What Are the Benefits of Electric Cars?

If you've never driven an electric car, you may struggle to see the benefit of owning one. Some benefits of owning an electric car include reduced emissions, lower fuel costs, a smoother driving experience, and greater storage space. Other benefits become more apparent once you start crunching numbers, while others are less tangible but still meaningful. With that in mind, let's take a deeper dive into the many benefits of driving an electric car.

The cost benefits of electric cars

Let's start with the easy stuff: the numbers. While an electric car will typically be more expensive to buy up front than a comparable internal combustion engine vehicle, the EV will likely cost less to own over time. This is most obvious with the cost of fuel. While power prices vary from region to region and depending on the time of day, electricity is significantly cheaper than gasoline or diesel.

If you stick to charging your car at home, you'll likely spend a few dollars per charge for an average electric vehicle. For example, if you charge your new 2024 Fiat 500e in California, you'll pay an average of 19 cents per kilowatt hour (April 2024), which would work out to around $8 for a full charge. Filling up even a relatively efficient vehicle with a 10-gallon fuel tank could cost as much as seven times that in some areas of the Golden State.

Some studies have linked areas with high levels of electric car ownership to lower electricity bills. If you're scratching your head and thinking that sounds bananas, you should remember that most EV owners charge their vehicles at home overnight when overall demand on the power grid is low. This fact, combined with revenue decoupling policies that don't incentivize utility companies to sell more electricity, means that any savings go back to the customers.

If you buy an EV that falls under the current EV tax credit guidelines, you can save a healthy chunk of money, which offsets some of that typically higher price. The maximum federal subsidy is $7,500 for new cars or $4,000 for qualified used vehicles. Individual states and some municipalities also offer credits or rebates to help people make the switch.

Aside from consumables such as tires, EVs put much less wear and tear on their components due to having fewer moving parts and generating less heat. As long as you don't drive your new electric car from stoplight to stoplight like it's a Top Fuel dragster, you're going to spend less money on maintenance. This is especially true of the braking system if you have a car with one-pedal driving and you use it frequently. One-pedal driving uses the power of the vehicle's motor to slow rather than the friction brakes, and you get better range as a little treat.

Also because electric cars are at their most efficient at slower speeds and on shorter trips, they make perfect around-town daily drivers. In direct contrast, internal combustion engine vehicles suffer from increased wear and reduced efficiency under the same conditions. Interestingly, that efficiency flips once you hit the freeway, so there's always a compromise to be made.

The intangible benefits of electric cars

Less tangible are the benefits you feel behind the wheel of an EV. For example, because nearly all purpose-built electric vehicles house their batteries below the passenger compartment floor, they feel extremely stable and are typically more nimble than they look.

The way that an electric vehicle delivers its power is also completely different from anything with an internal combustion engine, which only makes its peak power and torque at specific points in its operating range. Because the electric vehicle's maximum torque is available from zero rpm, even basic non-sporting EVs feel surprisingly quick from a stop and provide lots of opportunities to surprise your passengers.

Next up on the list of EV benefits is a lack of noise. Most people might not notice how much low-level noise and vibration a typical gas engine makes because it's always been there in the background. It's an ingrained part of their automotive experience. Being in the car becomes a very different experience when many of those noises are gone. An EV isn't totally silent, however. There's still the sound of the motors and road noise transmitted through the tires, but it's comparatively serene.

One huge benefit that you might not expect but that is present in more and more electric cars is a front trunk, or "frunk" for short. The added storage space for things you may not need to access all the time that would otherwise be rattling around in your trunk is great. For trucks like the Rivian R1T or the Ford F-150 Lightning, the front trunk gives you a spot out of the elements to keep more sensitive items like a bag of concrete or luggage.

The benefits of electric cars on the environment

Lastly, but still important, are the environmental benefits. This topic is slightly stickier than others because although EVs generate no tailpipe emissions, many of the minerals and chemicals that go into making their battery packs are somewhat dirty or ethically questionable.

Many car companies are working to reduce the amount of these rare-earth minerals, chemicals, animal products and more going into the vehicles they make, but the industry is still a ways off from being squeaky clean.

Some people might make the bad faith argument that EVs are just as bad for the environment as internal combustion engine vehicles because of their manufacturing and, more directly, the way the power they run on is generated. This argument is largely spurious, having been debunked by many sources. Still, your EV is indeed cleaner if you live in the Northwest, which gets most of its power from hydroelectric dams, than if you lived in, say, West Virginia and your power was generated by coal.

Edmunds says

Ultimately, electric cars have a lot going for them. They present a driving experience unlike anything else, they can be inexpensive to run, and you get the added benefit of knowing you're doing something better for the planet than your neighbor with their old clunker. They're still not for everyone given the limitations of battery tech and the costs associated with buying them, but maybe an EV is right for you.