A few years ago, Kat got a Volkswagen ID.4. It’s our first electric vehicle of any kind. With the purchase came three years of free charing from Electrify America. Fun fact, Volkswagen created Electrify America as part of their settlement with the EPA around Dieselgate.

The CAA 2.0 liter partial settlement requires Volkswagen to invest $2 billion in ZEV charging infrastructure and in the promotion of ZEVs.  The ZEV investments required by the CAA 2.0 liter partial settlement are intended to address the fact that consumers purchased these illegal vehicles under the mistaken belief that such vehicles were lower-emitting than others. Electrify America, LLC, was created by Volkswagen Group of America to implement this requirement.

But, that’s not why I bothered starting to write today. Today we’re going to run some numbers!

In the three years that we had free charging:

• 6388.43 kWh
• 176 charging sessions
• 25,854 miles driven

This, on average, gets us 144.44 miles per charge and about 4mi/kWh. If we had paid for this, assuming an average price of $0.50/kWh, that would be about $3,200. Not bad. Please keep in mind these numbers are all based on averages and some charges got fewer miles due to average speed (going fast is bad for EV mileage as well) , temperature (too hot is bad, too cold is bad), and did we do more uphill then downhill (going uphill is hard, thanks a lot, Gravity). On that last you you can reasonably argue that it all buffs out as we eventually return home, so we did as much downhill as uphill.

At the end of the day it costs, ignoring everything but electricity, $0.14/mi to use the ID.4. In comparison, my GTI costs $0.17/mi.