A real-life electric-van story from an Iowa publisher: 'We had been spending $900 a month on gasoline'

By John Cullen
Storm Lake (Iowa) Times Pilot

It’s been almost a year since the Times Pilot bought our electric van, and we receive a lot of questions about it. Here’s a progress report.

It replaced two worn-out vehicles — a van and a cube truck — that had amassed nearly 400,000 miles each. In the same month both broke down, one victim to a transmission, the other to a deer. We needed a replacement fast.

We had been spending $900 per month on gasoline, and so the economy of an electric van appealed to us, not to mention that within a decade or so internal combustion engines are going the way of the horse and buggy.

Art has had three Chevy Volts, the plug-in hybrid that was produced from 2011-2019, and barely had to fill his tank with gas because he got about 40 miles on electricity before the gas engine kicked in. Other than a trip to Byron’s in Pomeroy on Sunday evenings, he hardly drives it out of town. He’s sold on electric vehicles.

The Ford E-Transit van we bought costs about $160 per month in electricity. We put about 2,000 miles per month on it running papers all neighboring counties. The purchase price was a little more than a gasoline van, but the savings in fuel more than made up for that in the first six months.

While most electric cars these days have a range of 250-300 miles, our van’s range is about half that. Ford research found that most cargo vans average 74 miles per day, so to keep the cost and weight down, it has a smaller battery capacity. The mileage limit has worked out all right for us. We figured out routes that minimize mileage.

In summer the van’s range is up to 150 miles. In winter, the range drops to about 100 miles on the coldest days. The same limits apply to cars. Cold weather drops battery range by nearly a third.

We installed a level 2 charger, which uses 240 volts, at our office at a cost of about $1,900. It charges about 26 miles per hour. A home charger, running off regular household current, might only charge at a rate of 3 or 4 miles per hour.

There are commercial DC fast chargers along interstates that charge at a much higher rate, but they can cost $100,000 or more to install.

At the time we bought our van, Ford was the only electric option. Ford introduced its van just after it brought out its F-150 Lightning and those pickups are selling like hotcakes. Ours is the only electric van that we know of in Buena Vista County, and maybe western Iowa. As for the Lightning pickup, there is one in Storm Lake, and the owner waited 11 months for it. I’ve seen a couple Teslas in Storm Lake. They don’t have dealers. You buy direct from Tesla online. Ford and GM have service centers in practically every county seat town in Iowa. Tesla’s only Iowa service is in Council Bluffs and Des Moines.

GM produced the Chevy Volt until three years ago in favor of the all-electric Bolt, which is an inexpensive small vehicle with limited range. GM is coming out with a variety of electric vehicles later this year. Ford has the Mustang Mach-E, Lightning pickup and E-Transit van, and can’t keep up with demand. Along with European and Asian automakers, they are chasing an exploding market that Tesla has had pretty much to itself for the past five years.

There are other cost savings in electric vehicles. They require much less maintenance, for example, no oil changes and no transmissions.

The biggest challenge to electric vehicles now is the lack of public charging facilities. If you stay on interstates, you have no trouble juicing up. But if you wander up two-lane roads, even major routes like Hwy. 71, you’ll develop range anxiety real quick. There are no public chargers between Early and Spencer, nearly 60 miles. We’ve accommodated several visiting Tesla drivers at our charger who found out to their dismay about Storm Lake’s lack of charging facilities. In a few years as more electric cars hit the roads there should be chargers in every town from Schaller to Sioux Rapids, but until then, drivers be wary.

Many public charging stations, except for Tesla, are often out of service or slow. Where you can fill a gas car up in five minutes, it can take an hour or more to rejuice an electric car at a DC fast charger. Tesla is the gold standard for charging around the world. It operates its own proprietary charging stations that are fast, reliable and plentiful. The problem is that non-Teslas could not charge there until this month. Tesla is gradually converting its chargers to allow competitors, but there are only about 14 so far across the nation. That will change as Tesla converts. But non-Teslas pay a premium.

The cheapest place to charge is at home. MidAmerican Energy’s residential and business electric rates here are very reasonable, about 10 cents per kilowatt hour. Public DC fast chargers along highways cost from 30 cents to 50 cents kWh. At the higher rates, electric isn’t a whole lot cheaper than gas.

Gas stations aren’t going out of business anytime soon. There are hundreds of millions of internal combustion vehicles that will need dinosaur juice for decades to come.