Around a year ago I didn't really know anything about EV's. My wife's minivan had 90K miles and was losing coolant, but not dripping, so we traded it in and took the EV incentive right before it expired to get a plug-in hybrid. She gets 32 miles of battery range every day so her fill-ups went from every week to every month outside of road trips. That was the tipping point for me, where I went from looking at something like a Maverick to an EV. My daughter turns 16 soon, and my old car is 13 years old, so my plan was always to get something for myself and give her my old car.
The second half of this year was supposed to be the used EV apocalypse, with thousands of EV's coming off of 2-3 year leases and flooding the market to lower costs. Thanks to high gas prices, prices have kept going up all year. I had been keeping an eye on the market and ended up falling down a rabbit hole learning about the Fisker Ocean after seeing a bunch of them at a dealer over in Toledo. There were a million reasons not to get an Ocean, but I pulled the trigger back in May and love it so far. My endgame is for the Ocean to hold out long enough for the new Ford Fathom to come out and get some miles under it. I really like the idea of used EV's since a healthy modern EV battery should last hundreds of thousands of miles, so if it's healthy after 50K miles, it should be good to go. In the rare event they fail, it should happen pretty quickly, but they all (outside of the Ocean) have 8-year, 100K-mile warranties on the batteries.
For anyone who can semi-easily get a 240V line in their garage, the cost savings are huge. I had already run a 240V line to my garage for my generator so I just had to get a charger. I wouldn't recommend an EV for anyone who would have to rely on public charging. Having to spend an extra hour charging on a road trip once or twice a year is a fraction of my time saved by starting out every morning with a full charge. This summer my son had a tournament in Detroit. I left with a full charge, and the hotel had free charging, so all my travel and return were free. I've only used a fast charger once, just to make sure that it worked, because you have to do that with an Ocean.
The EV tech coming out of China right now is crazy. It's already making it to every place other than the US, which won't last forever. Cheaper, full charge in 10 minutes, more range, minimal cold weather range loss, etc. In 5 years EV's will cost less than ICE cars, and most of the things that keep people out of EV's will go away. My guess is it will be hard to buy an ICE car in 10 years. I think Ford gets it with their UEV platform, but if the Chinese EV's make it into the US with less than a 50% tariff, the Big 3 will have a hard time staying in business unless they get their asses in gear.
