Go Buy an EV

We Just Bought an EV for Less Than a Gas Car, and You Can Too

Yesterday we welcomed Evie, our new Chevy Equinox EV, into the family — and I’m still a little stunned at what we paid. After stacking rebates and discounts, the total came to $31,400, several thousand less than the gas version. And here’s the wildest part: There are even better deals out there right now.

So if you wish you could afford an EV but think they’re out of reach, I’d strongly encourage you to investigate further — but do it right now, because the $7500 federal tax credit expires September 30.

There’s so much to say about this that I’m going to break it into sections so you can jump to whichever section you’re burning to know about first.

1. How shockingly cheap many EVs are now — cheaper than gas!

2. Why you’ll love owning an EV

3. The negotiating strategy that’s effective and pleasant

4. What it actually took for us to buy our car

1. How shockingly cheap many EVs are now —cheaper than gas!

I thought an EV was out of reach for us. I have a number of friends with Ioniq 5s, but for the model I figured we’d want — a long range AWD — the starting price is $50,000! How the heck could we afford that? Even with a $7500 rebate, that’s still a ton of money. And even if we could come up with the money, is that really the most effective place to put it? Mightn’t it be a better idea to get a cheaper car and, I don’t know, donate the rest to a climate action group?

So I figured a used car made more sense — far more affordable, and there’s a $4000 federal rebate (also expiring) plus a $2500 New Mexico rebate. The problem is that finding a used car that I’m certain I tolerate (from a mold perspective) is challenging. We had a traumatic experience of buying a car that initially seemed OK and then wasn’t, leaving us with a car I couldn’t be in. And shopping for a used car by trying car after car and being sickened by them was… unappealing.

Still, since a new car was out of reach (so I thought), I dutifully clicked to Facebook Marketplace. I found some good deals and started getting excited.

But then I heard about the Chevrolet Equinox EV, which has a starting price of $34,995 and gets good reviews. Take off $7500 for the federal rebate and $3000 for the New Mexico rebate, and we’re down to $24,495. Wow! Now we’re talking!

It ended up being both better and worse than that. Worse because it turned out that we couldn’t find a Chevy Equinox at any dealer in New Mexico that cost anything close to $34,995 — the one we bought had an MSRP of $49,890, a rather astonishing sum. But it was better because of an almost unbelievable stack of discounts and rebates. Here’s what we got:

• $7500 Federal tax rebate

• $3,000 New Mexico tax rebate

• $3,000 Customer Cash from GM

• $1,250 GM discount for non-GM owners and lessees

• $4,000 Rebate from PNM (our local electric company)

That makes a total of $18,750 off.

If we’d happened to be Costco members, we could have gotten another $1250 off. If we’d been in the military or first responders, we’d have gotten $500 more. And while we were unable to get a discount from this dealer (more details in section 4), other dealers offered us discounts of as much as $2719.

This isn’t isolated, either — there are even better deals out there. The Ioniq 5s have a manufacturer’s discount of $16,000! Pile on the federal tax rebate, the state tax rebate, and the rest, and you could walk out the door with one for less than $20,000. We would have gone this way, except we couldn’t find one my body could tolerate (see section 4).

I couldn’t find most of these deals online, oddly enough. Even articles about the best EV deals currently didn’t include the incredible deals I was finding. You have to just contact dealers.

Do be careful, because with these rebates, the devil is in the details. The federal used car EV tax credit, for example, only applies to cars under $25,000, and there are income limits, and it’s only up to 30% of the car’s price, and… Another key detail with the federal credit is that it only applies to some cars (though you can get around that by leasing and then immediately buying out the lease). Just be sure you and the car you’re interested in qualify.

2. Why You’ll Love Owning an EV

EV owners love their EVs. One global survey of 23,000 EV owners showed that just one percent would go back to a gas car.

Why? Well, let’s start with the cold hard cash: They’re cheaper to own. Powering an EV costs less than a gas car for every single model in every single state. Maintenance costs are about half as much — they don’t need oil changes, they have fewer moving parts, and because of regenerative braking, their brakes last much longer.

Also, EVs hold their value now as well or better than gas cars. And EVs are lasting well: Their batteries are losing only 1.8% of their capacity each year, and some degrade as little as 1% a year. A Tesla Model S with 250,000 miles on it still has 87% of its battery capacity.

They’re also just, well, nicer. They’re silent, so much so that they have to make a noise when backing up for safety (usually a gentle one, not a jarring beep). They’re powerful and fun to drive, with more torque than most gas cars. The ride is smoother. They don’t stink. They’re safer. And you don’t have to go to the gas station!

Plus there’s that minor issue of helping protect the climate and preventing air pollution. (Air pollution, by the way, is a much bigger deal than you probably think. Somewhere between 100,000 and 200,000 Americans die every year because of it.)

3. The negotiating strategy that’s effective and pleasant

I never thought I’d say this, but: I love negotiating for a new car. I used to hate the smarmy back-and-forth, the manager games, the endless waiting. But now I have a strategy, and it cuts out all of that BS and works much better. In fact, it gets the dealers falling all over themselves trying to get me the very best deal.

Here’s what I do: I find the car I want, decide on the features I want, and get an offer from any old dealer. Then I contact at least a half-dozen other dealers, and I tell them what I want, what the offer is, and that I’m ready to buy and am comparing offers. When I get a better offer, I send it to the others. (Other times I’ve done this by email, giving dealers deadlines for round 1 and round 2 and avoiding talking to them. This time, because I was in a hurry, I did it by phone, passing better deals along right away.)

The hope is that you’ll end up with two dealers in a bidding war with one another. Then you don’t have to do the negotiating at all: They’ll duke it out for you.

The best way to implement this strategy is to do it right before the end of the month. The dealers have monthly quotas they’re trying to meet, and sometimes they’re willing to sell a car at below their own cost in order to meet a quota. But given the expiring tax credits, I wouldn’t recommend waiting — start now.

4. What it actually took for us to buy our car

Last Monday I finally got serious. I spent half the day researching used cars before realizing an Equinox might be within reach. Tuesday, we went to test drive one, and we agreed we’d be happy owning that car. But we decided to check out the Ioniq 5 first.

When I got into an Ioniq to test drive it, my teeth chattered — a dead giveaway I was reacting. But it was a brand new car! I’d just driven the Equinox with no problem. How could this one feel moldy? Surely it was some transient weirdness.

After driving about three blocks, I felt like a mountain lion had me by the back of the neck, twisting it backwards, and it was getting harder to breathe. It’s always embarrassing to talk about the reactivity with strangers, but I had to fess up and turn around and get the hell out of that car.

Back at the Hyundai dealer, I stuck my nose in a couple more Ioniqs. No go.

Still, the Ioniq was roomier and charged faster — handy for John’s drives to Boulder. So on Wednesday, I drove down to Albuquerque to try a different Hyundai dealer. Maybe there was just something weird about that one? Maybe the showroom was horribly moldy and the cars had been inside?

This time I told the sales guy upfront about my sensitivities. I tried six Ioniqs, all no good. By the seventh, I leaned in, breathed, and sagged to the ground, groaning. “It’s that bad?” Alex the sales guy said, eyes wide. John did a bit of research and found that the Ioniqs are all made at a factory in Georgia, a mighty moldy place, so we figured that explained it.

Then I got hard core about shopping for an Equinox, contacting dealers from across the state. I even called a dealer in East Texas

: “We don’t like EVs around here,” the salesperson said, though the manager called back, eager to make a deal.

The Santa Fe dealer only had loaded models, one black, one habanero orange. We were fine with any color expect black or habanero orange, and we didn’t care about all those expensive extras.

I found one in Las Cruces that was much more basic and a cheery blue, and I negotiated a $2719 discount. Thursday we drove 4.5 hours to Las Cruces, excited — until I sat down in the car and soon staggered out. We were baffled. How could an Equinox, made in the Mexican desert, trigger me?

But glory be! They had seven of them! Maybe someone with moldy clothes had sat in that one? Surely the others would be fine. But one after another set me off — teeth chattering, legs freezing until John had to drag me out. We drove 4.5 hours back to Santa Fe, grumpy and sad (but at least we were grumpy and sad together).

We figured that black one we’d test-driven in Santa Fe was just destined to be ours —though annoyingly, this dealer refused to give any dealer discounts. They could get away with it because they were the only Chevy dealer qualified for the $4,000 PNM rebate.

After losing Friday to illness, we went back to the Santa Fe dealer first thing Saturday morning, planning to spend a good couple of hours in the car before buying it to be really sure I was OK in it. Then we discovered that they’d just received another, a silver one with all wheel drive and not too much other stuff on it. And I felt fine in it. Hurrah! We’d found our Evie!

We haven’t quite brought her home yet. After spending hours getting the paperwork processed, the last step was for them to process the federal rebate through the IRS website — but the website was down. So yet again, we headed home without our new car. But we’ll pick her up tomorrow, God be willing and the website don’t be down.

Unless you’re a moldie like me, the process should be far easier for you. So go! Heed the call of the future! Get yourself a super deal, drive a better car, and help the climate. Buy yourself an EV, right now!