I’ve been driving an electric vehicle (a 2021 Tesla Model Y) for about six months. In that time, I’ve become familiar with all the obvious benefits that attract people to buy EVs: they’re easy to maintain, cheap to drive, and you can put your groceries where the engine normally goes. I’ve also discovered a few hidden benefits along the way that, in my opinion, people don’t talk about enough.
One-pedal driving is a safety innovation
Even if you’ve never driven a hybrid or an EV, you’re probably familiar with the concept of regenerative braking. This is where a vehicle is slowed by using some of its kinetic energy to generate electricty that’s then added back to the battery. This makes driving far more efficient and greatly extends your friction brakes' lifespan, because you’re simply not using them for the majority of your braking.
In my car, regenerative braking is the foundation for another feature: one-pedal driving. When you press down on the accelerator pedal this causes the car to move, as usual. When you pull off the pedal, though, the car applies proportional regenerative braking force, applying the maximum force when you’re completely off the pedal. There’s a bit of a learning curve to this, because you’re no longer able to take your foot off the gas and coast at whatever speed you’ve reached.
After spending some time getting used to one-pedal driving, I realized that it’s also an incredible fail-safe. When the driver’s not actively pressing the pedal to accelerate, the car’s braking. If an EV is flying down the highway and anything happens to the driver, the car would just come to a stop instead of flying off the road.
Stop and hold revolutionizes the stop light experience
Holding the brake pedal to keep a car still is old news. Hold mode keeps your car locked in place without the forward creep you’ll find in an automatic car, and won’t roll down a hill like a manual transmission car with the clutch engaged. It’s a small thing, but it’s one of the things I miss the most when I drive someone’s non-EV car.
Immediate heat on cold days
If you live somewhere that gets really cold, you know that it might be several minutes before the air coming out of your vents is warm. The electric heater in an EV doesn’t have to use waste heat from a slowly warming engine block the way a gas engine does, and I’ve found the time to warm air in my car — even on the coldest days — a matter of seconds, not minutes.
Free charging is a crazy perk
I admit that for the most part free charging is a gimmick. There are very few situations where you’ll get free fast charging. Some places, though — businesses, government offices, apartment buildings — will offer free level two charging. Even if a free charger would take several hours to fully charge your battery, being able to refuel your car for free is incredible!
Home charging is more convenient than any gas station
The most important perk of all is the convenience of charging your car at home. You’ll find a lot of people don’t recommend EVs to anyone that can’t reliably charge at home. After a few months of driving an EV, I see their point and mostly agree. Public chargers are much less ubiquitous than gas stations, and even the fastest chargers take way more time to recharge a battery than a gas station takes to refuel.
Not being able to charge at home adds a certain amount of planning and overhead to EV ownership. If you can charge at home — even at a measly 120V like me, you’ll discover the coolest part about EV ownership, in my opinion: your fuel tank slowly fills up whenever you’re at home. Filling the tank at a gas station only takes a few minutes, but you’re outside standing in the elements for a few minutes, waiting in line at a busy gas station, or an unwelcome diversion when you’re already late. If you don’t drive much, or if you have access to level two charging at home, it’s like starting every day with a very inexpensive full tank of gas, automatically, overnight.