想买一辆电动汽车
先读一读
Thinking more seriously about buying an 电动汽车 现在汽油价格正在飙升? 你和其他人.
E.V.S很难找到，尤其是现在. 的 war in Ukraine hasn’t just caused gas prices to soar. It has also disrupted car production in Europe, which sends exports to the United States. 和你.S. companies like Ford “basically got blindsided by how many people want to buy their cars” and can’t make E.V.s fast enough, Chris Harto, a senior policy analyst for Consumer Reports, told me.
When my partner and I moved to Los Angeles last year, we knew we would need to shop for a car, and we knew we wanted it to be all-electric.
经过大量的研究, we managed to test all the cars we wanted to see in a day and drove home that night with our top pick.
以下是十大彩票游戏平台了解到的情况:
提前计划.
电动汽车的需求量如此之大, few dealers are keeping vehicles around for test drives — we had to drive an hour to find one model. (Oh, and make sure to specify whether you want all-electric, so you aren’t surprised with a hybrid like we were.)
We made our appointments the day before. On the day of, we called ahead to make sure the car hadn’t been sold. A car being listed on a dealer’s website is no guarantee it’s on the lot.
准备好等待，或者支付额外费用.
We saw a handful of cars, but we ended up buying the first we test drove, the Kia Niro.
的 markup on the Ford Mustang Mach-E, was an eye-popping $15,000. If we had wanted the Volkswagen ID4, all we had to do was wait up to six months, our salesman said. 的 Chevrolet Bolt has been out of production for months, and a lot of the other models were nowhere to be found, 要么.
But because we didn’t buy the Niro as soon as we saw it, the salesman was unwilling to knock off a $5,000 price increase over the manufacturer’s suggested retail price. C’est la vie, we thought and moved forward anyway.
E.V. 演职表很混乱.
We were dreading redeeming the incentive of up to $7,500 the federal government offers to E.V. 买家. It’s not an instant rebate; you have to wait until tax season.
We were prepared to finance the purchase, 但那个商人说服十大彩票游戏平台签了租约, which included the full government incentive as a rebate, plus a little extra rebate that covered the lease’s administrative fee. Our contract allows us to buy the car for whatever cost remains at any point during the lease period, 外加300美元的费用, so we’ll do that in a few months to avoid the pricey lease charges. We calculated we may come out a few hundred dollars ahead, but the real value was that we got the credit right away.
不过这是一个冒险的举动. Chris Harto, a senior policy analyst for Consumer Reports, told me there could be a lot of gotchas. “I would definitely not do it without very closely scrutinizing all of the paperwork,” he said.
加州的 清洁车辆返利计划 也很令人困惑. First, the program, which offers rebates of $2,000 or more if you buy an all-electric vehicle, is funded and there is no waitlist, despite outdated messages on its website.
But the income cap recently changed: If you make more than $135,000 (or $200,000 filing jointly) you do not qualify — something your dealer may not know or tell you. And the cap on the manufacturer’s suggested retail price changed, 太, 到不超过45美元,轿车为000美元，60美元,000美元买S.U.V.S和卡车. 这意味着新购买的特斯拉 不符合资格. 这些数字可能会再次改变.
那里还有其他的爆发, including a $750 credit that California dealers apply at checkout and 电力公司的激励措施.
忘了买二手的.
十大彩票游戏平台研究. 的re are exceedingly few used electrics unless you want to buy older models with lower ranges.
的 Hyundai Kona we test drove was the cheapest late-model used electric we found — and was listed at more than $40,000, thousands over its original suggested retail price. And used cars aren’t eligible for the federal tax credit.
对你的储蓄要现实一点.
Gas isn’t cheap, but n要么 is electricity.
At about 18 cents per kilowatt-hour, it will cost about $11.50 to fully charge our car’s 64 kWh battery. That’s a lot better than the $70 it costs to fill our Subaru Forester to get about the same distance. 但是考虑到汽车的成本, 尤其是在加价方面, we may not really be saving much money over a conventional vehicle.
That isn’t the only reason to buy electric, which we were reminded of during a particularly smoggy day last week. And we expect to save on maintenance: no oil changes or spark plugs.
比较一下每英里的价格 使用燃气和电力时. 的 Department of Energy also has a good calculator that shows you the lifetime cost of various cars.
An alternative: Hybrids are in a lot less demand than full electrics. 的y’re also a lot cheaper; you can save as much as $10,000 to $15,000 at the dealer. Depending on your driving habits, you may still save a lot on gas.
In the end, we were happy we had been able to make it all happen in just one day. And as we drove the new car into our neighborhood, we were vindicated further: 的 price of gas on the corner had ticked up another 10 cents.
威廉·P. 戴维斯
刊登于 纽约时报 2022年3月23日