Hey now, you day ‘top reason’ and gave 4. Cheater!

For me:

o I had a very reliable cheap car, a Honda Civic. Bought late 1999 so a 2000, I billed it as ‘the best tech the 20th century had to offer’. Ok, a little ironically but not overly so. It was a great car, just even it eventually showed signs of age and needing replacement. Nearly 20 years and 300k mile and hard years/miles at that, I felt like I go a good life out of it.

o I’d been waiting for an EV or something more modern - PHEV or FCEV (hah! not) - that appealed to me, once the Civic had lived out it’s life. Lo and behold, by that time something worked as an only vehicle for where I lived, and I didn’t need to have a ‘second’ car for anything. I had options earlier sure but I’m the type, in my financial advisor’s complimentary phrasing, to drive my car into the ground as gently as I can.

o All the usual EV benefits - fuel cost, maintenance, not having to deal with gas stations. I’ve been in the EV crowd since the late 1990s, knew a bunch of folks who had Rav4EVs and EV-1s, but circumstances were such that I couldn’t get in on that. I was driving a lot when I got mine, if sadly it was spinning down (not that it was spinning down, but that the sudden decrease in cost/mile with an EV was after the peak).

o As far as surprises, a small one. In the early era you needed a house and/or garage to own one. We can kibbitz but pretty much, the property had to be yours. And, you needed specialized equipment to charge the car. In California I was just poor & young enough to have that house thing perpetually out of reach but even once we got something small, a townhouse, installing an EVSE was in question (HOAs but also limited panels in condos/townhouses). But then, I did the math. I found out L1 will work “for now” despite my long commute, and “for now” hit 5 years as of the beginning of this month (November 2023). Now that my commute is 1/4 what it used to be and I’m slowly moving towards retirement, I probably never will need it.