Why I sold-off my electric car

It was time for a new car and BMW had just released their first series of electric cars that were affordable as compared to Tesla’s high-price tag which was way above my affordability or interest scale.

As an early-adopter, the idea of an electric vehicle seemed exciting and futuristic and I wanted to be a part of the transportation revolution — so I bought my entry ticket to the future and got myself a BMW i3 in panda colors, because who doesn’t like to own a Panda-like something anyway?

More on my infatuation with pandas later, but for now let me tell you about my first and last day with the car:

With a friend on my side to accompany me in this exciting new journey and who knew a little more about cars than being ‘something with four wheels that takes you from point A to point B,’ we hit the dealership like there’s no tomorrow.

We were greeted and shown the car and of-course it was what I had expected: an angel from the future descending from the heavens of sustainability in steel and carbon fiber body. It was powered by an all-mighty invisible source of energy (electricity) and had left all things earthly (gas) behind.

So I bought it and brought it home.

In a future post, I hope to have a chance to share the numerous funny and crazy stories of my adventures with it, such as missing a new year’s party after taking my friends on a drive-and-charge-on-way adventure that made us celebrate new year’s in a cold parking lot of an abandoned charging station, but the aim of this piece is to simply state why I ultimately choose to give up being an EV-angalist.

I kept the car for a year and I wouldn’t be honest if I told you that I didn’t enjoy driving it, but after 365+ days of struggling with “range anxiety” (which is a real thing with a wikpedia entry) on daily basis, I had to say goodbye to this cute little panda, until it became a more mature product.

But range anxiety wasn’t really the only thing, what did it for me was facing an oxymoron paradox: while I was feeling blissful that I’m using a renewable source of energy (electricity) to power my transport, the electricity that charges the electric vehicle is actually made from mostly non-renewable resources. Like 75% of it being non-renewable:

In 2018, about 4,178 billion kilowatthours (kWh) (or 4.18 trillion kWh) of electricity were generated at utility-scale electricity generation facilities in the United States. About 63% of this electricity generation was from fossil fuels (coal, natural gas, petroleum, and other gases). About 20% was from nuclear energy, and about 17% was from renewable energy sources. source

I write this note not to complain of-course, but rather out of intense interest that I have in EVs and the future of sustainable living — and to also point out that any venture in life is multifaceted and our choices in life are not always necessarily as awesome as we think they are, when seen in the bigger spectrum of life.