually how we buy cars. It’s an incredible deal, we go pay cash, life goes on. We tend to discuss things for weeks and months but the final decision on anything big is going to be a split second decision for the most part. My gut serves me very well. MH and I were probably leaning towards just buying the car and enjoying the rest of our day. I finally said, “Let’s walk and see what happens.” *shrugs* There is really no reason to be in this big of a rush. I really expected them to change their tune (and have experienced this many times before, when it comes to various purchases). We told them there was a better deal down the road but that we preferred to not make the drive. If they could even meet us in the middle? They just didn’t give a flip. We walked. I was honestly surprised how little they cared, it was a car that had been sitting for a while.

As we got on the road and I perused cars (on my phone) that cost $1,500 less, we decided a little extra driving was well worth it. But… I knew the whole “50 Bolts” thing was going to be overwhelming. Hindsight 20/20, should have taken some notes and been more organized. In the end, I have a real mental block about black cars though that is MH’s preference. The black ones are beautiful and it’s absolutely my favorite color. But, the one and only time I drove a dark car (it wasn’t even black) it was infinitely getting hit by other cars. That car once got hit while I was paying in a parking garage, and that was before the distraction of cell phones. ??? Don’t ask me. That was after I had replaced the bumper like 5 times. It was absurd. So… All I ever tell MH is that I don’t want a black car. But, I also told him I wasn’t going to buy any of these cars if they weren’t immaculate. It was clear a lot of these cars were a little more rough (the one we otherwise liked the best was really scratched up and clearly not meticulously kept). So… I caved. I do like it and I hope this round of dark car ownership goes a little better. The car was immaculate. Posted price was same as the car we walked from, but had 10k less miles. We haggled in the “never hurts to ask” vein and they shrugged and took a few hundred dollars off the top. I think they were just as overwhelmed as we were. I admit those prices will likely drop even further given some time, due to sheer volume, but there was something to be said for sniffing out the nicest one in our price/mile range. If all that was left was the beat up ones, we wouldn’t have been happy to have made the extra drive.

We bought our prior 4 cars at dealerships. We generally end up there for the ‘1 at this price’ “too good to otherwise be true” type deals. This was more of a specialized used car lot and it took 15 minutes to sign the paperwork, paying cash. For reals. I would 1,000 percent go back to that car lot again. Probably too specialized (was a luxury car lot). But… I can’t believe all that and they even threw us a bone on the price.

We bought the higher-end/fully loaded version of the car. The pricing was all the same regardless. So might as well get all the bells and whistles at no additional cost. There is all sorts of crazy stuff: parking assist, lane departure, pedestrian braking, adaptive cruise control, etc., etc. No one tried to sell us on that stuff (very hands off) and is not why we bought the car, so have to figure out exactly what we have and how it works. I don’t know if I want to get used to all that, but will google a bit and try to find some quick videos about how all of this stuff works.

We bought used, paid cash. It's a 2017, same as the hybrid.

We have a learning curve on the all-electric driving. We didn’t do much research. We know the electric range is more than enough for our needs (will 99% of the time charge at home). But if we can get free charging or figure it out for road trips, we will. We just don’t have that all figured out yet. It will be a lot easier for us since we already dipped one foot into electric driving. We had so many surprises (all good) after we bought our electric hybrid. So there’s some baseline understanding and experience there. But we’ve never really had to think about refueling outside with only electric options. That’s the learning curve we have. & if it sucks and it’s not practical, then it just will be our around town or “within 100 miles” car, which is more than fine. Is more than we need. This car is primarily going to be driven on MH’s infinite 6-mile roundtrips to/from school and work. There’s just nothing practical whatsoever about making all those trips with a gas car, if you have a reasonable electric option.

That is what will be interesting and is some of the learning curve that we have. The hybrid electric car we bought was due to the doubling of commute (that also came with a significant pay cut). All of my electric driving is open freeway. I don’t even know if I have been in a traffic jam in that car because I have carpool stickers and have always been able to go around any backups. This means that I just get the expected miles range. If you do more city driving and stop and go, the car generates its own electricity and you can drive farther on the electric. MH mostly drives city, so it will be interesting to see how long we can go between charges. Of course, MH isn’t really driving anywhere right now, so these are things we might not be figuring out for a while still.

We will be able to function very well with our one “fast” charger. We call it a fast charger because it’s a lot faster than just plugging into the wall. But now that we have a longer-range vehicle with actual fast charging, I need to change my terminology. We have a Level 2 charger in our garage, that is in the middle (speed of charging). I will continue to charge every night for my commute. The all-electric vehicle can be charged on the weekends or as needed. (Probably 1-2 charges per month, on average, during non-pandemic times).

I will do a post later going into some more details about the car. Answering some of the basic EV questions. Ideally, I would like to share information and hopefully correct a lot of misinformation in the process. But… I know I haven’t done a good job since we bought the hybrid, because life has been so crazed. It’s also probably going to be “meh”, because the car is probably going to mostly sit in the garage for the rest of 2020. If I never blog about it again, it may just be that no one’s driving anywhere anyway. I expect it will all be a little more interesting and informative when life resumes some normalcy.

A quote from my blog May 10, 2020:
I commented in another blog that we aren't experiencing any +/- in our spending. A lot of it is having a bare bones budget to begin with. We are clearly using a lot less cell data (on wifi 100% now) but that might save us $4 this month ($1 per line). My commute has decreased a little bit, so my electric fuel spending might be $20 instead of $25. It's just stuff like that.

Other comments I apparently made elsewhere:
--Our grocery spending has only gone up with kids home 24/7 and inability to shop more carefully (just making do with whatever we can find). {We can no longer find family sized peanut butter, just as a random example. I have no idea when we will ever get our generic TP back}.

--Although I hadn't noticed any difference in our monthly spending, I expected more of our annual expenses to decrease (things like auto insurance or vacation spending).

As the year is half way over, I decided to sit down and see how things were shaking out compared to last year.

Income: Same as last year
Kind of hard to believe, because I was working two jobs the first half of 2019. But the lack of side income in 2020 has been offset by a raise, stimulus, and large unemployment checks.

So... pretty much all the extra income without the extra work.

Expenses:

Auto Fuel (Electric) -$14 (as expected; driving about 20% less)

Auto Fuel (Gas) -$300
What surprises me about this is that MH hasn't gotten gas since April 1. ??? Though he drove to work every day in May!? I expect he probably only drove to work 3 days per week (used electric car the days I worked from home) and his commute is only 3 miles each way. It makes sense. Usually he does a lot more trips back and forth dropping off and picking up kids. It may be a very short commute, but it is a lot of back and forth. This is not just a short term gain. This will be our reality very soon, once both kids are self sufficient drivers. I honestly don't know how much we will be even driving DL(14) to school this next school year. No doubt this will save a lot of wear and tear on our gas car (more of the bigger "annual savings" that I was envisioning). Current school plan for DL is to only have to be on campus 2 days per week, and they are expecting to (realistically) be closed one quarter during peak flu season. He turns 15 next week, so we get off easy during our last year of "driving kids around".

Groceries +$600
Up $200/month since pandemic, which makes sense.
Offset by spending $250 less on school lunches

Honestly, I am surprised that's it. It feels like our grocery spending is completely absurd. I think this is offset by a lot of "doing without and making do".

**Fuel/Food spending ends up being a wash**

Vacation Spending -$2,700
$2,700 was our entire 2019 spending (spent during the first half of 2019). I expect to spend -$0- this year.

Edited to add: Our annual family camp trip was canceled. 😞 We have decided to go to the family cabin for a weekend, near Tahoe. It's awful that we don't remember the last time we took the kids there. They are excited about it. No firm plans yet, but probably some time this month. It won't take much planning. It's in the same vicinity as camp, so we figured it was the next best thing. Cost to us will be: -$0-. Maybe $5 for fuel to get there and back. I am not going to bother recording that $5 under the "vacation" category. 😉

Medical Expenses -$6,600
Last year we had spent $4k on braces and we usually max out our medical deductible on MH's MRIs. I think in this case he is just not due for an MRI yet, but I also expect they may be pushing off less "medically necessary" appointments.

Other Expenses ~ Breakeven

Net worth and assets are stagnant. Which is better than I hoped for a few months ago.

I was doing some financial chores this morning and was looking at our total expenses for 2019.

One thing that stood out was our decreased car spending. I am long overdue for an update.

We purchased a plug-in hybrid in Fall 2019 when I changed jobs. Was a purchase we were probably going to do anyway, but the math changed substantially when I doubled my commute. I expect most of our "it's cheaper just to keep the old minivan we don't want" was due to how little we drove in the first place. I was scheming for many many years to replace. First, just doing a lateral change, and later wanting to buy an electric car. At the end it was 13-years-old and it was time to move on. But the math just never made any sense, and then suddenly it did make sense.

Which reminds me, we are comparing 8 months of gas minivan versus 12 months of hybrid car. I wasn't even thinking of that at first. Makes the numbers more astounding.

2019: $370 Electric fuel for hybrid
This pretty much covers my commute and small weekend trips. + any small errands in the evenings. Rounds out to $30/month. My commute is 200 miles per week.

The same commute would have cost $2,000 per year in minivan fuel. The savings is no small beans.

{We try to do *any* city driving in this car, because the fuel costs pennies in stop-and-go. This is why we also use this car for most night and weekend driving}.

2019: $270 Gas fuel for hybrid
This would just be Bay Area trips. Presume we did 20 trips, that would be about $13.50 per trip. Also substantial savings here. We can do part of the trip on electric, and the car gets about 45mpg on the gas engine.

2018 (8 months): $900 fuel spent on minivan

So I saved $260. Big whoop? Saved $700 when you adjust for a full year of minivan fuel.

Nope. Actually, we drove the minivan as little as possible. It was *mostly* my commute vehicle, but lord knows I drove our gas sipper whenever I could. The few months MH doesn't work, whenever I had to drive somewhere else during the day or needed to park in a small parking lot, etc.

2018 Gas sipper Fuel: $1,563
2019 Gas sipper Fuel: $ 820

Saved $743 on that car too. So we are back to *substantial* gas savings. Even though I *doubled* my commute. Did I mention that part?

Total fuel savings: $1,443, or $120 per month.

The hard part that is hard to carve out of this is MM(16)'s driving. We did pay for his fuel the first half of 2019 and added $166 fuel to our expenses for third car (plus I am sure he drove our cars a lot while he was still learning). But anyway, he was on his own the second half of 2019 and I am sure that also decreased our fuel costs somewhat.

Conclusion: Teen Driver + electric car = significantly reduced fuel costs.

Oh, and the other thing. MH only does city driving during the week, his commute and taking kids to school. So his car is only getting 25mpg or something horrific right now. UGH! I can no longer call that car the "gas sipper". It seems silly that I ever called it that. It does get 40mpg on the freeway and is why I called it that.

Which leads to the next couple of things.

REPAIRS
We had a lucky year on the car repair front. Very Very lucky. It was or first year as a 3-car family and we probably had a record year for car repairs (almost nothing).

Hybrid car is supposed to be very very low maintenance. Night and day compared to a large gas powered vehicle. It's also a much newer vehicle and will be under warranty for a while.

2019 Repairs: -$0-
BONUS: Oil change only once every 2 years; not due for another 9 months.

MM(16) is driving his car about 200 miles per month. Thought it's a 17-year-old car, low-miles driving keeps the costs down.

2019 Repairs: -$0-
BONUS: Mechanic told us to skip 6-month oil change this year because car was driven so little. (Basically, refused to change the oil when we took it in, because did not need). He may have an oil change this month.

MH car 2019 Repairs: $385
New battery, charge A/C, oil changes, replace windshield wipers, replace brake lights.

I had actually decided to just leave our "forever car repair" budget of $1,500 per year, even though we added a third car. Didn't have any room to increase that in the first place. But just let it go because I figured 2 new cars + one really old car would even out. Most years it's been a little more lopsided where we might have a 5yo car and a 15yo car. Now we have a couple of newer cars (don't expect much in repairs first 10 years) and we have a really old car. This year clearly worked out very well, but I feel like we were also just lucky. There is always something. Even on newer cars, tired need replacing, etc.

& finally, our plan to buy a second hybrid car...

Wish list: Want to buy a second Volt. We are *that* happy with the car. Somewhat of a lateral trade, with MH's vehicle. Actually, 100% lateral trade, if you factor the money we have saved (for 5 years) to eventually replace his car. Would be more short term cash outflow, but big picture/long-term wouldn't be spending more money than we would otherwise. The only thing I can come up with is we pay extra sales tax with more frequent car trading. Which would be very easily offset by fuel savings in this situation. So maybe some of why it feels so *shrugs* financially.

Last we discussed, we are considering a second Volt or an all-electric Bolt. We haven't test drove the Bolt yet, but it seems nearly identical in many respects.

For the short run, the all-electric Bolt is a no brainer. It would more than cover all of MH's city driving and save us a bajillion (more) dollars in fuel. It also has a decent enough range for our frequent trips to Bay Area. My only hesitation is that it would be such a short term purchase. MH has been looking for work (who knows where he may end up commuting to). DL(14) only needs a ride to school for 1.5 years at this point?

We last left it that we should wait one more year. It may make more sense to gift or sell MH's old car to MM(16) if he needs it for college. That is the other big question mark right now. No idea if he will need a car for college or not. (The car he has now is shared with his brother, so it stays here when he goes off to college).

It seems moot. We spent so much of our cash on this first Volt. In this case, we are looking in the $15k range (what we had spent on our last few vehicles). The Bolts seem to be losing value faster and more in our price range. The longer we wait the cheaper this car will be. I also still have hesitation about owning two identical cars. If any problems do crop up then it's problems x2. It's just so against my nature to put all our eggs in one basket so it weirds me out a bit. For these reasons, we may go all-electric. Get a slightly different vehicle, even if it is mostly the same. For MH's commute (a few miles per day, 8 months of the year) it would really cost pennies to run that car. It won't be anywhere near the $30/month I am spending on electric fuel. The all-electric is also even more low maintenance. I really do expect to significantly decrease our fuel costs for the long run.

If MM(16) does end up needing our car and we just give it to him, I suppose this also significantly increases the amount of cash we need to come up with to buy this newer vehicle. It should be a lot more clear next fall and that gives us time to save up the cash.

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.

Total miles driven last month on new electric/hybrid car: 1,769

A small improvement; was 2,000 miles last month.

Out of town trips:
--MH drove about 100 miles (on gas) to do some political canvassing before the election
--Bay Area for Thanksgiving (200 miles on gas)
--Bay Area for a book signing (100 miles on gas)

Probably a pretty average month for us.

I remembered to track miles on our gas vehicle this past month; we drove about 550 miles. That was pretty typical for how much I was driving the minivan. Same kind of situation where we favored the gas sipper when we had a gas guzzler, but I feel like we are favoring the electric vehicle even more. If we were driving 4 miles round trip to get groceries before, meh. Who cares if you took the van or the car? But, now all the short trips we do on electric if at all possible.

This comes up to an average of about 28,000 miles per year, total household driving. I'd say we were putting 20,000-ish miles per year on our cars, but have added 5,000 miles per year in commute miles. So I think that sounds about right. The 20,000 was "ish". We don't always do so much out of town driving.

For context, this was from my post last month:

We drove the car 2,000 miles total. UGH! I don't have a handle on total household driving because I didn't track miles on the other car. For November 1, I made sure to take a picture of both odometers. We generally average about 20,000 miles per year total. How we divvy it up between the cars just depends. But this was before I doubled my commute. For the long run, I expect to work from home one day per week, to lessen the wear and tear on our cars. October was clearly unusual with *a lot* of out-of-town driving. But there was also an element that we barely drove the other car.

Back to November...

Electricity costs: $34.23

1,302 Electric Miles Driven

418 kWh Used x $0.0819/kWh = $34.23

{418 kWh overnight electricity usage, per electric bill. This is the easiest/best approximation of how much electricity we are using to charge the car}.

Fuel Savings: $207

1,302 Miles/ 20mpg old minivan
=65 gallons of fuel

65 gallons x $3.18 = $207

$207 cost of commute in old minivan
-$34 cost of commute in new electric car
-----
=$173 FUEL SAVINGS

For now, I am focused on tracking the fuel savings to offset the cost of the fast charger we installed in our garage. Once that is paid for, I would like to offset the premium we paid for the car.



I am just going to call it. The charger has paid for itself. Woohoo! We apparently received a $400-ish break on our DMV registration, with the car. I thought it was a mistake and had been waiting for the bill. But for now, will just call it a day and will consider the charger paid for.

Last Saturday we were able to get some free charging. MH sat at the free charger while waiting for MM(15) at his volunteer shift. It covers one-way on the 21-mile drive.

We also went to the Symphony last weekend. We had planned to get "free charging" in the garage, but went a little early for dinner and there was free parking everywhere. We chose to save $4-ish and take the free parking instead. Our city (downtown area) has free parking night and weekends for the month of December? But I didn't expect it to be so completely abandoned on a Saturday night. Of course, maybe just lord knows where everyone parked, because the restaurant that we went to was jam packed.

In the middle of the month, winter started to arrive, and did a number on the car battery. I had been forewarned (belong to some online group) but ignored all the "Cold + car battery" stuff, figuring we don't have COLD here. Unfortunately below 50F degrees, you lose a lot of range. I don't know if there is much difference between that and like 0F degrees, because seems plenty of people are happy with their Volts in cold and snowy regions.

In the end, this happened around mid-month and I haven't noticed any changes to our costs, but December will be much colder and I will have a whole month of "cold weather" data to report. Most days I have been able to eke out my commute on the electricity. If I am using gas, it might be 1/10 of a gallon per day. (I think it got a little warmer, because I have not used gas all week).

This will be a morning problem. We have freezes overnight, but during the day it won't drop below 50F, generally. It probably helps to park in the sun and keep the battery on the warmer side. During summer, will do the opposite. I had always been more concerned about our hot summer weather. The heat is supposed to be worse as far as long-term battery degradation. Not much I can do about that, but will definitely be sure to park in the shade during summer.

The garage seems to be keeping the car about 30F degrees warmer than the outside, so maybe that helps with the cold and battery range.

In other news, GM is discontinuing the Volt as of next year. In the online group everyone was saying prices would drop at that point. I don't see why it would make such a big difference, but in the end, I guess this is driving people to not want to keep their cars. I don't *get* it, but whatever. We have talked seriously about buying a second Volt in about a year, before all this. Honestly, I don't expect prices to change much between now and then. But if they do, we will certainly take advantage.

{I think probably they mean more new prices, while I am only looking at used prices}.

It is sad. Americans love their gas guzzlers so much. I haven't seen any other cars quite like this. I was never thrilled with going all-in on electricity. Yes, it's cheap now, but you never know how that might change. I guess for the long run it might be we keep a gas car and an electric car? But I really like this whole "bets of both worlds" thing and haven't seen anything else quite like it.

I guess I should back up and say one reason we are considering buying the second Volt is we are going to run this one into the ground crazy fast, at this rate. Would rather spread over two cars that we can keep for 15 years each. (This car won't last 15 years if we do 90% of our driving on the one car). & MH has a new-ish car, so it would be more of a lateral(ish) trade. We just left it that we need to give it a year before we put all our eggs in one basket. Which is something we would probably never do otherwise, but the car is that amazing. & this also hinges on me getting like a really nice bonus next Christmas. I said it's lateral(ish) because we still would need to cough up some decent cash.

Costs and updates:

**I need to do some homework on the carpool stickers. Still have not had one reason to use them in the two + months we have had the car. I had heard a rumor if I renewed after this year that I could get 4-years of carpool stickers (for solo driver). I can't find anything about that and don't know if that is just a presumption. I don't want to lose out altogether. It would be three years if I apply now. I just have some homework to do. You never know when you might end up in a traffic jam or have a job change, etc., so I just want to maximize carpool benefits. Being prepared, as I like to do.

**The other thing I can't find *anywhere* is what on earth our car registration fees are supposed to be. ??? We paid something like $40 when we bought the car, and when they sent us the title it said "$40 paid" on the registration and/or title. I thought surely that wasn't right and expected to get a bill at some point.

I think it would be a fair assumption that the electric cars get a crazy break on this front, but I just can't find anything verifying this. On the online group I am in, everyone says they are still paying $300 or $400 or whatever to register and renew newer/expensive cars (same model; same state). So, I am confused. Am curious what the renewal will be next year.

**Fuel costs for December:

Electricity is still at about $1 per day, or $30 for the month.

We also drove out of town three times during December, so used a fair amount of gas.

Gas fuel spending was $26. I received a $10 work reimbursement (for driving 20 miles). This puts my net gas costs at $15 for the month, or about the same as last month.

When it got cold, my first thought was that my "reimbursements to self" for quick charger and car premium might take a little longer than I planned. But looking back at October, I think in the end it will be about the same. I saved about $225 in fuel costs?

When I get final electricity costs for November, I will share the details.

December and January are our coldest months, so will see how we fare during those months.

MH went out of town to do some political canvassing, yesterday. He was pleased with his gas mpg:



This is the spreadsheet I have been keeping to track fuel costs. I don't know if this sheet is ideal, but it's one I just found and copied. It worked in a pinch. I can tweak it later.


You can click on it to see the details more clearly.

We drove the car 2,000 miles total. UGH! I don't have a handle on total household driving because I didn't track miles on the other car. For November 1, I made sure to take a picture of both odometers. We generally average about 20,000 miles per year total. How we divvy it up between the cars just depends. But this was before I doubled my commute. For the long run, I expect to work from home one day per week, to lessen the wear and tear on our cars. October was clearly unusual with *a lot* of out-of-town driving. But there was also an element that we barely drove the other car.

{These cars are so under-advertised. We had *no idea* we could get 50mpg on the gas side of the car. We didn't expect this to also be our out-of-town car?
We just lucked out that we found a car with so low miles to start. I really didn't think we'd be piling on the miles this quickly}.

Electricity costs: $31.65

1,516 Miles Driven

386.4 kWh Used x $0.0819/kWh = $31.65

Fuel Savings: $226

1,516 Miles/ 20mpg old minivan
=76 gallons of fuel

76 gallons x $3.40 = $258

$258 cost of commute in old minivan
-$32 cost of commute in new electric car
-----
=$226 FUEL SAVINGS

NOTE: We were not spending that much on gas before because we bought the new electric vehicle at the same time I found a new job and doubled my old commute. But I do think it was somewhat critical to address our vehicle situation with the new commute. I also took a large pay cut, so the fuel savings is important.

Although my commute is HUGE compared to any frame of reference I have (I have never commuted more than 15 minutes?). I think it's a relatively small commute in the grand scheme of things. Isn't that gas savings mind boggling?? I think this is probably pretty average. It's probably pretty average that Americans drive gas guzzlers and would commute at least 20 miles each way.

For now, I am focused on tracking the fuel savings to offset the cost of the fast charger we installed in our garage. Once that is paid for, I would like to offset the premium we paid for the car. To be clear, we did not pay a premium because the car is electric. We paid a premium because it was a huge step up in car. We had saved $15,000 ($100 per month x 13 years) to replace the minivan. We ended up spending $22,000 + tax on this car (less sale of van), or $23,000 total cash out-of-pocket. I'd like to whittle down the extra $8,000 we paid with fuel cost savings. At this rate, we might breakeven in just 3 years. WOW! This wasn't really our intent with the car purchase. We had received a $15,000 completely unexpected cash gift that we decided to use towards buying a newer vehicle. I think it was more to the point that we felt I could buy my "dream car" with the extra money. I did not expect the fuel savings to be quite this substantial. I guess the substantial fuel savings is just icing on the cake!

$745 Cost of Fast Charger/Installation
-226 Fuel Savings October
-----
$519 Net Cost To-Date

It looks like we can get this charger "paid for" by the end of December.

NOTE: I am just ignoring gas fuel costs for simplicity. The Gas Fuel mpg comparison is 20mpg minivan versus 43mpg Volt. (I corrected my sheet after I posted it here). But the 43mpg is more in line with our other (gas) car, which is what we used to use for longer trips. So I don't know that we are seeing any fuel savings on longer trips or gas usage on the hybrid car. Will just track the smaller/electric trips, which is mostly my new commute.

I received my home gas bill and it was something like -$20 due to an energy credit. (They owe us $20). Our home is crazy energy efficient, though we have the more expensive private utility for our gas. So our bills average around $30 per month throughout the year. People all the time presume we have like $300/month heating bills in winter, if we have a larger home than they do. ??? I've never had the heart to tell anyone that is our bill for the entire YEAR. This is also one reason we would very seriously consider new construction again. We've been really spoiled by the low utility costs in this house. I'd describe it as more frugal energy efficient. Most of the energy savings was put into wrap and insulation. Not into things like solar (that cost a LOT of money).

Anyway, I saw the gas bill, so thought I'd check on our electricity usage for the month.

This was electricity usage pre-electric car:


This is electricity usage with overnight car charging (for lower electricity rates):


I was trying to figure out why our electricity was spiking so much more in the evenings on older bills, and I finally realized that was A/C. This second picture is more average electricity usage for us during the fall.

We can charge the car between midnight and 6am for cheaper electricity rates. There is a delay on the charger where you just set how many hours later you want to turn it on. Or you can set that up in your car. I think there's a way to set it up so that if the car knows it is at home it will always delay to midnight, or something like that. I suppose that is something we should figure out. But for now, I just usually set it to charge 8 hours later, when I get home around 4pm every day. Or sometimes if MH is going to run MM to gymnastics or something like that, I charge it until 5:00 and then unplug it. Is just enough charge to make a trip like that.

The summer rates are going to be INSANE during the week for 5pm-8pm, so we are just trying to get into that mindset/habit NOW. We have about 6 months to adjust. Mostly we are doing all the laundry on the weekends and making sure to charge the car at midnight.



I was really pleased to see this last summary pop up, when I logged in to electric company website today. It's going to be so easy to calculate the electric car costs.

For simplicity sake, will probably just use that '12am-6am usage' figure.

So, for this month we used 284 kWh so far, from 12am-6am. It looks like we used about 1.50 kWh per day, during those hours, before we bought the car, so gives us some kind of baseline usage. BUT we also sometimes top off a few miles on the car here and there during the day, so will just consider that to be a wash. Keeping it simple.

284 kWh x $0.0819 = $23.26

If this were the bill for the entire month, that is the number I am going to allocate every month to car fuel costs, instead of "house electricity".

Yesterday I drove 66 electric miles. That was around 50 miles with my (new) commute and dropping off MM at school. The rest was city driving; running errands and dropping off MM at gymnastic class.

I could have done all electric regardless, but it was nice to have the fast charge in between. (If I got home from work and plugged in for a couple of hours on the slow charger, I would have barely squeaked by with enough miles for evening errands).

Total electric fuel costs October 1: $1.36
**corrected after original post**

Cost to drive gas guzzling minivan 66 miles: $11.06

Fuel Savings: $9.70
**corrected**

There is no doubt we would have pulled the trigger on replacing the minivan, regardless. Might not have necessarily done it before I started my job and didn't have to go so "new" and expensive. Didn't even have to switch to an electric car. (Our other gas car is twice as fuel efficient as the minivan was). I am guessing this is a lot of why we have talked about the replacing the gas guzzler for so many years but was never quite able to pull the trigger. We just haven't had the financial incentive to. But wow, look at that financial incentive now!

It was crazy stupid how easy the "free car charge" was in the end. But admittedly, MH downloaded the app and set up the account. I told him just to put his login on my phone, since I was just going to be trying it out (later this week). For the long run, I should probably get my own account. Though maybe the one account is fine with the one car. If only one of us will be charging the car at any given time.

I think the difficult part of it all is finding good information. We thought for some reason there may be 1 or 2 chargers (per the app?), but in the end there were 6 chargers that were compatible with our car. This was in the cheapie garage we just happened to be parking at last night for the film festival we went to. (We'd park there regardless). We saw some other chargers on the way out but not sure what kind they were.

So we were happy to find that there were plenty of chargers.

Literally all I had to do was wave my phone in front of the charger. That's it. Didn't have to log into the app or do anything. I guess my phone had to be "on".

You wave your phone in front of the charger and it unlocks the charger for you:


So we plugged it in and went on our way:


These were the screen shots I took of the app (you can monitor progress from your phone).

Took this screen shot once we got settled in the theater, about 30 minutes later:


Took this screenshot at the end:


I suppose we are still paying (old) summer rates, so we are paying 13 cents per kWh, at home. 14.50 kWh x $0.13 = $1.89. So the free charge saved us $1.89.

Today was the first day I didn't stop anywhere on the way to/from work. (Not entirely true because I felt so terrible this morning, with the late night and maybe feeling a bit under the weather, I stopped for a soda. & I had no idea where to stop, so I may have driven 0.50-1.0 miles out of the way). But other than that, it was a pretty typical commute day for me. I dropped off MM(15) at school at 7am and then drove 22 miles to work. I suppose I can try again next week. I am not sure why it says 49.2 miles driven today. But this was the most true capture I've gotten of my commute, so will go with this for now.

These were the car stats once I returned home:


My drive to work today was totally free! The fuel part of it, anyway. I'd say we also had enough free charge to drive home last night.

It would be more electricity efficient if I drove in more traffic (because the brakes generate more electricity). This is an open freeway drive (all freeway/reverse commute).

I have about 2 gallons of gas in the gas tank. I don't think I have anything planned the next few days and so we probably don't have to rely at all on gas before we get our fast charger (at home). Will cross my fingers. Will probably just stick with the 2 gallons until we plan to drive out of town. We really plan to never really use gas around town once we have the benefit of the fast charger. Will charge about 5 times as fast. So we will have more time to re-fuel the electricity between drives.

It will be interesting to see how October shakes out. We will have fast charger + cheap winter electricity rates ($0.08 per kWh). Not only are the winter rates much cheaper, but we also get a discount on our overnight electricity usage because we notified our utility company that we are charging an electric car.

This week is shaping up to be pretty quiet. I had a few social things I was trying to plan, but everyone is being super flakey. Working folk! Today my plan is to nap in the morning and then will start hitting chores. I think just one or two days of that (chores) and I will start to feel a lot better. If I can feel like I am starting to move more forward than backwards... Still figuring out new car and probably will make October 1 more of a starting point for really tracking costs. Our electric company is in the process of shifting to different rates for peak times. We get to jump ahead to this new schedule with the electric car purchase (and will also get a discount for overnight electricity use). So of course I signed up the day we got the car. In the end, we looked more carefully at the schedule. Winter prices are mostly going down. We will have to change our habits a little bit though and avoid 5pm - 8pm during the week. Off the top of my head, that maybe went up a cent or two (per Kwh) during winter. Summer? Ugh. Electric rates more than doubled for 5pm-8pm. MH was just asking me if we were paying that now. Kind of told him, don't know, don't care. Have to power the car. It's just one more week until we can switch that to quick overnight charging? But he's kind of, "It's more than just the car. Laundry? Dishes?" Fair enough. So while he was asking me and I was looking something or other up on electric bill, I just decided to call. In the end, just more good luck on our part. We get to keep old/cheap summer rates through the end of this month. We switch to winter rates AND cheaper overnight rates starting when our bill closes, around October 1st. Anyway, I put the new electricity schedule up on the fridge. Will have to be more mindful of peak times. I think that is easy enough for us to work around. In the meantime, everything is just kind of chaos. We already drove new car 520 miles. Since Thursday 8pm. What in the heck!? We did drive 280-ish miles to/from the Bay Area. It was a 60 mile drive from the dealership. Everything else was more than usual. We probably both have mostly been driving new car. I did drive to my new work city and took MM to the animal shelter (both around 21 miles each way). I'd say this week should be way more calm, but MH has stuff going on every night. Will see how that ends up. Today I used 3 miles electric range to take MM to school. (It's 5 miles?) MH will be driving one round trip 6 miles, unless he gets off work early (probably) and has to go back to get kids later. He told me his free movie tonight is the movie theater in our neighborhood, so that may be another 6-ish miles. All electric for today. Tomorrow we might be able to squeeze out all electric. We are going to the movies a little further away, but might be able to start with a full battery if we don't drain it more today. Thursday is chaos. MH has a bit of a drive for paid medical study. I *just* got an e-mail from SF bff and I guess I never got back to her. Oops! Our plans are Thursday. She was waiting for me to reply. I will probably go visit her and then spend some time with my parents. Lots of driving. (Driving to the Bay Area twice in one week is not unusual at all for us, and where we hope to see some real fuel savings). After Thursday, I think we might be able to keep it all electric? Through the weekend? We have 60-ish miles of gas left in the car. I will try to remember to take note of mileage when we fill up. Dealership gave us a full tank of gas, to start. How did weekend driving go? Didn't get so much fuel efficiency on the long drive. MH was being such a backseat driver. Gah. It was the first time we had long enough to fully charge between trips. So we started with a full 53 mile electric range. I believe the car said 50 miles, and I wondered if we had been dumb to not see the full charge before we bought it. I kept it in electric mode during all the traffic we hit, and whenever we were on city streets. Not a lot of traffic or lights, but the range just kept going up more and more. I later read that 75 miles is pretty common/easy. I think in the end we ended up getting 57 miles, adding 7 miles for passing through a few bottlenecks on the freeway. (The braking generates more electricity). I guess the car does easily get 50mpg (on gas) on the open freeway, but we had never particularly seen this advertised. They advertise the combined freeway/city rating of 43mpg. We did go over some hills. That was when MH was driving me nuts with his backseat driving. I had it on gas mode on the hills (which was maybe a mistake) but it was *amazing*. It gets a little electric boost and that was actually pretty awesome. I usually drive pretty slow on the big hills, not wanting to gun the engine too much. I think that trip ended up being closer to 42mpg on the fuel side. I think we can survive with that. This display shows our trip stats. I finally looked up what MPGe was. Wasn't entirely sure. In the end, the way it works is that 33.7 Kwh is considered to be equivalent to one gallon of gas. So it figures the electric mpg and the fuel mpg, and combines it together (combined MPGe is on the left). This is by far *not* the most fuel efficient the car has been, but that's just how it worked out on our big trip. We did try to conserve all the electric charge for the traffic and city driving. For reference, I believe our winter rates will be around $3 for 33.7 Kwh, or the equivalent of purchasing a gallon of gas. So the MPGe figures can be converted to fuel prices for a rough idea of what we are paying/saving. I am really going to track energy savings closely starting October 1 when it will be easier and more logical to track all of this. Edited to add: I looked at winter (overnight) rate and it was cheaper than I remembered. $0.0819 per Kwh. That means it (will) cost us $1.12 to drive 53.2 miles, starting October 1 (winter rates). & again, we can improve on that electric mile range if we drive very efficiently and driving conditions are favorable to the electric engine. It will be interesting to see how my commute shakes out (real world MPGe). I am starting to think that we can quickly recoup the cost of installing a charger in our garage. If my "twice as long commute" only costs $1 per day. Maybe just 6 months to recoup the charger install in our garage?

I've personally never had a pristine vehicle. When I bought the minivan (1-year-new/excellent condition) it was hit the day after I bought it (hit and run, while parked). The damage was cosmetic only and so we chose to never repair it. My first car had been hit more times than I remember. Anyway, over time, I just embraced it. It's hard to feel much motivation towards something really pretty and nice (and expensive), when it's out in the world getting beat up anyway. Kind of funny now that I think about it. The van came into my life and went out with a bang. In contrast, MH's cars are never in accidents and have never had so much as a scratch.

To say I am a little nervous, is an under-statement. This vehicle replaces "my" car, even if it's all been very 50/50 since we have had kids.

In the end, when I asked for some pre-buying insurance quotes, insurance agent sent over some quotes with really low deductibles. Not sure why, because we have the largest deductible possible on everything. But in the end, it was so cheap that I decided to just go with it. I don't want to be worrying about spending another $1,000+ on a cosmetic repair if someone slams into my new car tomorrow. Was something like $150/$250 deductibles. I will just go with that for a while and then we can re-evaluate in 6-12 months.

I actually drove our older car to "new employer city" Friday to drop off my employment paperwork. Met "twin" briefly but she was slammed with her job. I had made more plans to have a very long/late lunch with her, and then kill some time before an afternoon meeting. Instead, I drove home in between. Car was making such bad noises that I took the Volt for trip #2. (Didn't really want to drive it in Friday traffic, but it ended up being okay). It's very counter-intuitive because the more city driving you do and the more you brake the more fuel efficiency you get (both gas and electric). I had enough electric charge to get there, but drove gas on the way home. I was dumbfounded that we still seem to be getting 50mpg. We really thought we would buy this car for shorter trips and then use the other one for longer trips. I am now thinking this is the car for any trip.

We have a long trip today! So, will see how that goes. It will be a good test, because we do drive out of town so much to see our family.

Oh, and that 50mpg was with, "No idea what we are doing" driving. After Friday? I had to drive MM(15) to the animal shelter yesterday (volunteer shift). Had enough electricity just to get there. I realized I should hold some electric charge for the few traffic lights between the freeway in our house (return trip). So I did do that. I guess that's the strategy at this point. I am sure we still have much to learn.

We did take out "electric car buff" friend for dinner last night, to pick his brain a bit. We knew he'd want to see it too. One of the most useful tips he told us was to only buy a gallon or two of gas at a time, unless you know you are going out of town. Otherwise the gas can get stale.

Oh, and we can save $250-ish buying a fast charger at Costco. We may do that today (with one of our parent's memberships). We are probably going to be moving quick on that (versus my initial presumption that there would be no rush). The reason is we will get much lower electric rates if we can limit charging between midnight and 6am. Also, the slow charge is supposed to be 12 hours but we are finding it is more like 20 hours (to full charge). It may be we can increase it a bit, but my dad (who has a lot of electrical knowledge) was away and unreachable. We have such a new home (modern wiring) I didn't think it would really matter, but he told me yesterday he would not increase the charging speed without consulting an electrician. It's a question we will ask tomorrow, we have one coming out for a quote. It may just be my dad is being cautious, since everyone is kind of, "It should only take 12 hours". There is a setting we didn't change in the car, for faster charging with a regular outlet, because it had a scary warning.

As to electric car buff, I think he is a lot of the reason we ended up going the "electric car" route. My visceral reaction was more definitely, "No way." But the more he talked about it, the more he swayed us. He initially had a lease for an all electric car that cost pennies. At that time it was his only car, but he had free parking at his job downtown, in turn. Which entirely paid for the lease (which was heavily subsidized with tax credits and so on). Then he also didn't have fuel expenses. He was just kind of, "You have two cars? Do you REALLY need two cars that can drive 300 miles?" Honestly and truly? No. So I think at that point in time there was some realization that an electric car would be very practical for MH's mostly 6-mile round trips, all city driving. If he could have convinced us sooner, honestly we probably could have leased for $100/month (where we live). It took me too long (years) to decide that was kind of "almost too good to be true." But by then, those deals were long gone. Other than that, I'd say we are very range picky, because we do spend so much time driving to see family/friends around 120 miles away. But I do also realize that we never in a million years would need two cars to do that. (& in the rare instance it does happen, it's not like there aren't any other options).

I think one thing I also like is this whole idea of skipping the chore of getting gas. I really try to limit how much time I spend on errands and the such. & that was also another thing that really appealed about going electric (if you can just charge mostly at home; maybe also wherever you happen to be).

Anyway, this is one reason I want to share so much of the process as we dive in. If anyone can get anything at all out of me sharing information they maybe never considered.

In other randomness, MH fount out yesterday he can play movies in the car, like on the main display. He was totally freaking out with excitement. It's actually kind of funny because I told him I just left the car on the entire time I waited for MM at the animal shelter yesterday (2 hours) and MH was completely horrified. Not sure the thought would have occurred to me otherwise, but was thought to TABS and his car-living experience. I will say that will be *so nice* during our hot summers when I can just sit in the car with the A/C. It just hit me that it's not the same as idling a regular car for two hours. Absolutely nothing like that! Best I can tell, I lost one mile of driving charge. Anyway, in the end, I think MH Will follow my lead. You can't watch the movies while the car is out of park, but point is that we sit around a lot waiting for kids. So yeah, I think MH changed his tune already on that front.

We haven't done very well finding free or very low cost places to charge the car. It will take some research. But MH found a free charger right by the animal shelter. WOW! Before I took new job, that was our "big" drive. Is about 21 miles each way, and feels crazy far away. We believe we can get free electricity one way, every trip, if I can just sit and charge at this charger for 2 hours. The vast majority of the time, I just sit in the car and wait for anyway. Is just hard to do that in the middle of summer. Then I end up running errands (for the A/C!) and usually spending more money. So I am guessing this is money saved in multiple ways. We are going to check it out next time.

I don't remember how or why this even came up, but I am probably going to get the windows tinted next week. Maybe saw some car post online or something. It sounds like it will be $150-ish to do the back windows (which is all we can do legally) at a place near my old job with all 5-star reviews. I may just go over there Friday morning and then pick up my paycheck on the way home. (It's payday and is when I expect to get my final check). This car would look so nice with tinted windows, but is also would be very practical in our very hot summers. I think MH thinks I have lost my mind, but he is sensitive to the sun and I think that he will thank me when all is said and done. I just think it would be a really nice and affordable finishing touch.

Oh, and I may have found a $500 rebate for car purchase. I added that to my list of things to do when we get the plates and registration.

I will definitely be tracking and blogging about actual fuel/electricity costs. The bar to beat is set pretty low at this point because we replaced a gas guzzling minivan. The goal is to lower our fuel costs (gas & electricity) with the doubling of my work commute.

We drove about 60 miles to a dealership to look at my pearly white "dream car". In the end, it was a little scraped up and just wasn't the "one".

But... there had been a couple of cars in Napa (near where we were). At this point the blue was looking better and better, and we started talking about having a nice dinner in Napa. I was relaxing and starting to feel much better. I just needed a nice "date" with my hubby.

On the way to the Napa dealership, I was trying to refresh my memory how long these cars had been sitting, for negotiations. & checking the carfax, etc. In the end, I didn't really remember any of these cars? I had looked them up before. But minutes before we got to the dealership I see the white one was a bit of a lemon (how did I miss that before??). & then there was a grey one that was one year newer, had all sorts of premium features, only had 14,000 miles, and was priced *very* well. How did I miss this one before? What in the heck!?

MH told me he liked grey better anyway. This is the first one he is really open to talking about post blue car. I told him, I just didn't know. But that maybe I'd like blue better than grey. We just have to see it in person. We both agreed though that we'd buy this grey car even if they wouldn't come down in price. If it came to that. It hadn't been sitting too long, but had sat long enough that they had just dropped the price by 10%.

So we get to Napa dealership and they show us the lemon car. We are really intrigued by grey car at this point, but they told us literally someone just walked into the office to buy it. We were maybe 15 minutes too late. Bummer! At this point, I Was feeling maybe the blue one was "meant to be". Not that we were going to buy it last night, but just where I thought things seemed to be heading. The grey one was clearly not meant to be.

MH was joking and asks, "How often do these things fall through?" I said, "Who knows, maybe they won't be able to secure financing." & I was totally serious. The woman who was covering for the busy sales people told us she'd get her card and we would call back the next day. We went with that just because who knows, but I didn't really think we'd drive out an hour again the next day (in the offchance this deal actually fell through) just to have this potentially happen again. Anyway, the grey Volt was parked right next to where we had parked and so we were really giving it a good once over while she got her business card. I felt a little silly knowing this car was essentially someone else's car now. Like, you don't go up to someone's car and start peering inside and checking it all out. But I *really* liked the color in the end. Surprisingly so. It's more of a metallic dark silver? I don't even know that I have even noticed/seen this color on this car before.

Between waiting for the business card and looking over the car, we ended up dilly dallying for a while. We were just kind of resignedly getting back into our cars when this woman runs back out and says, "Wait! They don't want the car!"

Some part of me right now is just like, "Seriously? Does every little thing in my life have to be a complete roller coaster right now?" But I will admit we have a fun story to share to go along with the most elaborate car we have ever bought. HA!

& I was absolutely horrified how much we had just drooled over the car. But I think it was moot because we were already okay with the price. Also, the first thing the salesman tells us is that they had just dropped the price $2k, and the people had said they wanted the car at that price and then later after paperwork was started they wanted to drop off $500. They said no, and they were really pissy about it. Dealership was pissy about how late in the process they decided to negotiate. It might also be because we were outside drooling over the car.

{In the end, the car was $2k below kbb, or more in line with private party pricing}.

BTW, salesman was so nice. The most pleasant car buying experience of our lives. By a mile. & I don't mean because we bought up so significantly, but because he didn't tell us infinite lies and it was pretty clear to us all along (before we got there) that there would be no wiggle room on price.

& so that is how we found our car! 2017 Chevy Volt (Plug-In Hybrid)

We did score low miles and premium sound, plus some extra luxuries. We had also learned very quickly in the car shopping process that the carpool lane stickers on these cars were all expiring December of this year. Not a huge deal because neither of us drive in traffic 99% of the time. For whatever reason, at some point while looking at this car, I thought to check the stickers because it was one year newer than all the other cars we had looked at. I wasn't expecting much because most likely they were going to expire this year too. But, there were no stickers?? Unbelievable! In the end, no one ever applied for them (prior owner?) and so we get to use the carpool lane solo for the next 3+ years. (Because we can apply for the new round of carpool stickers). This car just had a lot of little perks like that. (This is one of the things they should be advertising, but you just have to figure out on your own that it's a really good deal).

The actual purchase ended up taking so long (they were having a very busy week day), that the kids were asleep by the time we got home. I just told them over the phone that the 2005 basic minivan may as well be a horse and buggy and this car is a spaceship. We have always experienced significant upgrades because since around age 25+ we have always bought one-year-old cars and replaced cars that are 15-20 years old. But this one most definitely takes the cake. & we definitely paid the premium. Car ended up being $22,000, or about $9,000 more than we have ever spent on a car. But I just feel so at peace with it because of all the times we both were so incredibly frugal with our cars. & also, it most definitely feels like the premium was worth it as to everything we are getting with this car.

Instead of dinner and wine at a fancy restaurant, we stopped at Taco Bell around 8:30pm. HA! & MH ordered a bigger dinner and wanted to figure out more of the settings on the car. I just "ate and ran" because I didn't want to drive home too tired. Was past my bedtime by this point. (No way I was driving the brand new car home, tired and in the dark, through an area I do not know well).

Car logistics...

In the interim, we can just plug into our regular garage outlet and it will fully charge in about 12 hours. I already registered the vehicle with our electric company for reduced electricity rates. Will see how the electric costs sort out. (I've researched that but just don't remember off the top of my head). Our electricity is provided cheaply by a city/non-profit utility and is all green energy.

It may cost $1,000-ish (maybe less, but just rounding up generously) to install a fast charger in our garage that will charge the car in 4 hours. There is absolutely no rush on this front.

For whatever reason, the insurance was pretty cheap (which was the opposite of what I had heard and expected). That was another deciding factor. This is technically "my" car as to this is what replaced my car that I brought into the marriage. Post kids, our cars are very 50/50 though. We had a minivan and a small compact car, and it just depends on the day who needs what. We are going to fight over this car like crazy!

Back to the electricity logistics... The electric range is 53 miles. You can choose to just run the gas engine instead. Or, it will just switch automatically to gas when you run out of charge.

The car is *so quiet* which is also a factor we heavily considered with MH's disability. Definitely willing to spend more on quieter cars.

The car is probably most practical as to MH's endless city driving (driving 3 miles each way to work and to pick up kids). We would never have to put gas in this vehicle, and so gives us the chance to test out life with an "100% electric vehicle" mindset. BUT, we bought this car also with my commute in mind. I just went from 11 to 22 miles (each way). I can go roundtrip every day on the electric, easy peasy.

I think MH mostly concedes that the gas savings is more important at this point with the pay cut I took with my new job. But I am certainly not going to hog it completely to myself. We will find a way to share. It's still going to be a 50/50 car. Gas car will make more sense for longer trips or when the four of us want to go somewhere (because it is much more roomy in the backseat).

Some final thoughts:

We really almost pulled the trigger on something maybe even more expensive in the spring. I was really really unhappy at that point in time (with work situation and everything else). At that point in time, I had no idea how work situation would sort out. At some point I recognized very logically that this was just *stupid*. I *knew* that buying an expensive car was not going to make me any happier. & in fact would just add more stress that I didn't need (draining so much of our cash reserves on a car. Or alternatively, adding a monthly bill right before I knew I would be taking a significant pay cut). Logic won. But the feelings were very real.

I am happy to say that I feel the complete polar opposite today. Because we are both so financially conservative, there is definitely an element that this feels very wild and rash. But, I also know that I am mostly making a sound and logical decision. I think most importantly, this purchase isn't being made around those feelings of unhappiness.

If you hadn't picked up on it, we paid cash. We did not purchase any extras. Just car, sales tax, license fee. My parents gave us a cash gift and we had also already saved $15,000 (over 13 years) to replace minivan. So we still have some excess cash to sort through once my employment situation levels out. For now, still hoarding the excess until I feel out the new job.

So... What a week! New car and new job. So much excitement. I think we were long overdue for some happy news. So I am kind of riding the wave of fun and excitement right now. We were going to be in the Bay Area this weekend for the Beach Boys concert. So we will drive it down and show it off to our parents this weekend.

In-laws are gifting their old car to MM(15). End of this year. They are looking at hybrids and so on, to replace that car, and I think we may push them to buy this car. They are being so *cheap*. I honestly wish they'd keep the cash gifts the usually give us and put that extra $5k or $10k to a car like this. Our goal is to get them to make the splurge at 70 that we did at 40. Life is short. & I think that can be a very dumb justification in most cases. But when you are 70 and are beyond financially comfortable... I know they would absolutely love this car! One of their siblings inherited some money recently and bought a Tesla. Maybe we will sway them. We can sell this as the poor man's Tesla?

Edited to add: Our electricity is estimated to cost about $500 per year to power our new vehicle (based on miles driven, presuming it's all electric driving). This is a very personal estimate based on our actual electric usage and rates (including the doubling of my old commute). Since we drove so much the past two days without a full charge, we've used about a gallon of gas. Roughly, one gallon to drive about 50 miles. I am a little blown away since I think official numbers are more like 40mpg, or same as our other car. Will test out on a longer drive (250 miles) this weekend.

We ended up pulling the trigger yesterday.

To be clear, we are replacing a 2005 minivan. Though it's the newest car we have ever ditched, we just aren't "big car" people and have been scheming to ditch the van most the years I have blogged here. Early on it had been more of a plan to make a lateral car change (which we have certainly done in the past, no big deal). I'd say last time we almost pulled the trigger I was surprised how "in demand" older used cars were. In the farther past, I've generally been the only contender with private parties. In this case, I laughed (to myself) when some guy tried to say he had lots of interested buyers, but it ended up being the truth! So the cars were just being sold much faster than we wanted to act, and we probably had other reservations too. I think around the 10 year mark of owning the van (2016) we decided we were done and ready to just move on to our next "new-to-us" big car upgrade. We had agreed around that point to not put any big repairs into the van. I share just to be clear this is not a whim purchase.

This is one reason I really like paying cash for cars. (It's never the reasons everyone actually assumes). There's been significant upside and savings to just waiting. We've never paid more than $13,000 for a vehicle before, and those were the "big purchases." (The one we bought a few years ago and the minivan). Everything before that was $500 - $5,000. Way too easy to spend too much money when you start justifying the loans. & I say this age 16-40. At 40+, it was maybe a little too easy to spend the money with cash, but I still had to be comfortable writing the check. If I could only justify it by financing the last few thousand dollars? I knew we'd be stretching way too far.

Mostly where we were at before van had problems this week was that we had settled on buying an electric car and probably a Chevy Volt. The Volt is an electric plug-in but is also a gas powered car. So it's the best of both worlds. I think this is going to be a really good in-between car as to transitioning to full electric. The technology is on such a fast curve right now that we were more envisioning paying $5k-$15k for a used one (and were pretty close to pulling the trigger this past year when we test drove some incredible deals). But in the end, every time it was like, "The van's fine. Let's just wait another year so we can double the electric range and get a car that practically drives itself anyway."

As I share more about the electric car ownership later, I will also have to share a Money Mustache post where I believe he bought a brand new Nissan Leaf (electric only) for $15,000-ish out of pocket. I just want to be clear that this is more along the lines what we were thinking. There are a lot of incentives in our state too, and a healthy supply of very low priced used electric vehicles. It was never our plan to pay MSRP for a brand new hybrid or electric car. Most people will at least get a tax credit to offset the extra cost.

We've personally never considered the "new" route too seriously because we don't have enough income to be able to utilize the credit. For example, you have to have at least $7,500 in income taxes to offset the $7,500 Federal tax credit. As of today, you can get $13,000 off of a new Nissan Leaf in our state with rebates and tax credits (I just saw our electric company is also offering a $3,000 rebate, which was news to me). & Money Mustache had also gotten substantial discounts from the dealer. I think $5,000 off for taking a car loan. I absolutely would have financed a vehicle to save $5,000.

For whatever reason we had zeroed in on the Volt. It's the best of both worlds. It's been my "dream car" for the past several years as to it's appearances alone, and is absolutely the polar opposite of how I would ever buy a car. It just turns out to be an exceptional car also. I would say this was the first time we bought a car as to what we really wanted. Versus always being happy in the past with whatever random deal we come across.

{In the end, used 2018 Toyota Corollas are flooding our market right now and are priced around $13,500. Unbelievable! This is precisely how we have always car shopped in the past: Open to whatever might cross our path. In this case, we looked at a couple but just felt very "meh" about it}.

We looked at a blue 2016 Volt Wednesday, that I think we could probably talk down to $19k (because it's blue). Certified pre-owned and totally immaculate. MH was really leaning towards this car. I was being a little wishy washy. After sleeping on it, I told him that if we were really going to pull the trigger on more of a "Dream car" I Wanted the pearly white.

So yesterday we scheduled to take a look at a few deals out of town. In the end, I was not feeling well and had no desire whatsoever to clean out the van while MH was at work (for trade-in). When MH got home he was really pushing (I was surprised) but I just wasn't feeling well and didn't care at that point. He finally suggested I take a nap. I didn't realize I'd have time for that, or otherwise maybe I would have napped earlier. It did help to lay down for maybe 1/2 hour. I think we had an hour before he had to get kids from school. MH was still really pushing because didn't want to go this weekend. (It would be crowded and we have had so much stuff going on every day this week). I finally caved (lord knows I was excited to look at pearly whites). I figured I was probably in a good mindset for car shopping anyway. I wasn't going to be overly excited about it.

Oh, and I had also talked MH into forgetting about the van. I am guessing we will most likely scrap it. I doubt we'd get more than $200 more in trade-in, and I didn't think it was likely we'd buy car yesterday. Driving the gas guzzlers 100+ miles to look at cars? When it's not in the best condition? Meh.

To be continued...