The 99% Solution

There is something less than satisfying about doing a job with the wrong tools.

I use mine for edging the driveway!

Life has lots of little frustrations, and yet we see everywhere people making choices that add to their burdens. There are lots of reasons for consciously picking the wrong tool for the driving job. Perhaps the wrong car was marketed well. Maybe there's a stigma attached to using the right car. But most of the time, folks simply think they need a big honkin' swiss army knife on wheels.

This perception problem that stands in the way of the electric vehicle is what I call the 1% problem. People today buy cars (or more likely trucks) that fill every perceived need they could possibly encounter. To give an example, here's my own diverse list of things I need to consider when buying a car:

I have a wife, a kid, and a dog, and I take them all on road trips about 5 hours each way in the summer. We live in Michigan, and the snow has been terrible lately. And I do lots of home improvement projects that involve hauling lumber and stuff. I drive about 30 miles round trip to work, our folks are about 25 miles away, and we have friends that we see regularly that live a good hour away by freeway. 

Add it all up and you might expect to find me in this:

2013 Ram BFT edition

While the BFT is freaking incredible for the 1% of the time we're hauling lumber 350 miles, driving through a 20 inch blizzard, or vacationing with all our worldly possessions and extended family, it's probably about the worst tool for the daily commute. It sucks trying to park in city lots, it's expensive, and it would cost me about $20 in gas just to go see the in-laws.

The best truck is a borrowed one.

So often, people get trapped in these monstrosities because they think they need a vehicle (or two!) that will fulfill the most extreme 1% of their use, so 99% of the time we're driving something that's ungainly, and bleeding our bank accounts dry. A mid-sized electric car, while it can't possibly fulfill every need of the suburban commuter, is perfect for 99% of trips.

But this is real life, not a mental exercise. What do you do when you encounter that 1% problem? In our case, we have a second car, a Honda Fit. 

It's no bigger than my Nissan Leaf, but it does have a gas engine in case we need to go further. Add a rooftop cargo box and you can even fit all the family's stuff for a weekend trip. Remember, people have been taking road trips in things much smaller and less comfortable for decades. It's only recently that our lardy American asses demanded something that sat 8, with TV screens and cupholders galore.

Cute, but even I will agree this looks like a bad idea.

But!  Your spouse isn't adventurous, or packs, well, everything. Hell, you need to pick up some lumber this weekend! There's a simple answer for that too, and it's only going to cost you about $30 a day. 

Borrow or rent a truck for the 1% of the time you need it. It's cheaper and more satisfying than owning one 100% of the time. 

Resale Value and the Electric Car: It's complicated.

Recently, we have read a lot about the electric car and its problem with residual value.

The North American Auto Dealers Association (NADA) just released their figures concerning the Chevy Volt and Nissan Leaf, and found the resale value of both cars was about 40% of their original values after 3 years of ownership. To compare, the Toyota Prius retained almost 55% of its value in the same timeframe.

(the Mitsubishi Car-Shaped Object - oddly absent from residual value reports)

These value figures are misleading. It's hard to ignore the effect that a federal tax credit of $7500 off a new purchase does to the used value of a car, yet the NADA guide does not factor this into their equations. Also, both Leaf and Volt have seen their base prices slashed by $5000 or more since being introduced in 2011.

Calculations...

The base price of a 2011 Nissan Leaf was $32,780. If it retains 39% of that value after 3 years, the residual value of a used example today should be about $12,780. In my research, that number is a little low, but it's in the ballpark.

But what if you subtract the $7500 tax break towards purchase? You're left with an MSRP of $25,280. That's about 50% residual value. What if we factor in today's reduced prices? In that calculation, the 2011 Leaf has a relative value of more than 57% of the new 2014 model.

Conclusions

57% residual value over 3 years is good enough for second place in the Hybrid car category, ahead of the Toyota Prius and just behind the Lexus CT200h. That's not just respectable, it's impressive, considering the size and nature of the EV market.

That said, I still believe that purchasing an electric car, rather than leasing, is the wrong move. Lease deals are very good right now. We also still do not know the long term reliability of these cars, though it should be quite good. Finally, in the few years since their release, electric cars have gotten markedly better in each calendar year, at the same time that their prices have dropped, a trend that should continue.

Leasing the car protects the lessee from unknown long term reliability, while allowing us to reap the benefits of improved technology a few years down the road. It's also cost-effective, with the current deals available.

(haters gonna hate)

Detroit's Dirty Grid

For electricity, most of metro Detroit is served by DTE, the old Detroit Edison utility. Being in the midwest, you can probably imagine what our energy source of choice is, but most people I've asked (n=1) don't really have a clue how much of our electricity comes from coal-powered generators versus methane harvested from cow shit.

That's probably a DTE coal plant in the background. 

For numbers, I used the EPA website Energy and You, which features a handy breakdown of how dirty any particular source of energy is, and the Power Profiler application, which compares your local utility's sources of energy generation to the national average. Let's plug in DTE and see where we stand.

Fun Fact: "Renewables" is mostly burning gas from cow shit and trash. Seriously.

As you can see, we use a disproportionately coal-heavy mix in this area when it comes to power generation. And that's not clean-coal, either. More than a third of all our coal plants were built over 50 years ago, and 87% of our coal burning capacity exceeds the typical 30-year design of a coal powerplant. Further, Michigan has no reserves of its own, so all that coal must be shipped in from elsewhere at great cost. Gas and Nuclear account for a smaller portion of our mix, and renewable energy sources account for very little of the whole. You might be able to imagine what that means for pollution, but let's get a visual anyways.

Clicking embiggens.

Carbon Dioxide and Nitrogen Oxide emissions are meaningfully higher than the national average, and Sulfur Dioxide is more than twice the national average. While it's not a potent greenhouse gas, SO2 is known to be particularly harmful to the respiratory system, and contributes to acid rain. As an aside, "Sulpher?" Seriously, EPA?

What does this mean to the Electric Car driver? There's a lot to parse out here. Let's start with that lovable greenhouse gas, CO2. Compared to the conventionally-engined Nissan Versa, the Leaf would still only generate a little more than half the CO2 over the course of a year - 4.1 tons versus about 2.4 tons for the Leaf. Obviously, a cleaner energy mix would improve that figure even more. 

Sulphurfurpher dioxide isn't really an issue for gas-powered cars, except for those powered by diesel. I can't really find any published data on the tailpipe emissions of sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides in passenger cars, so we can't directly compare. Sorry, asthmatics. 

Finally, what about making that large battery pack? Isn't that pollution-intensive, and shouldn't we count that in the final tally? Recently, the Nissan Leaf was named lowest total carbon footprint by the Automotive Science Group, and the data they ran included looking at the production of the car and battery itself. 

In the end, the data means two things to me. 

1) DTE energy can and should do a better job of diversifying its energy source mix, looking towards renewables like wind and solar to keep emissions down. It's not as if Michigan isn't a good state for alternative energy generation. 

2) Even with Old Smoky DTE supplying the juice, the electric car is still a cleaner mode of transportation than burning gasoline.