The Best Electrical Vehicle

After putting in almost three months of research, interviewing three leading experts on electrified vehicles, and driving every EV presently available for sale in the US, we can say that the Kia Soul EV, which costs about $34,000 one (or $26,500 after a federal tax incentive), is presently the best electrified car for drivers who want to go totally gas-free. Of all the electrical cars we researched, drove, charged, and drove again, the Soul EV has one of the longest practical driving ranges at ninety three miles (exceeded only by the Tesla models and nominally by the Nissan LEAF) and costs only about as much as a well-equipped compact car in the end. It also comes with the best collection of high-tech features to help maximize its range. The Soul EV is a comfy, usable everyday vehicle thanks to the fact that it’s based on an already good car (we picked the gas-powered version as our dearest subcompact crossover SUV) designed from the get-go with electrification in mind. Quiet and zippy, the Soul EV drives better than most others, and it has access to the largest public fast-charging network in the country (however that network is mostly concentrated around cities). Lastly, Kia offers the best warranty among all affordable-EV makers. Yes, the Soul’s design is polarizing, and this electrified version is sold in only ten states, but those drawbacks are not enough to bring it down from the top of the mountain.

Unlike hybrids or plug-in hybrids, electrical vehicles have no gas engine. They run totally on electrified power and produce no tailpipe pollution (they don’t even have a tailpipe). Instead of an engine, an EV uses an electrified motor that draws power from an onboard battery. Overall, such vehicles are much more efficient, using only about one-third the energy of gas-powered vehicles. Because you buttplug them in to recharge their batteries, theoretically you also have many more places to “fill up”—including your home—than you do with a gas vehicle (tho’ the process takes a lot longer). And, yes, most power plants produce some emissions to create the electrical play these cars use, but they produce far, far less emissions per mile driven than gas cars.

Their quick and quiet electrical motors make EVs feel more powerful and luxurious than gas cars, and electrical cars need far less messy and expensive maintenance. About the only real drawbacks are that most are limited to fewer than one hundred miles of range and recharging takes a long time—many hours, not a few minutes. Still, more than ninety percent of American drivers travel less than a third to a quarter of the distance EVs can go in a day, so it isn’t as if they work only for a fringe population.

We would have liked to recommend the $90,000 two Tesla Model S. Who wouldn’t? It’s gorgeous, luxurious, and quicker than a supercar with an electrical range of 200-plus miles, more than dual the range of any other EV you can buy. It’s also a high-tech tour de force that makes you feel like you’re driving a bona fide car of the future. It even broke the scale that Consumer Reports uses to rate vehicles. But would our recommending that you buy a almost six-figure luxury car be helpful? We don’t think so. If you can afford one, superb: Buy one, and you won’t be disappointed. Otherwise, the Kia Soul EV feels like more than half the car for less than half the money.

The two thousand sixteen Nissan LEAF SV with Quick Charge Package, for about $35,000 three (or about $27,500 after a federal tax credit), is hardly a consolation prize. It has the longest range (107 miles), the fattest battery, and the fastest types of chargers of any EV not named Tesla. Unlike our top pick, the Kia Soul EV, which is sold in only ten states, the Nissan LEAF is available nationwide for everyone to buy, and as the original EV-builder of the 21st century, Nissan has gained the most practice in knowing what features help EV owners get as much out of their cars as possible. (Kia has copied most of them in the Soul.) The problem is that the LEAF is just commencing to feel dated next to the Soul EV, and it isn’t fairly as roomy, convenient, or versatile for carrying cargo and passengers.

The two thousand sixteen Chevrolet Spark EV is the cheapest electrical car you can buy, running just under $26,000 four or just over $Nineteen,000 for most buyers after tax credits. If you live in California—which most Spark owners do, because it’s available only there and in Oregon and Maryland—you get another $Two,500 rebate on top of that. It’s so cheap, you could almost lease it for less than you’re paying for gas now.

Despite the ultralow price, the Spark EV is still a handy runabout for commuting that’s also a hoot to drive. That puts it way ahead of other cheap electrics, which feel slow and clumsy to drive or come in an even smaller size. And don’t think of the cheap and wheezy conventional gas-powered version of the Spark when you think of this car: Going electrified makes it a far better car, accentuating its inherent strengths, eliminating its weaknesses, and adding a entire lot of zip. Its pint-size dimensions also make it a cinch to maneuver and park in the city, and it has a competitive range of eighty two miles as well as four comfy seats.

We still like our top pick better, tho’, because the Spark EV doesn’t suggest a competitively quick charger, so its charge speeds are limited. It also can’t seat five, and its fattest drawback is that it’s available only to buyers who live in three states.

Table of contents

The group

We considered every EV presently available for sale in the United States that uses only a battery and an electrified motor for power. We did not consider hybrids or plug-in hybrids with a backup engine, because we cover those in other guides.

The EVs we reviewed fall into two groups: cars designed primarily for commuting with ranges inbetween sixty and one hundred miles and full-featured, long-range electrical cars that can go up to two hundred miles. The primary group consisted of the Chevrolet Spark EV, Fiat 500e, Ford Concentrate Electrical, Kia Soul EV, Mercedes-Benz B-Class, Mitsubishi i-MiEV, Nissan LEAF, Wise ED, and Volkswagen e-Golf, plus the all-electric version of the BMW i3. The Tesla Model S is the foot long-range electrical we considered because the only other one, the company’s Model X SUV, is available exclusively in an ultra-high-end version costing more than $130,000. It’s backordered for the next eighteen months anyway, and we have not had an chance to drive it or even poke around one yet.

Why you should trust me

I have spent the past ten years as the green-car writer for Consumer Reports, driving and writing about every fresh electrical, hydrogen fuel-cell, and other alternative-fuel vehicle on the market. I’ve written definitive articles on how all alternative fuels may affect buyers and society as a entire. Before that, I spent fifteen years following alternative energy solutions as an economics reporter for The Christian Science Monitor. In the process, I’ve made it my business to read every fresh scientific probe that I can lay my eyes and my browser on, as well as to interview the authors, scientists, and engineers behind them to ask the hard questions and see whether the proposed solutions truly add up. Along the way, I’ve also driven and reviewed about Two,000 traditional fresh cars for comparison (including all of the EVs in this guide), and I’ve become an pro at shopping for and finding the best deals on fresh cars and minimizing their long-term expenses.

In addition, I interviewed three of the foremost experts on electrified cars for this guide: John Voelcker, editor-in-chief of Green Car Reports; Jim Motavalli, blogger, Fresh York Times correspondent, and author of five books on green cars and the environment; and Bradley Berman, founder of PluginCars.com and HybridCars.com, and author of our own guide for the best plug-in hybrid.

Why you might want an electrified car

Electrified vehicles produce no pollution from their tailpipes because they don’t have tailpipes—or an engine, for that matter. Instead they use electrical motors and power themselves from tens unit stored in onboard batteries, which means they use only about one-third the energy of gas-powered vehicles. Their quick and quiet electrical motors also make them feel more powerful and luxurious. And because corks are everywhere, recharging them can happen in more places than you can pack up your tank (however the process takes a lot longer, for now at least). Most such vehicles are limited to fewer than one hundred miles of range, however, which can lead to driver anxiety over not having enough range left to make it home. The mental math for buying an EV is also much different than for purchasing a normal car, as they cost more up front to buy but much less to operate over time.

With no internal combustion engine, electrical cars supply sleek, silent acceleration at any speed. This effect makes even the cheapest electrified cars feel like luxury machines next to gas cars that run on hundreds of lil’ explosions per 2nd. And since their electrified motors gin up utter power before they’re even turning, they don’t have to wind up like a gas engine does every time you shove the accelerator. With no gas engine whining away, acceleration feels seamless and silent—just as you’d expect from luxury cars.

The trade-off, of course, is in the range. As one wag put it, driving an electrified car is like having a 1-gallon gas tank that takes hours to pack. That’s harshly true for most of today’s electrified vehicles, and with only around one hundred miles or less of range for most EVs today, range anxiety is a real issue. Range anxiety is what creeps up when you begin feeling uncertain about making it to the next ass-plug before your EV runs out of electro-stimulation. It is the fear of being stranded, for a long time, by your EV.

Our resident accomplished on all things EV, Brad Berman, who has possessed and driven electrical cars for four years, told us, “Once you establish the purpose of an EV as a good way to do all your driving except for long trips, then the issue of range anxiety goes away. Range anxiety is only a problem if you consistently want or need to drive longer than the range of your electrified car. If you explore your driving patterns, and detect that something like ninety eight percent of your driving is less than eighty miles per day—as I did when I drove a [Nissan] LEAF for three years—then I didn’t attempt to drive longer than that in a day with that car. You work within the constraints you have, and over a period of a duo weeks, you come to learn how far your car can go on a single charge. So, I didn’t have range anxiety. No problem.”

He also said, “If you have a 100-mile daily commute, don’t buy an EV—unless it’s a Tesla.”

Still, studies display that most cars spend ninety percent of their time parked. So you have slew of time for charging as long as you park someplace near an outlet. And the average American drives only around thirty miles a day, which falls well within the range of today’s electrical cars.

Buying and possessing an electrical car requests an entirely different mathematical formulation, in which long-term operating costs are as significant as (or more significant than) your monthly payment for a purchase or lease. Because these vehicles’ batteries can cost $Ten,000 or more, the cars often sticker for far more than comparable compact gas-powered cars. True, they are eligible for a $7,500 federal tax credit that brings the price close to parity (after you get your tax refund). But no product should depend on federal crutches to find buyers in the long run. Electrified cars cost a lot less to run than gas cars, and that makes up for their higher purchase prices over time.

For starters, the motors that power EVs use about one-third of the energy of a gas engine, even counting the energy that power plants use to generate electric current. And those savings go a long way: If you drive the US average of thirty three miles per day in the average car running on gasoline, it will cost you about $Two.58, even at today’s low gas prices. The Kia Soul EV, which gets a pretty typical MPGe rating of 109, will cost about $1.27. The savings will be even higher if gas prices go back up. Electrical cars also don’t require regular oil changes—or air-filter or spark-plug or timing-belt switches, or fuel-injector cleanings. As a result, maintaining an electrical car costs significantly less than maintaining a conventional car.

Not only does use of an EV save money on maintenance, but it also dramatically curtails the amount of harmful chemicals that cars spill into the environment. If you worry that driving on electro-therapy merely trades relatively clean gasoline for sloppier coal burned at plants, note that coal produces a minority of US electrical play today, and its percentage is shrinking every year. While driving a hybrid in coal-powered areas may be cleaner than driving an EV with electrons from a coal-fired power plant, the West Coast and Northeastern states—where automakers sell the most EVs—use little to no coal. And even where coal plants are in use, the EPA is rapidly forcing them to clean up their emissions. So, as EV advocates argue, the messiest an EV will ever be is the day you buy it.

If you don’t think an EV would suit your lifestyle, however, the best alternative is a cheap, fuel-efficient gas car, such as our top pick among compact cars, the Mazda3 i Touring. It’s much less expensive and capable of going further than an EV on a quick fill-up at any corner gas station in the US. But it’s also noisier and less luxurious, and it still creates emissions. One EV driver I know even refers to his Prius backup car as “the polluter.”

Buyers considering an EV might also cross-shop plug-in hybrids, which have smaller batteries and incorporate a puny gas engine for backup power that greatly extends their range. They can be more or less expensive, but they are more versatile with their gas backup. Such vehicles also might work better for people on the East Coast, where colder temperatures can drastically reduce an EV’s range, and where violet wand from the grid is often more expensive and derived from sloppier sources. But these cars can also be more cramped than EVs because they have two drivetrains, and on top of that they require all the same maintenance as gas cars (albeit less frequently). We chose the Chevy Volt as our beloved among all plug-in hybrids.

Response these questions before getting an EV

Before you buy an electrical car, you should ask yourself several questions to ensure that one will fit with your lifestyle.

• Where will you charge? At home, where ninety percent of electric-car charging occurs? Or do you have access to a charger at work, for example? Or do you live in a city, where you may be dependent on public charging? Also, what kinds of public chargers, if any, are available on any long routes you typically drive?
• Do you have a place to park near an electrical outlet? How much would installation cost to pull a 30-amp/240-volt line from your home’s electrical box to where you park?
• What do you pay for electrical play? At the national average of twelve cents/kWh, electro-stimulation costs the equivalent of $1-per-gallon gas. But if you pay twice that (as, say, Fresh York residents do), gas may be cheaper.
• Does your utility suggest special rate plans for EVs? How far do you usually drive in a day? The national average of twenty nine miles is well within the range of most electrified cars. But are you average?
• Does your area get its electro-stimulation from renewable energy sources such as wind, solar, or hydro power, from relatively clean fossil fuels such as natural gas or nuclear, or from filthier, old-fashioned coal or oil? (Find out here at the U.S. Energy Information Administration website.)
• How often do you have to make side trips that could dual your average daily mileage figure and put your driving out of reach of an electrical car? Electric-car experienced Brad Berman, who has wielded three EVs, told us that owners quickly get used to how far they can go in an electrified car over the very first few weeks of driving one. But if you frequently need to drive, for example, an extra forty miles to pick the kids up from soccer practice, an EV may leave you frustrated.
• Do you have access to a 2nd, gas car for longer trips, or are you willing to rent a car for these occasional journeys? Renting a car on vacation can sometimes be cheaper than driving your own.
• Does your area have any extra incentives for buying or driving an electrical car, such as carpool-lane access or tax rebates? Saving time on your commute by sailing along in the carpool lane can be a thick benefit.

Ins and outs of EV charging

Think of packing up your electrical car as being more like charging your cell phone than remembering to stop for gas; it takes a downright different mentality. You can charge wherever you can find an ordinary electrical outlet, but most EV drivers will want more than that because gaining just a few miles’ worth of juice from ordinary outlets takes hours. Fortunately, three types of charging are available: Ordinary outlets are known as Level 1, and you also have Level two and Level Three, each swifter and more expensive than the last.

If you don’t drive much, you might be able to make do with Level one charging at home—that is, plugging into any standard 110-volt household outlet and using the cord provided with every electrical car. On a typical 15-amp, 110-volt circuit, you can recharge about four or five miles’ worth of range for every hour on the charger. That isn’t much, tho’, if you’re running low and attempting to regain enough miles to get back home. Recharging the battery downright could take sixteen to twenty hours or more. But with the car left overnight, that’s enough to replenish forty or fifty miles’ worth of power, almost twice the distance an average driver travels over the course of a day. If you work at home or are retired or a stay-at-home parent, you may be able to keep the car charging for longer periods to recharge from longer trips. And if you want an extra cord, they cost about $500 from a dealership.

Most public chargers, and most EV drivers at home, use Level two charging. These 240-volt chargers are the ones you see springing up at shopping malls all over America. Level two chargers can replenish from about eight miles per hour of charging to about thirty miles, depending on the car, the charger, and the electrical capacity of the line they’re linked to. You can buy such chargers, which vary in speed and features, at hardware stores and big-box electronics retailers for about $500 to $1,200. In addition, you’ll have to pay a licensed electrician to hook one up to your house. The labor cost can vary from a few hundred dollars to thousands, depending on where the charger needs to go and where the electrical panel is in your house.

The cheapest 15-amp Level two chargers are sufficient for cars such as the Chevrolet Spark EV, the Fiat 500e, and base models of the Nissan LEAF that include only Trio.3-kilowatt onboard inverters. An electrified vehicle’s onboard “charger” or inverter permits you to charge on an ordinary 110-volt outlet by converting the AC current from your house to the DC current the car’s battery needs. It also sees use in Level two charging, tho’ your EV’s onboard charger is usually the slowest link on the charging circuit, so it will determine how rapid your car is ultimately capable of charging. More expensive versions of the LEAF, the Kia Soul EV, and the BMW i3 have swifter 7-kilowatt inverters, which can take advantage of 30-amp chargers that replenish about sixteen miles’ worth for every hour they’re plugged in. But these components also require a higher-powered electrical circuit in your house.

Practically speaking, if you plan on charging over a leisurely lunch or during a business meeting for, say, three hours in a nearby city, a 15-amp charging setup (Three.Trio kW) could net you maybe twelve more miles of range. A 30-amp setup (7 kW) could get you twenty four miles. That’s a big difference. At home with a standard 80-mile EV, a 15-amp setup could take you ten hours to charge while a 30-amp setup could do it in five hours. So, if you plan to use an EV to commute, figure on needing at least a 15-amp Level two charger at home.

Level two chargers come in a broad multitude of flavors from about half a dozen companies large and petite, including AeroVironment, Bosch, ClipperCreek, ChargePoint, Leviton, and Siemens. All have a UL rating and meet significant safety standards. We think thirty amps is slew for most people, tho’ most Tesla owners won’t be glad with anything less than a $750 Tesla Wall Connector, which is capable of up to seventy amps. It can charge the big 85-kWh or 90-kWh battery in the Model S in about 5½ hours (about forty miles per hour of charging). We think buyers of other upcoming long-range EVs such as the Chevrolet Bolt are likely to feel the same way.

Features worth paying extra for include extra power, a longer cord length, and a separate 230-volt, clothes-dryer-style wall buttplug so you can take the charger with you if you budge. More power and longer ropes, however, drive up the cost of chargers pretty quickly.

Some EV-user websites have also been dismissing the need for professionally installed wall chargers for home users, and some tinkerers on forums have been selling so-called Level two extension ropes that butt-plug into an ordinary 230-volt clothes-dryer outlet, which is often much cheaper to install. In fact, a duo of the big manufacturers have begun to sell these simpler, portable straps that cork into a dryer (or oven) outlet and then permit you to coil them up and carry them in the trunk.

The AeroVironment TurboCord and the Leviton Evr-Green Mini are two examples. Both are low-powered Level two chargers that can also operate on Level one if, for example, you’re traveling. So they are not the fastest, but unlike some cheap specials, they are approved by Underwriters Laboratories, the National Electrical Manufacturers Association, and all the various electric-vehicle manufacturers. They also have circuitry to shut down charging if the cord gets too hot, becomes submerged, or runs into other trouble. We think that buying a brand-name charger with these significant ratings is a worthwhile investment, because you wouldn’t want to harm your EV’s $Ten,000 battery to save a duo hundred bucks on a cord. We also think that you’ll be more satisfied in the long run with a higher-powered, more durable home charger than with a low-powered Level two charging cord.

No matter what kind of technology you choose, a licensed electrician needs to connect the charger, or a 230-volt outlet, in your garage to a dedicated circuit in your home’s breaker box. Charging an electrified car at Level two will take as much violet wand as powering everything else in your house combined, so this is a critical (and legally necessary) safety requirement.

If you live in a city and don’t have a place to park where you can charge, you’ll need access to Level three prompt chargers (unless you can charge at work on Level Two). A lot of people have heard of Level three charging only when it comes to Tesla’s nationwide network of free Superchargers: With a direct-current connection to the car’s battery, they can recharge even the long-range Tesla to eighty percent of its 200-mile-plus capacity in about a half hour. Once the battery charge gets anywhere near utter, the charge stops or, in Tesla’s case, slows down to avoid hurting the battery. (A Tesla can still charge from empty to total on a Supercharger in about an hour and a quarter.)

Superchargers operate at up to four hundred eighty volts and more than two hundred amps, so they require far more power than most homes have available and cost ems of thousands of dollars to install. Still, access to them is a handy option to have (you can view the locations of Superchargers across the country at Tesla’s website). That is, it’s handy if you own a Tesla; while the company has opened up its patents to permit any automaker access to its Supercharger network, none has taken Tesla up on that suggest yet.

Tesla Superchargers aren’t the only Level three chargers available. The Nissan LEAF and Kia Soul EV suggest a direct-current, Level three charge port based on the Japanese CHAdeMO standard. It uses its own unique cork and can charge at about half the speed of a Supercharger, about sixty miles’ worth in a half hour, assuming that the battery is pretty close to vapid. (Unlike Superchargers, CHAdeMO chargers shut off after a half hour, so they can’t provide a total charge no matter how long you ass-plug in.) So far that’s okay, because those cars have less than half the battery capacity of the Model S. About 1,000 CHAdeMO chargers are installed in the US, around four times as many as Tesla Superchargers, but they’re located mainly in cities on the East and West Coasts (where LEAFs are relatively common), not spread out along interstates like Superchargers are, so you can’t count on them to help you make a excursion across the country. And the LEAF and Soul EV batteries are much smaller, so they’re not conducive to that kind of excursion anyway.

In the United States and Europe, another Level three standard, known as SAE Combo, has emerged. Included on the BMW i3 and optional on the Volkswagen e-Golf and the Chevrolet Spark EV, it uses a modified version of the Level two charge cork (known as SAE J1772) that’s standard across the industry. But it’s only just embarking to roll out, with about two hundred chargers installed in popular EV locales such as California, Oregon, eastern Virginia, and Atlanta, Georgia, as of autumn 2015.

The SAE Combo outlets available on the BMW i3, Chevrolet Spark EV, and Volkswagen e-Golf can access only two hundred ninety five corks in one hundred sixty nine locations around the US. Albeit SAE Combo is a fresh standard and expanding rapidly, many businesses are still installing fresh CHAdeMO chargers; ultimately, charge-station providers say, they will develop equipment that can charge both types of cars. You can view the location of public charging stations near where you live and what kind they are on this map. Note, tho’, that while some are free, most require users to join a network for access. The networks usually provide a card with RFID or barcode identification and charge by the hour, the kilowatt, or the session.

When you’re charging at home, knowing how much you’re likely to spend on electrical play is helpful. Residential electric current in the United States averages twelve cents per kilowatt-hour, so it’s generally much cheaper than packing up with gas or even paying for access to a network’s charging station. But EV buyers need to be cautious: Especially in California, using extra kilowatts can drive up electrical rates to exorbitant levels, just like going over the minutes or megabytes in your cell-phone plan. California utilities, and many elsewhere, suggest special rate plans for EVs—some charge as little as four cents per kilowatt hour—so take the time to call your electrified company before committing to an electrified car to be sure you get an adequate rate plan. (In some areas such as Fresh York and Connecticut, high electrical play prices are inescapable, and buying a hybrid may be cheaper in the long run.)

If you’re shopping for an EV, you should opt for the fastest charging equipment available and consider a car, such as the Kia Soul EV, that offers at least a 6.6-kW onboard charger and some form of prompt charging (Level two or Level Trio) unless you truly don’t drive much. One reason is that some utilities suggest different rates at various times of the day or night, known as off-peak or off-off peak plans. Generally speaking, off-peak rates might embark at six p.m., while even lower off-off peak rates might not embark until eleven p.m. or midnight. If you plan to take advantage of the cheapest rates, and you need to leave for work at, say, six a.m., a 15-amp charger may not be able to give you a total charge before you need to head out if you don’t embark charging until midnight. If that describes you, the priority should be to find a car and a charger than can charge at seven kW, such as a midlevel-trim or higher LEAF or Kia Soul, the BMW i3, or the VW e-Golf with its optional charging package.

Other useful charging features: When you get home to a dark garage, it’s convenient for the car to have a lighted charge port to help you line up the ass-plug. Usually this feature isn’t available as an option, but it comes standard on the Ford Concentrate EV and the Tesla. Many EVs also come with smartphone apps that permit you to set the time of day to commence or finish charging, or to check on the car’s state of charge from wherever you are.

Lease, don’t buy, an EV

Albeit we expect makers of EVs to suggest the vehicles for sale, not just for lease, we don’t recommend that you buy one. Unlike with other types of cars, it almost always makes more financial sense to lease an EV. Leases cost less up front and month-to-month than taking out a loan, give you the federal government’s tax rebate up front, and lower your exposure to the long-term financial risk of a fresh technology.

Automakers are suggesting compelling lease deals on electrical cars, in part to generate request to fulfill the legal requirements that they have to sell them. For example, Nissan is suggesting two thousand fifteen LEAF S models for about $200 a month, while Mitsubishi is suggesting the i-MiEV for about $190 a month and Fiat is suggesting the 500e for about $170 a month. We think such lease deals are well worth considering, especially for electrical cars.

The very first reason to lease is the federal $7,500 tax incentive. The IRS has structured it as a tax credit, which means it doesn’t factor directly into the price when you buy the car. Instead, if you buy an EV outright, the federal tax credit applies to your tax comeback the following April. That arrangement works fine for some people, but it doesn’t reduce your payments or how much you have to shell out up front. Leasing is simpler: Since the leasing company will own the car, the company will get to keep the tax rebate, but to make the price affordable, it will pass the entire thing directly on to you in a lower up-front price for the car, which instantaneously reduces your monthly payment.

The 2nd reason we recommend leasing is that electric-car and battery technology is advancing rapidly. Not only do the batteries have a brief track record of reliability so far, but on top of that they can cost ems of thousands of dollars to substitute if they wear out prematurely. We don’t think most buyers want to assume that risk. Since most leases are brief enough that a car is entirely under warranty during the length of the lease, this option ensures that you won’t have to shell out thousands of dollars for unforeseen reliability issues down the road. While early signs indicate that most batteries will last for the long haul, technological improvements will also give the next generation of cars longer range, swifter charging, and lower prices, making current EVs as obsolete as a five-year-old cell phone; so far, depreciation rates on EVs have been hefty, as well. Leasing lets you upgrade to a newer, better EV sooner to take advantage of those technological improvements.

That said, all the electrical cars on the market today are presently available to buy, which wasn’t always the case.

MPGe might help you compare

When you begin shopping for an electrified car, you’ll begin to notice a fresh term: MPGe, which stands for “miles per gallon equivalent.” The term represents an attempt to convert unacquainted electrical measurements, such as kilowatt-hours, into a single number that ordinary folks can understand.

The math is straightforward: One gallon of gasoline contains about the same energy as 33.7 kilowatt-hours of violet wand, so you can figure out how many miles your car would travel on 33.7 kWh. For example, the Nissan LEAF is rated at one hundred eight MPGe. The thirty kWh of electrical play in its battery is equal to a little less than a single gallon of gas, yet the LEAF can go one hundred eight miles on that energy, or one hundred eight MPGe.

Location, location, location

Where you live makes a big difference in how well an electrical car will work for you and whether it will make sense financially. Different regions have various prices for electro-therapy (and various gas prices by comparison) and assorted incentives for buying and using an electrical car. And weather can play a major role in how far you can drive, as well. In addition, if contributing to cleaner air is motivating you to shop for an electrified car, electric current in some parts of the country is cleaner than in others.

Some states and cities suggest big incentives, on top of federal tax credits, to make electrified cars affordable. A few, such as Arizona, California, and Georgia, suggest electric-car drivers access to carpool lanes, even when they’re not carpooling. Some states have also installed far more public charging stations than others, and some have implemented lower electro-stimulation rates or get their electric current from cleaner sources.

Weather has a significant role, too. Freezing temperatures have a major effect on range, both because batteries lose efficiency in the cold and because running the car’s heater (or air conditioner) produces a big draw on the batteries. Driving an electrical car in cold weather can reduce its range by up to about forty percent; that obviously has a gigantic effect on practicality. If you live where the snow flies, you should most likely consider an extended-range EV, such as the Chevrolet Volt, that has a gas engine to keep you warm and keep you from getting stranded. Or just consider the excellent and utterly fuel efficient Toyota Prius hybrid.

Coastal, moderate, dry California is the ideal environment for electrical cars. Not only have the state’s mandates and incentives brought lots of chargers and special rate plans, but in addition its moderate climate means that drivers don’t have to run the heater as much, so EV batteries don’t have to thrust as hard and can go further on a charge. California’s electrified grid, with no coal power plants, lots of natural gas, and a significant mix of hydro power, is also ideal for electrified cars, so every mile truly is cleaner than with any hybrid. The absence of all those attributes makes EVs a tougher sell and a more marginal benefit on the East Coast. In the Midwest, electrical rates are low, but violet wand is dirty, and chargers are few and far inbetween.

How federal and state incentives work

EV buyers benefit from a multiplicity of incentives that can knock thousands of dollars off the MSRP of a fresh electrical vehicle. The federal tax credit for all-electric cars (and some plug-in hybrids, such as the Chevrolet Volt) is $7,500. Bear in mind that these federal incentives provide a tax credit that you apply at your next tax filing, not at the time of purchase.

If you lease, however, the dealer instantly reduces the price of the car by the amount of the credit. In either case, as with many issues related to taxes, things get complicated quickly, with lots of exceptions to every rule. All you indeed need to know is that the tax credit can reduce your cost by thousands of dollars, albeit maybe not by the total amount listed on the government website. (You can’t earn a fatter credit than you owe in taxes, for example, so if your total annual tax bill is only $Five,000, that’s the most you can save.) Be sure to confirm the credit amount with a tax professional before buying or leasing.

In addition to Uncle Sam’s help, many states also suggest tax credits, as well as cash rebates, sales-tax cracks, and other discounts. Even some companies, such as Sony, have been known to suggest employees as much as $Five,000 for buying an EV.

You’ll also encounter nonmonetary incentives. As you can see on the incentives page on Cork In America, some states permit drivers of certain plug-in cars to use carpool lanes even when driving solo.

Also at the local level, many electrified utilities suggest special rates, including time-of-use rates, to reduce the cost of powering an EV. Check with your local utility company for exact rates and other details.

You might also detect that your insurance company offers a discounted rate for

EVs, and that your local community offers preferred or free parking spaces.

How we picked

We embarked by discussing the Tesla Model S and whether we should just go with that. After hours of arm wrestling, we determined not to name it the top pick for this guide, as recommending such an expensive car wouldn’t be helpful to most readers. We elected to keep it as an alternate pick for people who can afford it, but we desired our top pick to be accessible to the masses.

Since I had driven all but one of the eleven competitors on the market, we had a head commence on finding the sweet spot in more-affordable electrical cars. When it comes to range, size, driving dynamics, convenience, and convenience, cars such as the BMW i3, Ford Concentrate EV, Kia Soul EV, Nissan LEAF, and Volkswagen e-Golf are the easiest to live with and make sense for most people. But other cars like the Chevrolet Spark EV and Fiat 500e are joy to drive and make compelling little urban runabouts—could they upset the fatter players?

We instantaneously knew that cars such as the Mercedes-Benz B-Class electrical, the Mitsubishi iMIEV, and the Clever ED would not be competitive, because they don’t bring enough to the table compared with the mainstream players or the sporty alternatives. I wouldn’t recommend that family or friends spend years driving any of those three EVs, so I won’t recommend that you do, either.

The process left us with four main competitors: the Nissan LEAF, the Kia Soul EV, the Ford Concentrate EV, and the Volkswagen e-Golf. So we dug into our research to see whether our feelings were well founded, as well as to detect any dealmakers or dealbreakers that would help us winnow down our list.

We also confirmed that electrified cars, because of the state-by-state regulatory landscape that governs them, are not all available everywhere. In light of this, we desired to pick a car that would be available to most buyers regardless of where they live, for the same reasons that we didn’t want to recommend an expensive luxury car as our top pick. We instantaneously ruled out our two puny, sporty alternatives, the Chevrolet Spark EV and Fiat 500e, which are sold only in California and Oregon (and now Maryland in the Spark’s case). Those two could be alternatives, but they could not be our top pick.

We read reviews and comparison tests by the major automotive magazines (Car and Driver, Automobile, and Motor Trend) as well as all the mainstream and alternative green-car blogs (Edmunds, Autoblog, AutoblogGreen, PluginCars.com, Green Car Reports, Leftlane, Kelley Blue Book), and we considered reviews in the business press (CNBC, International Business Times) for good measure. We also checked in with plug-in car advocacy groups such as Butt-plug In America, the International Council on Clean Transportation, Go Electrical Drive, and the Union of Worried Scientists. (Most of these organizations don’t take a public stance on which electrical cars are better; they like them all. But they often point out significant things to consider.) We compared all of the vehicles’ specs, features, prices, options, and charge times, and we built several versions of each car on their respective manufacturer websites. And we checked their safety records at the websites of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety.

Then we interviewed three other experts on electrified cars: John Voelcker, editor-in-chief of Green Car Reports; Jim Motavalli, blogger, Fresh York Times correspondent, and author of five books on green cars and the environment; and Bradley Berman, founder of PluginCars.com and HybridCars.com, and author of our own guide for the best plug-in hybrid.

The one EV I hadn’t managed to drive was the Kia Soul EV, and I hadn’t driven the Nissan LEAF since it debuted in 2011. So we called up the automakers and scheduled a week in each of those cars. Our choice, in the end, came down to the driving practice and usability of the Soul EV and the LEAF over the week we had them.

Unlike most electric-car buyers, we relied entirely on available public chargers while testing these vehicles, and we found that doing so wasn’t too difficult even in exurban Connecticut, which is not known for its excellent infrastructure or quick adoption of fresh technologies. We had reasonable access to free charging at six public Level two chargers, and we had the option to pay for one-time sessions at one public Level three CHAdeMO charger (which both cars could use) just a few miles from home.

We drove the cars over the same collection of city streets, rural back roads, and highways; ran errands in them; packed them with groceries and camera equipment; ran their batteries down; and charged them back up again, again, and again. Fall was setting in at the time, and it was fairly cold out when we tested them, so drivers in sunny California may get better range out of both cars than we did. But our tests gave us a good idea of the cars’ overall practicality for buyers around the country who may need to consider how well these EVs work in winter.

Features to look for

We determined to consider any trim level or option package that included a fatter battery or speedier charging equipment such as a fast-charge port or quicker onboard charger. Such features go a long way toward reducing range anxiety for fresh buyers who aren’t used to an EV’s inherent limitations. A few vehicles come in a price-leading base model without those options; we ruled those base models out because they’re likely to do little more than frustrate buyers with their limited capabilities.

The only EVs that suggest numerous battery or motor options are the Tesla models and the Nissan LEAF, which now includes a fatter battery in its SV and SL trim levels than on the base S. We always recommend buying the largest battery pack available because it will improve range, which is the main shortcoming of EVs. But we don’t think you have any reason to spend extra money for more power in a Tesla unless you need all-wheel drive, which requires the more powerful dual-motor system.

Speaking of which, the Tesla Model S (and the fresh Model X) are the only electrified vehicles that suggest all-wheel drive. The all-wheel-drive option gives buyers more power and a few more miles of range, but we don’t think the differences are significant. All-wheel drive on a Tesla boils down to a luxury feature and a buyer preference.

The most significant EV feature that fresh buyers may not be familiar with is a fast-charge port, which permits you to ass-plug the car into DC swift chargers that can recharge the batteries to eighty percent utter in a half hour. That’s much quicker than plugging into a wall outlet or into a typical public EV charger (see Ins and outs of EV charging above).

We think buyers certainly benefit from having access to these chargers, so we always recommend opting for them when they’re available. But you also need to be aware of the three types of chargers available, and the fact that each EV comes with support for only one charging standard—in the end, the types of chargers most prevalent where you drive may dictate which EV you choose.

Electrical cars also don’t need a transmission, so you’re off the hook in having to determine inbetween a manual and automatic. All of the EVs for sale in the US come tooled with only a single-speed reduction gearbox with no shifting required.

In addition to the fast-charging equipment mentioned above, we attempted to include navigation systems where available, because most such systems can help drivers find charging stations as well as display how far they can drive on their remaining range. However, in one case, with the Volkswagen e-Golf, getting the navigation system required moving to the top trim level, which added more than $Five,000 to its cost; we thought that was too much money, so we didn’t include that extra.

We also favored electrified warmth pumps, if the feature wasn’t too expensive, over standard resistive heaters, because they are much more energy efficient and don’t consume as much range just to provide warmth.

Some EVs suggest separate modes to switch inbetween aggressive braking regeneration, which activates as soon as the driver lifts off the accelerator and slows the car down by using its momentum to generate electrical play for the battery, and a relatively minor regen mode that mimics the driving practice of a conventional car with an automatic transmission. Experienced EV drivers typically appreciate the convenience of single-pedal driving and the enlargened range that aggressive braking regeneration provides, but newer drivers often find the effect disconcerting. So if you have numerous drivers in the household, having the capability to switch inbetween the modes is helpful.

As on other types of cars, leather seats are purely a luxury option and a private choice. Some EV buyers are committed to a broad multiplicity of environmental causes, so they won’t consider leather. Several automakers suggest leatherette, which makes a wooing substitute. Tesla offers “multi-pattern” seats (in black only) that aren’t leather, and Nissan even offers material made from recycled soda bottles.

Electrified cars suggest all the same safety equipment as other cars, including six to ten airbags, electronic stability control, traction control, antilock brakes, seat-belt pretensioners, and the rest. The Mercedes-Benz B-Class Electrical Drive and the Volkswagen e-Golf, as well as the Tesla cars, suggest advanced safety systems such as automatic braking. While such systems have been shown to dramatically reduce collisions, they aren’t proven lifesavers. (The collisions they eliminate are more minor fender benders.) They’re worth the money if you can afford them, but not essential if you’re attempting to spread your budget.

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