How to quite paying for gasoline, buying an electric car

A new car for the new year

If you're still driving an old vehicle that is drinking gasoline like water and perhaps even burning oil, pay attention! You're burning money and killing the environment! Time to sit down at the kitchen table and look over the options for a new car. Now I don't know your wallet so I don't know what kind of money you have to spend, but you can look at a few options for getting money as well. Selling your old car to family car buyers for instance, instead of trading it in, might be a good way to add some money to your pocket book.

There's many ways to go about buying a new car and many things to consider, so I'm going to focus on buying an electric car because I care about the environment. Now we all know that electric cars are better for the environment and get a lot better milage for your money, in particular if you go ahead and put some solar panels on your roof as well to recharge the battery with. Also recharging is offered in a growing number of places. If you're an average Joe, driving a maximum of 50 miles to work and maybe to the lake on the weekends, the average electric car will get you there and back on one charge.

Hybrids?

If you're not that average and have to drive long distances in your vehicle, a hybrid might be the way to go. This you can run on gasoline when necessary and on electricity when available. In addition running the car on gas allows you to recharge your batteries, in the smartest of cars they even store the energy you waste on braking. Also, the technology is relatively new so expect improvements to be made on your vehicle for some time, making our dependence on fossil fuels drop dramatically, with all the political advantages internationally.

If you have to go more than 50 but less than 100 miles to your place of employment (where you have to spend 8 hours earning your keep) you might want to talk to your employer about putting a recharging station in the parking lot. That way you can still use your car to go to work and back and half the electricity will be on your employers tab. With a little investment in solar panels this could work out very well for both of you. And 8 hours is ample time to recharge your batteries! This might eliminate the need for a hybrid and give you the option of buying a fully electric car.

Picture perfect: an electric car and solar panels

So let's make some calculations. Let's say you're driving 100 miles a day on average, going to work and back, etc. This means you drive a total of 36.500 miles yearly. Give or take a few miles, let's say it's 40.000 a year (for easy calculation)

Gasoline is $3,60 a gallon now, and more likely to become more expensive than less so, but for the sake of argument let's say it's going to be an average of $3,50. Your current family car, that old clunker you are going to sell tohttp://www.familycarbuyers.com get's about 20 miles to the gallon? You should be so lucky you say? We'll go with 20 MpG anyway...

This means you buy 2.000 gallons of gasoline each year. At $3,50 that means you're spending 7.000 dollars a year on gasoline alone! Average family, average use, average expenditure on a family car, am I right? Your situation may be a little or a lot different so you best do your own math on this one. If you have the money to invest in an electric car in combination with solar panels your average expenditure goes down to zero.

The electric car is free!

Buying an electric vehicle isn't cheap. However driving it is going to be a lot cheaper, up to zero expenditure in combination with solar panels (and a good deal with your boss for charging during the daytime). So how can you afford nót to buy the electric car?

What's the cost of a new electric car? You can purchase one round about 35.000 dollars, which would mean that if you had the money in cash you would start saving yourself 7.000 a year. The solar panels to feed your car would run about 7000 dollars as well. This means in only six years time you will have saved on fuel the full cost of a car and solar panel system. Put a different way: If you drive this car for 6 years it's essentially a free car.

If you have to get a car loan the interest on that is all you pay on top of what you would normally pay for gasoline alone. Selling your old car at family car buyers will give you a bit of capital and perhaps you have some savings so you won't need to loan the full amount. Interest is steep but remember, you'll be saving yourself 7000 a year (almost 600 a month) in gasoline cost.

Worth considering ain't it?