For rural drivers, electric vehicles (EV) can cost as little as 1.5 cents/mile, compared to 20 cents/mile for gas cars, according to Steve Gutmann, co-founder of EVmath, which crunches the cost/mile numbers to demonstrate the economic benefits of driving EVs in rural and other areas.
Listen to Gutmann, along with Robert Wallace, an EV convert who works with rural small businesses in Oregon at Wy’East, explain:
Here’s how Gutmann worked the numbers:
A gasoline car that gets 25 miles/gallon (MPG) at $5/gallon costs 20 cents/mile to drive.
An electric vehicle (EV) that gets 4 miles/kWh at $0.06 per kW–the cost in parts of Wasco County, Ore.–costs 1.5 cents/mile.
“Your electricity prices might be a quite a bit higher than 6 cents/kWh, but if you’re in the Pacific Northwest and you mostly charge your car at home overnight, you’ll almost always pay a lot less per mile to drive an EV than a gas car,” he explained in a LinkedIn Post after our podcast interview.
“And I haven’t verified this with anyone, but I recently heard that electricity costs only $0.02/kWh in Chelan, Wash. If that’s true, and you get an efficient EV that goes 4 miles on a kWh, you’ll be driving for a half a cent per mile!”
Readers can calculate their own fuel savings with the EVmath calculator.
During the podcast interview, Wallace pointed to another cost savings: avoiding oil changes.
Wallace replaced his diesel pickup with an EV, eliminating $300-$500 oil changes that generally are required four to five times a year.
In rural areas, bidirectional EVs–which are capable of using their batteries to charge homes, electri appliances or send power to the grid–can provide numerous advantages, Wallace said. The most well-known bidirectional EV is the Ford-150 Lightnng. He’s seen them used to charge pizza ovens, small water pumps, fans or other vehicles.
During the interview, Gutmann pointed out that used EVs are now about the same price as used gasoline cars. It’s possible to get a used Tesla in the $15,000 to $25,000 range, and that doesn’t include the federal investment tax credit (ITC) or EVs that’s now being phased out by the Trump administration. Even without the ITC, EVs can pencil out.
You can listen to the interview on Apple Podcasts here.