Hi all,
My name is Assaf. Our family has leased a 2012 Leaf for the past 11 months, but I joined the forum only last week.
Serendipity led us towards an EV last summer. Our only car was a 2001 Sante Fe. While we didn't drive it a lot, it does <15 MPG in-city. We were sick of that (mostly for environmental reasons), and besides the car was slowly dying. We started hesitating between a used Prius (while keeping the Santa Fe for long missions e.g. camping (we're a family of 5 plus a mid-size dog) - or getting a larger hybrid SUV. Meanwhile my wife saw a couple of EVs at local street fairs (including a rare Coda which the owners drove from California themselves) and met their super-enthusiastic owners. I still didn't guess that soon I'll become one of those going around and EVangelizing.
Long story short, in late August on a whim, after doing far less research than I've done on much smaller purchases, we went and leased a blue Leaf on an end-of-month sale. It's been nearly a year, and I've only become more and more obsessed with EVs as time goes on. We don't drive that much (close to 4k miles now), but vs. the Santa Fe we already saved some 270 gallons and nearly $1k on gas (we still kept the Santa Fe for those camping trips etc., but now the burden on it is minimal). Very quickly we discovered that for our needs trickle-charge alone is good enough.
Ok, here's what this post is really about. While our EV experience is fairly light and non-savvy, I have become somewhat on an EV blogger. I blog mostly at Daily Kos, the largest independent liberal blogging site with about 500,000 members and many more non-member readers (my page: assaf.dailykos.com). My readership is above-average although not huge. However, occasionally one posts a popular story that gets read by thousands, most of them people in support of environmental causes but not EV drivers themselves. My EV stories tend to be rather popular, and like everywhere else there is increased interest and entusiasm about EVs on that site. In short: an ideal target audience for education about EVs.
I have a few future posts already planned, and would like to solicit information and insight about them from this forum. The next one might be "Myths and misconceptions about Electric Vehicles". The biggest myth I'd like to kill in that post is that EVs are environmentally no better than ICE cars. I already know a fair bit about that, but would appreciate more links and information sources, especially from independent professional and academic sources.
In particular, the new boogie-man in anti-EV town is "life-cycle analysis". Presumably that's a huge skeleton in the EV closet. I'm not buying it, and have read the recent EPA review document that puts it in a more realistic perspective. What I'm curious about is whether anyone has done a serious ICE "life-cycle analysis" including of course the life-cycle wells-to-wheels CO2 impact of using gas/diesel. I believe such an analysis could be the nail in the coffin of the "EVs are not green" myth. Is anyone aware of such analyses being published?
Thanks and have a great Sunday!
Assaf
My name is Assaf. Our family has leased a 2012 Leaf for the past 11 months, but I joined the forum only last week.
Serendipity led us towards an EV last summer. Our only car was a 2001 Sante Fe. While we didn't drive it a lot, it does <15 MPG in-city. We were sick of that (mostly for environmental reasons), and besides the car was slowly dying. We started hesitating between a used Prius (while keeping the Santa Fe for long missions e.g. camping (we're a family of 5 plus a mid-size dog) - or getting a larger hybrid SUV. Meanwhile my wife saw a couple of EVs at local street fairs (including a rare Coda which the owners drove from California themselves) and met their super-enthusiastic owners. I still didn't guess that soon I'll become one of those going around and EVangelizing.
Long story short, in late August on a whim, after doing far less research than I've done on much smaller purchases, we went and leased a blue Leaf on an end-of-month sale. It's been nearly a year, and I've only become more and more obsessed with EVs as time goes on. We don't drive that much (close to 4k miles now), but vs. the Santa Fe we already saved some 270 gallons and nearly $1k on gas (we still kept the Santa Fe for those camping trips etc., but now the burden on it is minimal). Very quickly we discovered that for our needs trickle-charge alone is good enough.
Ok, here's what this post is really about. While our EV experience is fairly light and non-savvy, I have become somewhat on an EV blogger. I blog mostly at Daily Kos, the largest independent liberal blogging site with about 500,000 members and many more non-member readers (my page: assaf.dailykos.com). My readership is above-average although not huge. However, occasionally one posts a popular story that gets read by thousands, most of them people in support of environmental causes but not EV drivers themselves. My EV stories tend to be rather popular, and like everywhere else there is increased interest and entusiasm about EVs on that site. In short: an ideal target audience for education about EVs.
I have a few future posts already planned, and would like to solicit information and insight about them from this forum. The next one might be "Myths and misconceptions about Electric Vehicles". The biggest myth I'd like to kill in that post is that EVs are environmentally no better than ICE cars. I already know a fair bit about that, but would appreciate more links and information sources, especially from independent professional and academic sources.
In particular, the new boogie-man in anti-EV town is "life-cycle analysis". Presumably that's a huge skeleton in the EV closet. I'm not buying it, and have read the recent EPA review document that puts it in a more realistic perspective. What I'm curious about is whether anyone has done a serious ICE "life-cycle analysis" including of course the life-cycle wells-to-wheels CO2 impact of using gas/diesel. I believe such an analysis could be the nail in the coffin of the "EVs are not green" myth. Is anyone aware of such analyses being published?
Thanks and have a great Sunday!
Assaf