| San Francisco to Disneyland (408 miles) Who won my hypothetical 408-mile road trip using the gas-powered F-150 and the electric Lightning? The EV — barely. The savings were modest because of the substantial premium for using fast chargers, typically three to four times more expensive than charging at home. In the Lightning, I arrived at the park with $14 more in my pocket than if I had driven its gasoline counterpart. But if I decided to make a longer stop at Level 2 chargers at hotels or restaurants, my savings would have been $57. Detroit to Miami (1,401 miles) Driving from Motown across the Midwest is not an EV dream. This region has some of the lowest EV ownership rates in the United States. Chargers are not as plentiful. Gasoline prices are low. Electricity is dirtier. To make it even more lopsided, I chose to compare the Toyota Camry with the electric Chevy Bolt — relatively efficient vehicles that narrow the difference in fueling costs. Did the EV hold its edge? Sometimes. But not always. If I was refueling at Level 2 commercial stations along the way (an unlikely scenario), the Bolt EV was cheaper: $41 compared to $142 for the Camry. But fast charging tipped the balance in favor of the Camry. At Level 3 chargers, the retail cost of electricity added up to $169 to complete the trip on batteries. A gasoline-powered journey would have cost $142. The true cost of a fill-up In the end, we may never agree on what it costs to refuel an electric vehicle. But that may not matter. For the everyday driver in the United States, it's already cheaper to refuel an EV in most cases, and it's expected to get cheaper still as renewable capacity expands and vehicle efficiency improves. After that there's one last number I felt was missing: the social cost of carbon. It's a rough dollar estimate of the damage from adding another ton of carbon to the atmosphere — a tally of heat deaths, flooding, wildfires, crop failures and other costs tied to global warming. Every gallon of gas adds about 5.5 pounds of carbon to the atmosphere, equivalent to about 50 cents in climate damage per gallon, researchers estimate. Accounting for external factors such as congestion, accidents and air pollution, according to one 2007 estimate by Resources for the Future, puts the damage bill closer to $3 per gallon. You're not required to pay this, of course. And EVs also don't solve this problem on their own. We need cities and neighborhoods where you don't need a car to visit friends or buy groceries. But electric mobility is essential to helping keep temperature increases below 2 degrees Celsius. The alternative is a price that has become impossible to ignore. To read the full column, click here. | 
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