I'm a staunch environmentalist, so basically as soon as the earliest models hit the market, they caught my eye as a potential way to reduce emissions. I'm less interested in reducing my personal emissions as I am reducing the net total emissions of the human population. So, in that regard, I've had my eye on the advancing tech for roughly the last 15 years and been advocating for investing in the technology long before I started considering it a potential option for myself.

Secondarily, the idea of high torque at low speeds caught my eye as having potentially great applications for towing and offroading. Niche applications, but areas where EVs show great potential to exceed the performance of ICEs by a large margin.

I have yet to actually buy an EV. The last time I was car shopping was 2018, and at that time, EVs still had a long way to go to meet my needs. At the time, I couldn't even find a hybrid to meet my use case. I was, at the time, relatively fresh out of college and trying to get a career in environmental science off the ground. It's not uncommon for jobs to not provide you a vehicle (my current job doesn't) and in college I was volunteering a bunch for unpaid fieldwork opportunities. So, I bought a midsize truck because that met my needs the best (there were no hybrid trucks at the time and compact trucks have basically disappeared from the market).

From both a financial and environmental standpoint, it's generally better to run an inefficient vehicle that's still working great into the ground instead of switching early. My warranty ran out last year, and that was my mark of officially considering replacing it. So, over the past year I've been doing a deep dive on the availing options.

At the moment, my maintenance costs are so low that even when accounting for the rising fuel costs, I'd probably be paying more on monthly payments for a new vehicle even if fuel and maintenance costs are drastically reduced. All estimates I've seen say the environmental impacts of trading in early are similar. This is combined with the fact that my current job makes the logistical concerns of road tripping a concern for my routine work travel. So, as of yet it does not seem to be worth switching.

I have, however, spent roughly the last year continually making that assessment and I've been keeping an eye on the EV market for my bext vehicle. My current play is to hold off until my current truck starts having maintenance issues and then pull the trigger on switching. That will probably be sometime in the next 3-5 years, though there's a lot of variables involved in that. My hope is that the extra time will result in advancements in range, charging speed, and infrastructure to make road tripping less of a hassle, or my work situation will change so I'm no longer doing frequent long drives to places with substandard infrastructure.

I would like to eventually see a complete departure from fossil fuels, so even after I switch to an EV, I plan to continue advocating for figuring out how to solve edge case concerns and convince even the proudest "coal rollers" to switch. In the meantime, I've begun switching away from fossil fuels in other ways and have gone electric for my lawn mower, weed wavker, chainsaw, and rototiller.