FYI: I just got an ElectWay CCS1 to CHAdeMO adapter from AliBaba and it works great. It's pricy but better than buying a new car, especially since I love my Leaf. Using this adapter, I have charged at starting peak of 76 kW at an Electrify America. Apple Green (both are 350 kW CCS capable charging stations) and at a Flo (50 kW charging station) too. All three worked perfectly to charge my 2024 Nissan Leaf SV Plus, to SOC=95%. I will be trying other charing network charging stations soon. Next ones to try are EVgo and ShellRecharge.

Not sure how I ended up here, but I really enjoyed your video. It’s a real world problem and it’s similar to mine in that during our typical longer trip to the in-laws, the range needed is quite tight. The first thing I thought about when I saw your video is that you could probably drop by 5 to 10 miles an hour on your highway driving and make up all the difference, because the one thing that Kia Niro has going for it is amazing.efficiency. The other thing I thought was that there should be new chargers, going in soon, and even a very quick stop in the middle would make up the difference. We have the new Kia Niro EV and we really love it. But we think our next purchase in the far future will be an EV with a faster charger because we do do long trips occasionally and that’s when it’ll make the biggest difference. My feeling is that you should try to squeeze this one a little longer so that when you do buy in the future, you can get something like I used Ionic 5 that charges much faster.

I love the niro! I dont understand why most people dont like it, but its really amazing especially with the new look.

Now that its 2025, how do you feel about Carvana now? Ill make sure to watch your vids!

It was me - approaching 120,000 miles in three cars...all 100% BEV. 2017 Bolt with ~63,000 miles driven when I traded it. ~52,000 miles on my current Bolt. And a couple of thousand on my wife's IONIQ 5. I jumped straight out of the ICE house into the BEV house after watching people struggle with issues on the hybrids they owned! In my opinion, hybrids, including the PHEV, are still fossil fuel. If you can drive without plugging in and you are burning stuff, that ain't "electric!" Not to mention, you double your problems. You have an internal combustion engine and the stuff that goes with the BEV, too! That doubles your chances of trouble. ALSO, the fire dangers are 130 times greater in a hybrid than in a pure BEV. 65 times greater in a pure ICE (gas or diesel) car than a BEV, too! So...all BEV for me! I will only drive (or rent) an ICE or Hybrid car if there are no other options. Call me sold-out on Driving Electric...🤣

I always learn something new about spreadsheets from your videos, thanks! I currently own 2 Volts a 2011, 142,000 miles (which my son drives) and a 2017, so far total electric miles on the 2017: 88,245 out of 123,270 miles. It has been a great EV and I plan on driving it till it drops!

I am on my 4th ev.. I started with a Chevy Volt, then a Tesla Model S that pretty much was free to me.. I drove over 1,000 miles a month for work and had unlimited free supercharging.. work paid me 54 cents a mile for my trouble. I broke even on that one and during the pandemic, sold it and put that money into a Model Y, which is truly the perfect car. not too big, can haul anything, I have a trailer hitch for my bike rack and if I wanted to haul a trailer around town i could. I never go to a gas station, charge only at home.. My wife got a mini cooper ev, it's fun and while it only gets 114 miles of range, it's plenty for around town. and she doesn't have to go to a dirty gas station alone, with all those creeps in big trucks. No car is free, that's true, and could I have just kept my volt and saved money? sure aI could have, but the tesla feels like new and when I registered it, you could do so for $25/year, so i got a 5 year registration which was the max. I am good until 2026. People love their gas cars and that's ok.. I don't try to convince anyone that I am smarter than they are, but i am happy with my choice, that is the truth, and it's fun to drive and is super safe.

Happy New Year! Welcome back, this was a fun one. I could be wrong but when I subtract your EV charging cost from the Gas total, I get a payback of 9.8 years?

Hmm I live in the UK and my spreadsheet that I update every time I fill up my car shows 43 miles to the gallon and my car, which cost about $4000 US with 23,000 miles on the clock. It does 400 mile to the tank of diesel, seats 7 people, and I didn't need finance to buy it ! So for me it really is a no brainer! Oh and the kicker is that the resale price after 2 years ownership is still $4000.

Qapla! While my mileage is going to be higher than 191K miles, it will be free long before that because I have projected my date for reaching that mileage will be sometime around June of 2031. Battery warranty will run out in 2027 (summer most likely), but that is okay. I expect I will get 300K to 350K on the original battery - and longer if I take really good care of it (which I do). One of the things that EV Haters NEVER understand is basic math. They like to convolute the math with things that don't matter in the grand scheme of car ownership. They just like to bellyache about the nonsense they are being fed by the mind-controlling Fossil Fuels Industry. Great information, though! Happy New Year!

nothing is for free, the whole idea is to spend less money during its ownership while getting from point A to point B

Our 2016 Spark EV is our family’s sixth electric vehicle purchase in the last ten years. Started with an electric motorcycle that I reliably rode to and from work for 2 years. Cost less than $2/week to charge, and required no maintenance, other than checking tire pressure. Was such a great experience, I recommend to my wife she replace her gas car with an electric one. Originally looked at a new Leaf but ended up buying a one-owner Model S with free Supercharging for life for the same price. Also super reliable and has practically free to drive, other than tires, so we bought each of our kids EV’s as their first cars; a pair of smart ForTwo, coupe and cabrio. Really fun and quick cars and just like my bike and my wife’s car, totally reliable and dirt cheap to charge (we have local L2’s that only charge .25/hr). Around the same time, I upgraded my short range, slow charging bike to a much longer, much faster DCFC charging bike to an Enérgica Ribelle, packing a 21.5kWh battery. Easily the best bike I’ve owned in 30+ years of riding. At this point, we had replaced all of our gas vehicles with electric ones with no plans on ever switching back. Practically zero maintenance, great performance, and all were purchased at lower than expected prices, especially when factoring the rebates and incentives. And of course, still only costing pennies per mile to drive. And boy have we. We’ve done road trips to Canada, Colorado, Washington State, Arizona, Reno, all over California, New Mexico, and Utah this past decade. All these great experiences, led up to recently purchasing our 2016 Spark EV, as an upgrade to my daughter’s Smart Fortwo electric drive. She still has her smart and still drives it regularly, but now has a longer range, larger cargo, and most importantly, much faster charging car for those occasional trips that exceed her smart’s range, giving her far more confidence and convenience for those longer trips. To get her Spark updated with greater safety, I installed a Pelsee rear view camera mirror with an integrated dash cam and ADAS for less than $150. For fun, I put footwell lighting under the dash and seats that automatically turn on & off with the car’s power. Blue of course, to match the car’s interior trim. And that’s it. Nothing else is needed. Just two days ago, my wife and I did a successful 84 mile round trip to test out its range, and was pleased it could do freeway speeds (95% of the trip) and still show 6 miles of remaining range (temps here in SoCal are still warm despite it being January so no heat was required, and the elevation changes along the 10 are minimal). I predict 100+ miles is easily achievable with mellow driving in warmer months, with 5% SOC to spare. Pretty impressive for only having about 18kWh’s to work with. Chevy did a good job with an efficient shape, an good drive ratio, a good pairing of motor power & BMS when cruising, and a good balance between freewheeling and progressive regen when brakes are lightly applied; a nicety for those who know how to leverage the Spark’s momentum, and invites a little experimentation of using both D & L, depending on the situation. Took another trip in it today out of town with my son, and before leaving the house with a full charge, it showed an estimated max range of 109 miles and 84 miles as the median range. During the drive on the highway (we drive pretty fast in California) with some city before and after exiting, the car maintained a very respectable average of 4.3 miles per kW. I mostly used L instead of D for max regen, as my usual preference and years of riding/driving EV’s has helped me incorporate hyper miling habits whenever range takes priority over having fun and unleashing the torques, and thankfully; the latter usually applies as 99% of trips are well within our EV’s range, but it’s nice to know that the Spark can stretch its legs on longer trips. DC fast charging was incredibly fast (50kW ChargePoint used) the last time we wanted a quick top off, requiring a mere six minutes to get back to our desired 80%, before continuing our journey. And speaking of journey, the Spark has a surprisingly quiet and comfortable ride that I wasn’t expecting for such a compact car. Seats are comfortable (heats up very quickly) and space for rear passengers (especially head room) were also better than expected. Chevy’s Mylink system isn’t bad, and we decided to keep it rather than replace it with a CarPlay head unit, as we did in the smarts. It was just lacking the rear view cam and navigation (yes, we could subscribe to OnStar for that, but each driver in our family have iPhones that function well for that purpose). Price paid? Probably hard for most people to believe, unless they’re EV drivers themselves, but after the Federal tax rebate and my utility rebate, our Spark’s total purchase price with tax/title,license comes to less than $500. Not quite free, but officially the least expensive car I’ve ever purchased. Even less than my first electric motorcycle (just $1400) and my daughter’s smart ED ($3200), which up until this point, were impressively inexpensive purchases as well. I almost feel bad that more people aren’t aware of how good of a deal can be had for many used EV’s, as most tend to shy away from buying a used EV, making the prices even better for those of us who understand the value of owning an EV, and will buy one with “high mileage” and out of warranty in a heartbeat, knowing just how reliable and fun they are to drive for literal pennies per mile. In all, I think Chevy did well with the Spark, for the purpose it was built for, and Chevy/GM is positioned well today with their current EV offerings. Never thought I’d buy a Chevy after watching the documentary “Who killed the electric car”, but I’d say, Chevy redeemed themselves since the EV 1, and I can see myself purchasing another EV from GM.

You can go with a used Model Y LR RWD with low mileage for that $25,000. Just stay away from the short lived 4680 model. Or you can put that $25,000 as a down-payment for a brand new Model Y LR RWD, or Equinox and have a very small payment every month.

We test drove two 4xe models, and it’s a lively drivetrain. For us, it combined gas and electric, and didn’t try to do all-electric in our driving. They are discounting heavily right now. Ride quality is OK on the Wrangler for what it is; I’d get something else if ride quality is more important than off-road ability. Jeep also makes a Grand Cherokee 4xe that has a better ride. After reading so many complaints about things like wind noise, it was better than I expected. Like anything else, test drive before you buy and pay close attention to things that are important to you.

The depreciation is beating the crap out of used EV prices. I have heard there are issues with the 4XE. They were hard to get, but Jeep has killed the Jeep market. The Jeep would be fun. I am still just watching the EV truck market. If Trump pulls the tax credit we might see even more depreciation. Fingers crossed! Hope he collapses the use EV market. I would love it. By the time they come to their senses we might be able to score some nice rides.

I started browsing Carvana after watching your videos - the biggest depreciation (but still expensive) that I can find in an EV is a Mercedes EQS sedan. Found a 2023 EQS that MSRP of around $107k that is now selling for $44.5k. Still wouldn't buy but that's massive after just a year.

I recently bought a 2019 Nissan Leaf with 40 kWh battery, under 33 K miles. I took it to a Nissan dealer for an expensive multiple point inspection since I have never had an electric car and it shows the battery at 12 bars (the newer leaf does not show bars on display, just a capacity bar) while my screen shows a full capacity bar. The range after 2 tests full charges to 100%(1 at Nissan and 1 I did for testing) shows 118 miles and 140 miles range after a few minutes driving. After today, I am going to stay within 20% to 80% charging. Is this possible that this Nissan Leaf has a good battery like this after someone drove it for 5 years?

I've been following some 4XE owners on KZbin, and they've been plagued with problems. Right now I think Stellantis is telling people not to charge the car and just use gasoline.

What no chipmunks? No grandma got run over by a Tesla? LOL Someone has to be happy about the holiday. Bah humbug! LOL

First, I just want to say, love the videos. Arkansas native that had to move out of state for work but it's still home. In regard to getting a vehicle that can truly get you the range you would need for that trip in the winter the options are few, BUT still possible depending on what the budget is. you can get a used model 3 long range for under $20K and I would imagine that it would work great. You can now find Used Kia EV6's and IONIQ 5's for around that $20k price point and with the used PHEV tax credit would makes these some very viable options. I am going to be buying an EV to replace my vehicle that was totaled in an accident and I've come to the conclusion of either I get a bolt EV and with the current market after the tax credit would only be a $13k car and just live with the limitations that brings (really don't want to btw) or just get a used model S/3 and enjoy all the amenities that having a tesla brings (charging speed, infrastructure, better overall warranty depending on model). Many people are iffy on getting a used EV and I understand the reasoning to a point. I understand my limitations financially so if I'm going to get what I want, I have to be willing to accept some calculated risks like a used EV. I still consider getting an EV to be an early adopter thing, particularly in the southern states like Arkansas where the infrastructure lags behinds and always will be due to population. This is the struggle people like you and me face. The normal person that can't afford a new EV, and the ones we can afford being older lack the faster charging and or range of the new models. The tax credit will definitely help speed up the adoption and hence help with infrastructure, but it will be another 5 years or so before most middle-class families can get an EV around $15k with the range needed to be viable for most trips like yours or really any longer trips in general assuming battery degradation is still minimal. Keep making that great content of yours and keep living that EV life good sir!

They have one of these at the Flying-J in Joplin, Mo now. I'll have to swing by sometime and check it out. Driving the Volt we usually just go to QT. ;-) We're thinking about getting a full EV while we can still get a tax rebate, and we'll need to be able to make it from SE Kansas to NW Arkansas comfortably, and charge somewhere before driving back. Amazingly, for all the money in NWA, you see Rivians, and Cybertrucks all the time, there aren't really any good public chargers that I'm aware of. It's crazy. Hopefully this GM and government money will fix that. They need to get on it.

My version of this is with an electric scooter. It gets 30 miles per kwh. Since I commute in a city, my transportation costs are now effectively nothing.

Our electricity in Kentucky is about 15 cents a kilowatt hour and I love seeing the numbers you create but maybe do it quarterly or something for the non-math nerds. It would still be cheaper to use electricity and not have to deal with gas station credit card readers and their loud advertisements on the pump. I was in AR for the first time in my life last month but I don't think we were too close to Jonesboro. Hope you guys have a great Christmas and New Years.

I have to admit I hit the data hard when I am first making the decisions, but after I am satisfied the numbers are OK then I don't pay that much attention. My solar generates a lot more than I use during the summer and I draw that down balance in the winter. My utility expires my energy credits I have with them at 1 year. So use it or lose it. So I come up with creative ways to use electricity in the winter now just so I don't give away the energy for free to the utility. I still don't pay that much attention other than look at my credit balance each month with the utility to make sure I am not over consuming now with my "wasteful" energy using ways now! LOL I just don't keep the data anymore. I just make sure I don't owe anything. I admit it, I have gotten LAZY!

I think these videos are great, data, data, data! All of your work tracking these costs proves how much smarter you are than most.

We love our Mach-e. It’s been a great car so far. 2023 Premium Extended Range.

"Minimum 200mi in the winter" = 300mi+

They are not delicious if you think they are.It's just because you eat so much sugar.That's what you want to taste.They are crap

I frequently travel from Sikeston to Brinkley and it is a 200 mi nail biter. Its all 75 mph and I've had to slow to 60. Now I'll be able to do 75 no problem with this new station. I 55 had lots of construction last trip.

While I plan on getting an EV at some point, I am definitely keeping my PHEV for the reasons you cite. It is great for travelling into areas where the infrastructure isn't ready. I also enjoy getting double the m.p.g. in hybrid mode that I used to get in my Taurus.

I normally don't recommend leasing, but you can get very cheap lease deals on the Equinox right now, if you look around, which is about the size of a Model Y. I saw somebody on Reddit got a 36mo Equinox one pay lease for 5k zero down!

I use the term “urchins” in real life quite often. 🤣😂

Driving really doesn't warm the battery much. You were cold gating. Winter efficiency is brutal. This is really the reason I tell people to buy as much range as you can afford and look for preconditioning features. Heat pumps do help if on longer trips. Fast charging is getting higher on my list of wants since owning the Tesla. I wouldn't mind it charging even a little faster. Otherwise weather, cold, heat, charger spacing all make range critical. This is why I took a beating to get out of the Bolt and into the Tesla for the preconditioning functions before leaving and while on the trip. Efficiency and range still take a beating as soon as that function turns on, but at least it charges like it should when you get to the charger. I think we need at least 400 mile range in EVs so that you're in the middle of the pack SOC on road trips and still have about 200 miles of range to work with for charger hopping. Sadly we aren't there yet in the general EV market for long range EVs. People keep saying we don't need them. That just tells me they don't live where it gets cold and/or don't road trip. I would say watch the used Model Y prices. Within about 4 months of the Juniper launch you should see significant price pressure downward on current generation Y. You might even see some of that action starting on the Ioniq 5 since the 2025 is refreshing lots of things that may have people trading up to the 2025. The prices should start falling on those cars soon also. The eGMP cars charge like a BOSS. The eGMP cars offer more interior space for people than the Model 3 or Y, but not as much in the trunk, but the car is like 2 inches wider so it actually should work pretty well. I think there is a refresh already coming to the Ioniq 6 also. What those eGMP cars need is a better infotainment system and software. The current nav system is pretty bad in the current generation eGMP cars. I saw the Ioniq 9 preview and it does look like they did refresh that system, but no word yet on how much it is improved. Not gonna lie, the fast charging features that I didn't think would really matter that much to me do and I wouldn't mind getting something faster than the Tesla for the charging speed on the road trips. Once you get used to being able to charge at a faster speed you want to go even faster. Tesla is falling behind pretty badly. The main reason to buy the Tesla still is the charging network. We are getting a Christmas software update that finally lets you set your SOC on arrival. We are finally getting a weather map overlay so we can see the weather in route, and they are finally going to give us the traffic data for free without having to upgrade to premium. It is baby steps in the right direction. I still spend most of my time at road trip stops checking the charger status for the next stop, traffic, and weather. If they start putting that all casually on the display so that I am not having to hunt this stuff down that would be a huge improvement. Now if they do that then I will be sitting there doing nothing during the charing stop and I will be bitching that the car needs to charge faster!!!!! ROFL What an ungrateful PIA I am!

TesSC will be open to Kia/Hyundai pretty soon. Then you will have like double the PIPs. I vote keep it. Nice thing bout EVs is they last freakin 4 ever. Stay safe & happy holidays.

I'd stick with what you have, it works with your wheelchair and it's not like you are doing 200+ mile drives every week. If you're lucky the upcoming NEW Bolt may be ideal for your situation or an Equinox EV that comes off someone's lease in a couple of years for a steal. I'm seeing more and more Flying Js with DC fast chargers going in, I'm sure most are NEVI funded, this is great news! We've had highs in the single digits up north so your version of cold makes me laugh! Thanks for the great content.

Wow, that's a lot of data! Nice work. I have an Ember mug that my son gave to me a couple Christmases ago, the battery is failing. When it gets to around 50% it drops off a cliff and the app shows 0% battery. Looks like yours has held up better.

Yeah you won't get 320 miles out of that on the highway, I might get 250 if Im lucky on my Model 3 LR, probably more like 225 though

Probably cheaper to rent a car if the trips are not too frequent.

The long term dividend growth works if you have a long runway. I am glad there are young people taking an interest. Once you are my age the runway is pretty short so the shift from dividend growth to dividend yield takes precedence in what I am looking at. I have it split with dividend yield stocks and I am paying attention to the electrification and AI of everything and trying to catch a few of those waves to help me catch up to where I should be in my retirement savings. They are just starting the mass buildout of the grid and we are seeing the glimmerings of where nuclear, hydrogen, and other advanced technologies are starting to catch on as they put the building blocks into place. The AI play is pretty hot right now. Data centers are prime real estate again. It looks like unless there is a horrific economic collapse we are going to be seeing huge growth on the grid and all things around it for decades to come. Ride some of that hyper fast growth from the trillions we are spending and hope that we don't drown in the inflation from it.

Is there somewhere I can find your excel document for calculating EV vs Gas?

I find the ratings on Plugshare are wholly unreliable...a good majority of the time when a someone posts "could not charge," it was operator error OR something wrong with their car, but they never follow-up to let people know. As an example, one of the Duke Energy chargers that was only rated 3.4 on Plugshare has worked perfectly for me every single time I have stopped to use it! Your KIA will be able to use the Tesla network sometime before the end of January...maybe sooner. So, there is that! I would recommend a used IONIQ 5...? Best of luck to you...

Good morning... Carvana... Oh boy. After my experience with them with my current car I think I will steer clear of them. I would get the most possible range you can afford in the EV. And I would want a car that can get access to the Tesla charging network. Tesla just announced they will start the V4 deployments in 2025. It will be able to finally support 800v+ architectures. How long that will take before those are deployed widely is anyones guess. I can tell you after running into a bunch of V2 sites and some challenges with those that I don't expect V4 to suddenly be everywhere. On that Tesla that was the rated miles when new, and I can tell you that it will be significantly lower than that in practice during summer, and significantly lower in winter, preconditioning really hammers the range and efficiency, but there are Tesla SCs. I don't recall which year they added the heat pump and preconditioning off the top of my head. I watched preconditioning fire up and really hammer the SOC. My car was rated a 356 miles, and I can tell you it would be lucky to see 280-290 100%-0 and I am coming to the conclusion this is far more common than we are lead to believe. I loaded Recurrent app to have them run the report on my car and they come up with some BS 6% degradation and say it is average/normal. Yeah, fat chance. Others are starting to look at their cars now and figure out something don't add up. LOL Plan on reality in the winter being 100-120 miles between charging stops unless you want to "trust the BMS"! LOL I had a couple of legs of my trip where I pushed it and knocked out some longer miles and just have to really watch that SOC on arrival to see if you need to slow down or bail out for a closer charger. Temps ranged from 30's to 60's. Things change fast so I learned not to trust the navigation system and keep an eye on the SOC. Overall the road trip ability of the Tesla is acceptable. Once we finally start to see 400-500 mile cars so that you can keep them in the meaty center of the battery SOC and knock out like 200 miles charge in like 10-15 minutes then I think we will have arrived at the place that BEV is not really an inconvenience. I would like to have about a 200 mile travel window for range in that 80-20% SOC window during winter or bad weather on road trips. Then I would say that would be the sweet spot. Right now there isn't much out there that really can do that just yet. But it looks like we might be getting close in the next couple of years. The Y and the 3 have the same trunk openings I think. The Y just has the advantage of a hatch for putting in bigger stuff, but with the rake and angle of the back you still can't put very tall items that need to go back very far. And of course the rear seats do fold down if you need the space. One day people will realize that wagons and mini vans were awesome. LOL Overall I am not disappointed in the size of the trunk on the M3. It is the back seat space that is pretty cramped to be honest in the M3. I expected to be disappointed with the trunk, but it really has not been bad for me. I am able to make a large Costco/Walmart/etc run and jam everything in the car and is actually more usable than my Bolt for that. I did not expect that so I am happy. However I wouldn't want to put adult size humans in the back seat with taller front seat occupants that have the front seats back. Great for 2 adults and carrying some things. If you want I can take some measurements for you so you could get an idea if your chair would be doable. I would only be concerned that the bumper is exposed pretty closely to the trunk opening and I do worry a little it will get damaged. That route up from Branson has chargers now. Not sure if that would work to come that way.

I"d just take the longer route and enjoy the scenery!

I just got a 2017 Energi with 15k miles. I am having a hell of a time setting up the app. Did you have any trouble?

I have been burned by both EVgo and Chargepoint so bad that I look like a lump of coal. I won't touch them anymore. I wish you the best of luck with this. I don't see how any of these charging companies are going to make money. This really makes me worry about how these chargers get maintained going forward unless they figure out a way to make money. I know most gas stations don't make real profit on gas sold. It is the C store sales that keep them going. So these travel centers will find a way to monetize them. Not sure about rural areas however. The cost of electricity is going to be going up for sure. I guess we have to look at how do companies that make gas pumps stay in business? Or ATMs? Stuff like that. I see Shell and BP all jumping in. BP is going with Tesla SCs for their 30k deployment. The costs have to be a lot less for the Tesla SCs and the reliability has to be better.

Hang on until it hits $15 a share. As soon as the loan gets approved it is going back to the $8 range and then it is only up from there. I’m hanging on to a couple thousand shares and am in it from here on out. Profitability is coming very soon, within 3 years, don’t question profitability on a company like this. Scale is needed to achieve profitability. Look at how unprofitable Amazon was for a long time in its early days, because it was constantly reinvesting back into the company. This is very similar to that. This is going to emerge as #2 in the EV charging space, or potentially even #1 if you give it enough time. Now is the time to buy in.

Talking stocks. I sold our CVNA and about broke even when there was discussions of bankruptcy and almost bought back at around $4 but unfortunately did not... I always try to hold stocks for a year to not have to pay capital gains tax. I think we are seeing the tipping point of EVs going main stream with so many models available and they are everywhere now. As more people get them more people will need to charge them. Seems like it could be a decent long term buy for that market sector.

Just careful with that one. Fundamentals looks good and I believe long term, this will do very well. Over this next presidency though, I see this struggling. If you can hold this for 10 years, you'll have nothing to worry about 👍Short term is always much more risky.

with our 2013 and 2014 gen1 volts, i always preheat before leaving. saves about 2kwh from the 10.5 usable kwh. i usually keep the car plugged in in the garage with the door shut and just make sure the car is solid green charging before i start it and manually set the preheat. with the heated seats on full and the climate on eco and the lowest fan speed, it will let me preheat for about an hour. anything you can do to save batter goes a long way in the volt. I replaced the headlights with drop in LED's which saves about 35w of load on the 12v side. I also replaced the agm battery with a 7lb 32ah lifepo4 battery i built for 50$ which has its own heating circuit to keep it above freezing. keeping it at about 1-2 gal in the tank saves about 100 lb total with the battery. I also added 200w of flush mounted solar to the roof and removed the antena (the hole is where the panel wires go in). its on its own 30amp mppt circuit and keep the lifepo4 battery topped off instead of constantly drawing from the high voltage battery, saves me about another 1-2kwh each commute. on longer drives, i wait until the battery is at about half before kicking on the engine. the lower internal resistance of the lifepo4 battery, lower leakage current that u get in lead acids, and having the battery on half charge lets the generator and regen breaking be more efficient. raise the tire pressure to about 40psi instead of ~34psi. also added some al foil tape to the bottom of the car along the sides to reduce drag which got rid of the dust that accumulates on the rear passenger doors. getting about 50-55 miles of EV range even in winter/regardless of outside temp. put 45k miles on my car in the last 18 months, and saved 6500$ in gas which is the same amount i paid for the car lol. only put about 5k miles on the engine. the first gen volts with their solid gear "transmission", iron block engine, and port injected heat will litterally last forever. expecting mine to last over 500k miles. i still do annual oil changes even though i only do about 3.5k miles on the motor per year. going to upgrade the remaining front running lights/blinkers with led's once i take the bumper off and will add some ceramic wool to the wheel wells to get rid of the extra noise running on higher psi lol.

I enjoyed this episode and commend your bravery for speaking your mind. I served for over 20 years for your right to speak your mind. I’m a couple years older than you but my first vote was Ronald Reagan in 1980. So not much older. I’m a liberal Yankee but a moderate Democrat. I love my country more than any political party. I’m optimistic about the future. Hopefully it will include and increase EV infrastructure and and promotion for them. I’m a loyal viewer because of your advocacy for EV even though they are not so popular where you live. Thanks for creating and sharing your experience with us. Please keep doing it. God Bless you and the United States.