Time to diversify your garage
With all of this talk about range anxiety, its completely understandable that people are a little stressed out just thinking about replacing their familiar gas guzzlers with an emissions free electric car.
We get it. It’s new and it’s unfamiliar. So there’s a lot to think through, but that doesn’t mean you should discount them so soon. In his October 20th post, Gas2.0 Editor Nick Chambers points out a compelling statistic: according to the 2001 US Department of Transportation National Household Travel Survey (NHTS), the average person drives their personal vehicle less than 23 miles a day, which is more than covered by the CODA’s minimum 90 mile range.
Still, the questions persist, “What if I want to go on a road trip over the weekend? Or what if an emergency comes up and I need to drive further than I normally do?”
These concerns are understandable, but perhaps a bit irrational. Nick may have put it best, “So, if the average person drives a quarter of the distance an electric car is capable of going in a given day, why do people still say that they aren’t practical? It certainly isn’t a feeling based in how people actually use their cars. No, it’s more of a feeling based on our obsession with risk aversion—trying to avoid potential problems even if those problems don’t crop up during 95% of the rest of our lives.”
Our solution? A hybrid garage. No, we don’t mean a garage of hybrid vehicles. What we mean is a garage with a CODA electric car for every day commuting and a conventional car (that gets high gas mileage, please) that will get you where you need to go on those rare occasions when you need more than your 90-120 mile CODA range. And since most US households (92%) already have two vehicles, the idea of having two different cars for different purposes shouldn’t be news to anyone.
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