Not long after buying a Ford E-Transit van for his plumbing business last November, Mitch Smedley sat down with some receipts and a calculator to figure out how much the electric vehicle was saving him on fuel expenses.
A few minutes of number crunching showed he was spending about $110 to $140 a week on fuel for each of the four older, diesel Transits in his fleet. Then he worked out how much electricity he was using to charge the electric model to drive the same distance — about 300 miles a week. The cost: about $9 a week.
“I knew there was going to be some savings because our electricity here is very inexpensive,” said Mr. Smedley, whose business is based in Blue Springs, Mo., just east of Kansas City. “But I was amazed when I worked it out. It makes it really, really cheap to operate.”
In the auto industry’s transition to electric vehicles, passenger vehicles have led the way. In the first quarter of 2023, sales of E.V.s were 45 percent higher than the same period a…
This article was written by Neal E. Boudette and originally published on www.nytimes.com