What's the most ecofrugal car?

Regular readers of this blog may have noticed that I didn't post anything last weekend. That's because we were away visiting some friends down in the D.C. area. Like us, these folks are eco-conscious, and in two major ways, they're ahead of us on the green scale: their house has solar panels, and they drive a plug-in hybrid car. Brian and I have already determined that solar panels aren't really an option for us, and we've now subscribed to a community solar project instead. But on the way home, we got into a discussion of whether we could be driving something more ecofrugal than our small, fairly fuel-efficient Honda Fit. If we had to replace the Fit this year, we wondered, what would we get instead?

Last time we had to make this decision, back around the beginning of 2011, we decided a hybrid car wasn't worth the added cost. It was much more cost-effective to buy an inexpensive, fuel-efficient gas-powered car and pay a little extra for carbon offsets. But since then, the math has changed. Electric vehicles, both battery-powered and plug-in, have grown steadily cheaper, and experts are predicting that they could reach price parity with gasoline vehicles as early as this year. And electric cars were already cheaper than gas vehicles to fuel and maintain. So, in theory, the most ecofrugal ride would be a small car like our Fit, but one that we can plug in to power it.

But in practice, it's not that simple. Because while electric cars are getting cheaper and more prevalent, most of the choices are battery electric vehicles (BEVs). Buy one of these, and you're limited by its driving range. The EV charging network is much bigger than it used to be, but charging stations—especially the ultrafast kind that can power a car in "as little as 30 minutes"—are still nowhere near as easy to find as gas stations. And even if you can find one of these fast chargers, half an hour to refuel is much slower than filling up the tank with gas.

True, today's BEVs have much longer ranges than before, but it's still not always possible to avoid charging up while on the road. Even the longest-range BEV, the $87,000 Lucid Air, can't go more than 520 miles on a charge—not enough to get us all the way to Indianapolis. More affordable options, like the Chevy Bolt or the Nissan Leaf, can go between 200 and 250 miles, which would require us to recharge at least two or three times en route to Indy at a minimum of half an hour per stop. A shorter trip, like the one we made last weekend, might be possible on a single charge, provided we could plug the car in at our destination. But we probably wouldn't want to count on it.

So, if our Fit were to die tomorrow, there's no BEV that could replace it for all our driving. Our best choice would be a plug-in hybrid electric vehicle (PHEV), which would allow us to do most of our driving on battery power alone and have the gas tank as a backup for longer trips. What we'd really love is a PHEV version of our current car, the Fit—a hatchback with folding seats that combines fuel efficiency with ample storage space. But unfortunately, no such car exists. (Non-plug-in hybrid versions of the Fit are available in some parts of the world, but not only does Honda not offer them in the US, it no longer offers the gasoline version either.) 

In fact, there's no PHEV on the market that's even remotely similar to the Fit. When you search for "PHEV hatchback," the only model you find is the Hyundai Ioniq, which is no longer available; Hyundai now makes the all-electric version only. Lists of the top PHEVs at sites like Edmunds and US News are dominated by SUVs and luxury cars, with only one non-luxury sedan (the Prius Prime) making the cut. The closest thing to our Fit would be a smallish "crossover" SUV like the Kia Niro, but it's still an SUV, and we hate SUVs. Even an electric SUV that doesn't guzzle gas is still big, heavy, clumsy, hard to park, and dangerous to everyone else on the road. We just aren't SUV people, and we never will be.

After discussing this dilemma a bit, Brian proposed another solution: We could get a BEV as our main car and keep the Fit as a backup. The vast majority of all trips we make are well within the range of the Bolt or the Leaf, so we'd only need the Fit for long drives. But there are obvious downsides to this plan as well. Although our driveway is technically big enough for two cars, it's a tight fit, and keeping two cars parked there all year round would leave us with no place to dump the snow after a big snowfall. (Not that we've had any of those this winter, but we can't assume it's ceased to be a problem.) And even if we weren't driving it often, the Fit would still need insurance and at least some maintenance every year. So owning two cars would definitely be more expensive than owning just one, even a more expensive one.

Perhaps a better option would be to buy a BEV and plan to rent a car for long trips. Renting a car for just a few trips every year would be a bit of a hassle, but almost certainly cheaper than maintaining and insuring a second car year round. And we might not have to keep doing it indefinitely, since the charging network could eventually get good enough to make taking the BEV all the way to Indy a reasonable option. Our biggest concern is that this may not happen by the time gas-powered cars are phased out completely. Then it will be impractical to drive across the country with our BEV and impossible to rent a gas-powered car for the purpose. Under those circumstances, our only choices will be to fly out to Indy for the holidays—which has a much bigger carbon footprint than driving a fuel-efficient car with two people in it—or make the drive significantly longer than it is now, possibly spanning multiple days. Or, I guess, stay home.

Of the electric options available now, this BEV-plus-rental setup is probably the best. But for us, it seems like the best approach of all is to keep our little Fit running as long as possible. Then we can hope that, by the time we're finally ready to replace it, there will be more options that actually work for us: either PHEVs that fit our preferences or EVs and chargers that can reasonably take us 700 miles in one day. Our failure to jump on the EV bandwagon right now may damage our green cred, but it gives us the best chance of making the switch in a way that will work for us long-term. And you can buy an awful lot of carbon offsets for the price of an EV you're not really happy with.