Today marks the first anniversary of our emancipation from gasoline. A year ago – on December 4, 2018 – we brought our Chevrolet Bolt EV (for “Electric Vehicle”) home from the dealer. We have not driven a single inch on fossil fuel since. And I have not had a single regret.

A scorecard: During its first year, our Bolt has traveled 12,469 miles and used almost exactly 2900 kilowatt-hours of electricity, much of it generated by our solar panels. We have made four overnight trips of 300 miles or longer – the longest was 800+ miles – and countless day trips into our surrounding mountains, including travel to trailheads as much as 100 miles away. A few of those trailheads have required a mile or two of travel over roads marked for 4-wheel-drive only. Aside from two flat tires (neither of them the car’s fault) and a single tire rotation (time for another), we have not seen the inside of a service garage. Electric cars require almost no maintenance.

Some observations: first, the car is incredibly enjoyable to drive. It’s not just its ability to pass gas stations – it can pass almost everything else on the road as well. 200 horsepower and all the torque you can handle, available instantaneously, means we are usually the first away from stoplights and have no problem passing on hills. Cornering is excellent, due to the low center of gravity provided by the “skateboard” of batteries the car sits on. Driving really is fun again.

Second, the car is bigger than it looks. It’s a full five-passenger vehicle. Rear-seat legroom is about the same as we had in our Ford Escape – a medium-sized SUV – and greater than any other car we’ve owned in recent memory, probably back to the 1954 Kaiser we started married life with in 1967. The floor is flat. The luggage space behind the back seat looks tiny, but we got all of the luggage we needed for a week away from home – including a guitar and a laptop computer – into that space, with a little room to spare, in mid-July. The back seats fold flat if more space is needed. There are really very few restrictions on what we can carry.

There aren’t many restrictions on where we can go, either. Ground clearance beats anything we’ve owned recently except the Escape (I’ve already mentioned the 4-wheel-drive roads). Refueling problems on the road have been over-hyped. Range varies with conditions – very cold weather can drop it by as much as 20% – but during the warm-weather travel season it is generally 250 miles or more, the same as a 25 mpg gasoline-powered car with a ten-gallon tank. Stops can usually be planned around meals, so the hour or more it can take to refill the batteries at a DC fast charger isn’t often an issue. And many motels are putting in so-called “destination chargers” – you can plug in before you go to bed and wake up with a full battery in the morning. There are still places without either of those options, but they are getting fewer. And we’ve invested in a portable 240-volt charger, so we can charge in just about any RV park or in any home garage wired for a dryer.

It’s been a great travel year, and we’ve been extremely pleased to do it without producing any greenhouse gases. I’ll grab a few of my favorite pictures from earlier posts and repost them below to show you some of the places we’ve gone without gasoline in the course of the year. Enjoy – and if you’re thinking about a new car but are hesitant about going electric, talk to me.