It has been six months and 5000 miles since we purchased our Mitsubishi i-miev all electric vehicle.  The long and short of it is that we love it!  We enjoy driving it more than we expected and the cost of ownership savings will pay for the car in its 100K lifespan.

For the price tag of $21K after rebates and tax credits, we preferred the styling/value/driving experience over other similar fully electric vehicles that are currently for sale (we did not consider lease only vehicles – see “Who Killed the Electric Car”).  LOVE the Tesla S, but it didn’t fit with the story of the Green Idea House in terms of affordability. 

The things we like about the car:

• It drives like a sports car
  • It is fast off the line and tops out at 82 on the freeway
  • The battery pack under the seats allows you to take a corner at 40mph! 
  • The “B” mode shifter option gives max acceleration and deceleration so it is fun to drive with mostly “one pedal ” driving – similar to the Tesla
• No gas and virtually no maintenance – We are on Edison’s Time Of Use EV (TOUEV) program that lets us charge the car at night for 10 cents/kwh with our Eaton charging station.  The car’s battery capacity is 16kwh so it costs us just $1.60 to go 60 miles.  Our other car gets about 20mpg, so at $4/gallon it costs $12 to go 60 miles.  Net savings of $10.40 every 60 miles.   That means in the 5,000 miles we have driven the car we have saved $867.00 and have no oil, spark plugs, air filters…for maintenance.
• Carpool lanes – with our white carpool sticker we zoom past the traffic and will do so until 2019 when the stickers expire.  That alone is worth $20K in LA!
• No Emissions or burning of fossil fuels – We are not pumping carcinogens into the air every time we start and drive our car.  We are not contributing to the contamination of our environment through the mining and burning of fossil fuels.  As you can see from our bill(below), our Solar World PV panels more than offset the electrical consumption.
• No smell – when we get back into our gas powered vehicle, we now notice how much the petrochemicals (both burnt and unburnt) smell.  It is nice not having to inhale gas fumes at the pump as well.
• Lots of airbags – it is a small and light car, so safety is a concern; but the car does have lots of safety equipment built in.

 

Things that we have adapted to:

• Different styling – For aerodynamic reasons, the car has a heavily raked windshield and egg like shape.  At first we weren’t wild about the styling, but we put some racing stripes on it and it has grown on us.  People stop us all the time saying they like the car and want to know where to get one.
• Planning trips – the car only goes 62 miles, but that covers 95% of the driving that we do on a regular basis.  We have changed how we think of our cars.  Instead of this car is yours and the other is mine, we ask “where are you going today?” and use the car that best fits the purpose.   Plugshare is a great program we use to plan trips and find charging stations, when needed.  The only time we have ever run out is when we were testing the full range of the battery and pushing it to its range limit (63.5 miles).  Luckily we ran out of juice in front of a friend’ s house who allowed us to plug in for a few minutes so we could get back home.
• Freeway miles use a lot of energy – Going over the speed limit on the freeway drains the battery much faster than driving surface streets.

 

Things that could be improved:

• The interior and the gauges are a bit sparse.  It would be nice to have separate countdown, trip and mileage odometers, especially when you have to gauge how far things are and how far you have gone already.
• The NAV system should ID charging stations and give more info on distance in relation to how much charge you have left in the car.

 

Watt’s Next??

We have been charging the car almost exclusively at the house since July and it still hasn’t made a meaningful dent our energy bill in relation to how well the Solar World solar panels are working and how efficient the house is operating (see bill below). 

So it is time to start thinking about replacing our other car.  Before we bought the i-miev we had not replaced our cars in a long time.  We made a commitment when we bought the last round of cars that our next cars would have plugs on them.  We never thought it would take so long to get there!

We would like our next vehicle to be a Plug in Hybrid EV (PHEV) SUV to replace our Rav-4.  We would like to use it for road trips or anytime we want to go out of range for the i-miev.  Surprisingly there are few choices in this category, but Mitsubishi has a couple of good choices coming out:

http://www.topspeed.com/cars/mitsubishi/2013-mitsubishi-xr-phev-concept-ar161049.html

http://green.autoblog.com/2013/09/26/mitsubishi-outlander-phev-could-go-on-sale-in-us-in-fall-2014/

We look forward to reviewing them.

Please let us know if you have any questions/ comments as you are considering replacing your gas powered vehicles.  We will never go back to a car without a plug!

Tags: Affordable, Air Quality, Case Study, environmental, Life Cycle, Metrics, Net Zero Energy, solar, Zero Carbon

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