I’ve driven gas-electric hybrids for 20 years, but I wanted to step up my environmental game. I thought I’d share the basics of that journey towards increasing electrification, since others may be pondering the same.

My first choice for a new vehicle was a Toyota Prius Prime, a plug-in hybrid electric vehicle (PHEV) that uses 100% electric over the first 40-ish miles and then automatically switches over to the gasoline-fueled internal combustion engine (ICE) after that. Since the U.S. Department of Transportation finds that 95% of trips are less than 35 miles, that seemed like a sensible bridge vehicle to use while the charging infrastructure and EV battery technology improved.

However, after spending two years on a Prime waitlist, I got impatient and somewhat impulsively bought a 100% electric Chevy Bolt EV instead.

The Bolt’s battery pack has an EPA-rated 247-mile range. Though the range is much lower in the winter, even winter ranges easily cover the way I use my car over 99% of the time. It’s very feasilble to go further by refueling at the fast-growing number of public charging stations, but for the other 1% of trips we also do have an ICE-powered vehicle in reserve.

For what it’s worth these are some of my initial impressions of EV life.

While the Bolt is much cheaper (MSRP ~$30,000 with generous tax credits available to many) and much more utilitarian than the Prius and other high-end EVs, it’s easily the smoothest, quietest, and most technologically sophisticated vehicle I’ve driven. I’m not a car enthusiast, but I look forward to driving my Bolt. While many people I know seem to assume EVs will have worse driving performance than ICE vehicles, I’m finding the opposite to be true.

It’s also cool to never again have to do things like add gas, oil, transmission fluid, sparkplugs, fuel filters, and coolant, or make other repairs associated with ICE cars powered by thousands of recurrent explosions. Brakes also last much longer because one-pedal driving has the engine doing much more of the braking, which also regenerates free electricity to slightly extend the range.

I’m not one of those guys who meticulously calculates the cost of electric charging versus the cost of putting gas in the car, but the federal government calculates that the average 2023 Chevy Bolt EUV user will save about $5,000 in fuel costs over 5 years. I tend to keep cars a lot longer than 5 years (current car is 14 years old), so that benefit will grow over time.

Environmentally, it’s not perfect, because Minnesota has a lot of coal fueling its grid. But that is changing rapidly as Minnesota moves to sunset coal use by 2035. Still, the Bolt has a 10 out 10 EPA rating for greenhouse gas emissions and is rated at 115 miles per gallon equivalent (MPGe), which measures the efficiency of vehicles that run on non-liquid fuels.

Charging is truly easy. The vehicle comes with a Level 1 charger that you can plug into a regular three-prong household outlet. A Level 1 charger is the slowest kind of charger, delivering about 4 miles of additional range per hour of charging, or about 96 hours per day. That’s mighty pokey compared to other types of chargers, but a lot of people who don’t drive far or often could get by with it. In my dotage, I probably could.

For a couple grand, minus a nice rebate from my utility company, I put in a Level 2 charger in my garage. The Level 2 delivers about 25 miles of range per hour.  With that, I can easily fully charge a nearly empty battery overnight with cheaper off-peak power rates. So, I start every day with a “full tank,” though “full” is a very complex concept among the legions of EV techno-geeks.

When making longer trips, I’ll use Level 3 chargers at public stations, which deliver about 200 miles of range per hour of charging. That leads to a longer re-fueling stop than I made with my ICE vehicle at gas station. But by the time I take care of my biological needs, appetite, and smartphone addiction, I don’t think that an hour will be so onerous. And again, for the vast majority of my trips I’m only charging in my garage, where there is no waiting for refueling.

Beyond installing a charger, life with an EV truly isn’t that much different than life with an ICE vehicle.

Except for all of the questions I am fielding. That’s definitely different.

You don’t need to become an EV expert to own and operate an EV. EV enthusiasts inhabiting online EV discussion sites can make EV operation seem like quantum physics, but the truth is that you can ignore that level of complexity if you’re not interested in deep analysis of all things EV. And I most assuredly am not interested.

However, you do have to become somewhat of an expert to endure the endless questioning you get from the genuinely curious to the shockingly hostile. “Aren’t you worried that thing will start your house on fire?” “Don’t you know EVs are actually worse for the environment?” “Why get it when gas prices are low now?” “Why not wait for the next generation of improved technology?” “Aren’t you worried about getting stranded?” “Oh, so you’re better than us now?” “How can you afford that?” “Oh now I suppose you’re going to be That Guy who never shuts up about your precious EV?” “Doesn’t range decrease in cold weather?” “What did you pay for X, Y, and Z (EV-specific things)?” “Aren’t EVs going to overwhelm the grid we depend on for our homes?”

That constant barrage of questioning definitely does get tiresome. But so far, that’s the only part of EV life that I dislike.