Larry Chretien is the Executive Director for Mass Energy Consumers Alliance and People’s Power & Light. This blog is the third in a series about the Chretien family’s experience purchasing an electric car. Download our e-book and read the series up until now! 

 Narrowing It Down

The Chretien family has been looking hard at three possible choices – the Toyota Prius Plug-In, the Chevy Volt, and the Nissan Leaf.  We have found it both fascinating and frustrating to compare the pros and cons of each vehicle.  The reality is bringing an electric drivetrain into an automobile affordably with today’s technology is possible – all three choices are good ones – but there are clear tradeoffs. 

Before getting into a discussion about the tradeoffs, I want to emphasize a point.  By driving a plug-in vehicle and switching from gasoline to electricity, we can dramatically reduce carbon emissions per mile, about up to 60 percent using power supplied by your local utility.  A plug-in hybrid that runs part time on gasoline would reduce emissions by about 50%, which is still outstanding.  This is our primary motivation.  Given that climate scientists tell us that we need to reduce total carbon emissions 80% by 2050, it’s easy to see how important it is to shift to cars that plug-in, either totally or in part.   Using green power supplied by Mass Energy, we can drive a million miles on electricity with zero carbon emissions with an all-electric car like the Nissan Leaf.  Aside from the environmental benefits, we like the idea of running our car on power generated from wind turbines located here in New England rather than from oil drilled in Saudi Arabia or Texas.

So back to the tradeoffs we have found:

• Prius Plug-In:  Having owned two Prius hybrids before, we love the car.  It’s a reliable five-seater with good trunk space.  But it the plug-in only allows about 11 miles per charge.  That is very good, about 4000 miles per year, but the other cars do better.   And because the electric battery is small, it is eligible for lower state and federal rebates than the Volt or Leaf.

• Chevy Volt:  It gets 38 miles per charge and then is supported by gasoline.  It’s a comfortable car, but a four-seater with a small trunk.  It should allow us to run on electricity about 90% of the time before kicking in with gas.  The Volt’s battery is large enough to earn the same incentives as the Nissan Leaf.

• Nissan Leaf:  It is all-electric, which means that there is no gasoline power.  It’s a comfortable five-seater with good trunk space, similar to the Prius.  It gets the largest federal and state incentives – a $7500 federal tax credit and a $2500 state rebate.

Bringing In the (Online) Experts

We looked at the True Cost to Own calculator by Edmunds.com and saw that the Volt and Leaf were the least expensive of the three because they earned the higher incentive and because it costs less to run a car on electricity than gasoline (both fuel and maintenance).

We have also gone through the state’s website for electric vehicle rebates.  It has a lot of good information about the rebates and the technology.  We found out there are websites and apps that will show us the locations of EV charging stations.  One example is from the US Department of Energy.  This will be a very handy tool once we buy.

We’re still thinking it all through and hope to make a decision by the end of July.  Any thoughts?