Electric Vehicles

Cool! The EV or the EUV?

The EV. These things are rarer than hen’s teeth. She would’ve rather had the EUV I think, but you just can’t find them. This one had been ordered by someone who then decided they didn’t want it, so she grabbed it. We have a kid driving now and needed a 3rd vehicle so this will be our “drive around town” car.

1 Like

The EUV is still on my radar for 2024. It has great reviews. The EV is well reviewed too, but it might just be a little too small for my liking. I’ll have to see them in person.

I hope it works well for you and look forward to future updates. A town runabout is where EVs excel.

Is Chevy going to install a Level 2 charger for you?

Chevy has killed the Bolt, both the EV and EUV. There will be no 2024 models, they will stop making them this year.

2023 Chevy Bolt EV and EUV Dead after This Year (caranddriver.com)

Thanks. Yeah I’d forgotten that the electrified Equinox and Blazer are coming next year.

Yes, that’s included. Not yet scheduled though, but will be soon.

1 Like

If you’re just running around town with it, you should be fine with the standard outlet charger in the short term. I’d be interested in how the Level 2 installation goes and how you fared without it. Also, please post your wifi password.

These are pretty common. EV drivers don’t pay the tax included in gas, so this is a way of collecting something from them.

I don’t have a problem with this. If EV drivers use public roads, they should share in the cost.

Agreed, although there is an element of a penalty to it.

The TX gas tax is 20¢ per gallon, so $200 is the equivalent of buying 1,000 gallons of gas. My current Tesla-sized, 4-cyl sedan has averaged 23mpg over the 3 years I’ve had it so, if/when I get an EV, I will be getting charged for 23,000 miles of driving when I actually do about a tenth of that.

Yeah, there’s no one size fits all to this. $200 is a bit high.

We’ve now had our Ioniq5 for a month and put about 1800 miles on it, including a 650 mile round trip to Santa Barabara from the SF Bay area.

On each leg of that trip, stopped 2x to recharge. Took about 15’ each time (Electrify America network, free for 2 years with the car). Finshed charging each time before the family was done using the restrooms.

In the Bay Area, with relatively small hills, we’re getting around 4mi/kwh, so just about the 304 mile range estimated for the car. With the bigger and longer hills around Santa Barbara, drops to about 2.5 mi/kwh, so range would be about 190 miles.

Driving electric has come a long way (at least in CA) since I got our Leaf 11 years ago. Will not be missing gas.

1 Like

There is an argument that EVs should pay more than regular cars as they are harder on roads because they’re heavier, and this is true. But $200 is clearly just a number they pulled out of Abbott’s ass.

Glad it’s working out for you.

Seems like there’s an opportunity to piggyback on the inspection system and charge a fee proportional to the number of miles put on the vehicle in the last year. They’re already filing your inspection result electronically, they could presumably file the current mileage, too (if they aren’t already).

1 Like

Agreed. The gas tax was a perfect way to charge people for usage, and it would be nice to get the same consideration for EVs.

My scheme probably falls down when a lot of your driving is in other states. A gas tax is better about that: that gas is going to get burned relatively close to where it was purchased. That suggests that we may eventually see road taxes tacked onto charging costs.

And I agree that users of the roads should help pay for some of the upkeep as well as the time lost to congestion. Changing to largely EVs will lead to re-evaluating how and who subsidizes what portions of our transportation infrastructure - including transit and rail.

I am a regular rider of the commuter buses from where I live into SF. The tolls I pay to cross the Golden Gate bridge subsidizes my bus fare.

There’s a lot of sense to that too, as it would catch mostly the roaming EVs. So you pay a mileage-based tax in your home state and a charging tax when you use roadside fast chargers.