T3.11 EV education *
Partner with environmental and other agencies to increase consumer awareness about EV options and incentives for use and purchase.
Ongoing survey research at UC Davis’s Institute of Transportation Studies concludes that even in California, most people “remain to a great extent unaware of PEVs and anything about them.”
The Sierra Club’s Electric Vehicle Guide website helps people figure out what sort of EV they need and roughly compare the costs and emissions reductions of a particular EV with those of the most popular conventional car of the same type. (They have a summary of the assumptions they’re using in the estimates, which include driving 15,000 miles a year, and using national averages for fuel and electricity prices.)
The Department of Energy’s Alternative Fuel Data Center offers a significantly more sophisticated website that lets you enter your own details about fuel prices and driving habits, then compare the costs and emissions reductions of a number of different cars of all sorts. (In particular, if you give it a Michigan zip code, like 48106, it will use the Michigan grid, which is about as dirty as PSE’s current power in Thurston County, around 1,100 lbs CO2e/MWh, to do the estimates, rather than Washington State’s whole grid. Of course, as our grid gets cleaner over the next ten years, an electric car in the county will reduce our emissions more and more…) They also detail the assumptions they’re using in the estimates.
PlugIn America also has a website for comparing different cars, which includes cost estimates for leases, loans and cash purchases. (It doesn’t seem to provide emissions estimates unless you are comparing different models; then there’s a tab for emissions estimates, and a link to the assumptions behind their estimates at the bottom of the that page. They also use Washington State’s whole grid.) Their PlugStar program provides EV sales training for dealers’ staffs and various marketing resources for their use.
You can get a quick sense of the current prices for a variety of used EV’s by browsing the website for Paramount Motors NW, in Seattle, which buys cars coming off lease at auction and resells them.
Chargeway has a kiosk to provide EV information to potential buyers; it’s intended for car dealers’ showrooms.