The U.S. Energy Department has launched a website designed to nudge Iowans toward buying electric vehicles. Pat Davis, the Energy Department’s director of vehicle technologies, says the goal of the new site is to provide people with the information they need to make informed choices about their vehicles.
“It’s a new tool available for consumers and the e-gallon represents the cost of fueling a vehicle with electricity compared to a similar vehicle that would run on gasoline,” Davis says. “It’s a way that consumers can know what their cost of fuel would be if they bought an electric vehicle as compared to a conventional vehicle.”
The website shows that in Iowa right now, the price of gasoline sits at about $3.84, while the e-gallon cost is $1.03. Not only is the price of electricity significantly lower, Davis says it’s also much more stable and predictable than gasoline prices.
“If you already own a vehicle, you know how many miles per gallon it gets because you probably did your homework before you bought it,” Davis says. “You know what the price of gasoline is as consumers monitor that pretty carefully, but you may not know what the price of electricity is and how it translates to how far you can travel in electric vehicles.”
Hybrid and plug-in electric vehicles only comprise about four-percent of new vehicle sales, but Davis says plug-in sales were up 300-percent last year compared to the year before. As of last month, there were 100,000 plug-in vehicles on the roads nationwide.
Visit the website at: Energy.gov/eGallon