It’s finally time. You’ve decided to make the switch and join the zero-emission club. Buying your first electric car comes with a whole new experience. Once you feel the instant torque, upgraded technology, and smoother drive, you will never go back. Now the question becomes how do you choose which electric car to buy? Here are a few factors to consider.
How to choose your first electric car
Like with any major purchase, it’s good to know your options and what to look for. You wouldn’t blindly buy a house without knowing how the inside looks or feels. The same holds true when purchasing an electric car.
Americans are buying electric vehicles (EVs) at a record pace as new electric models appear in showrooms. According to Cox Automotive, electric cars accounted for 5.6% of the total auto market this past quarter, more than doubling from 2.7% in 2021.
Tesla remains the dominant brand, yet most major automakers at this point have introduced their own electric models and are beginning to scale production.
With more options than ever, where do you start? It’s not as complicated as it may seem for first-time buyers. However, there are a few things you should consider before choosing the right EV for you. Here are a few tips and considerations for selecting your first electric car.
Price and incentives
Yes, there are incentives to buy electric cars. The Inflation Reduction Act, passed in August, extends the up to $7,500 tax credit for new electric car purchases and provides a $4,000 credit for used ones.
For an EV to be eligible, though, it must meet strict battery sourcing and assembly requirements. You can find a list of electric cars eligible for the tax credit here.
Several popular EV models make the list, including:
Chevy Bolt EV and Bolt EUV
Ford F-150 Lightning
Ford Mustang Mach-E
Nissan Leaf
Tesla Model 3
Tesla Model Y
The average price for an electric vehicle in September 2022 is just over $65,000. However, that doesn’t mean that all EVs cost that much. For example, here are a few of the most affordable electric cars on the market and their starting prices:
Starting price
2023 Chevy Bolt EV
$25,600
2023 Chevy Bolt EUV
$27,200
2023 Nissan Leaf
$28,040
2023 Hyundai Kona Electric
$33,550
2023 Volkswagen ID.4
$37,495
Most affordable electric cars list
Driving range
Another huge consideration when buying your first electric car is how far it will travel on a full charge. The range is one of the most critical factors for drivers. Do you mostly commute to work? How often do you travel long distances? Do you live in a house or an apartment?
These are a few questions you may want to ask before deciding which EV is right for you. Here are the electric cars with the highest range and their starting prices to make it easy for you.
Range (est.)
Starting Price
Lucid Air Dream Edition
520
$169,000
Tesla Model S
375
$109,490
Tesla Model 3 Long Range
358
$62,990
Mercedes Benz EQS
350
$102,310
Tesla Model X
333
$120,990
Tesla Model Y
330
$67,990
EVs with the longest range in 2022
Vehicle type
Why not choose a car you love driving? Electric cars offer a driving experience that’s superior to their gas-powered counterparts. With instant torque, you can feel the power behind the wheel. Furthermore, because they have no internal combustion engine and fewer moving parts, EVs are quieter and offer a smoother ride.
At the same time, you don’t have to give up your favorite type of vehicle by switching to electric cars. Automakers have introduced an EV in every category to fit all driver styles. Below are a few examples in each category.
Electric car model
Sedan
Tesla Model 3
Crossover/ compact
Kia EV6 Tesla Model Y Hyundai Kona EV Chevy Bolt EV Chevy Bolt EUV Ford Mustang Mach-E Polestar 2 Volvo C40
SUV
Hyundai IONIQ 5 Volkswagen ID.4 Rivian R1S Jaguar I-Pace Chevrolet Blazer EV Audi e-tron Kia Niro EV Mercedes EQS
Truck
Ford F-150 Lightning GMC Hummer EV Rivian R1T
Luxury
Tesla Model X Lucid Air
Types of electric cars
Charging considerations
Last and certainly not least is charging availability. If you own a home, it’s ideal to have a charging option at home. This way, every morning you wake up, you will have a fully charged electric car ready to take on the day. It’s common for about 80% of charging to be done at home.
To state the obvious, it’s best to place the charger where you typically park. However, not all EV models will have the charging point in the same location (some are near the back, while others can be in the grille).
The next thing you will want to factor in is the charging speed. Most new EVs will come with a level 1 charger, the slowest equipment using the standard 120-volt connection. Level 1 can take ten or more hours to charge your EV.
You can upgrade to a level 2 charger, but it will require a 240-volt power source. Meanwhile, Level 2 charging units can fully charge an electric car in around 3 to 8 hours.
For those who don’t own a home, it’s okay. There are charging options for you, too. You can always talk to your apartment manager to see if EV charging installation is viable (it makes a good investment)
If that’s not an option, plenty of public options are available. Automakers like Tesla are building their own Supercharging network, allowing drivers the freedom to go anywhere. Meanwhile, federal funding is contributing to the rollout of a national EV charging network.
Other companies, such as ChargePoint and EVgo, provide chargers to private businesses and for public use, expanding access further.
Most electric vehicles use the latest in connected technology, letting you know when and where to charge so you know exactly how far you can travel.
Which electric car will you choose first?
Your ideal first electric car will depend on several factors, including your budget, travel habits, and lifestyle. To get you started, here are a few of my top electric vehicle choices for first-time buyers:
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We heard a little more about Rivian’s upcoming plans to open its Rivian Adventure Network chargers at a roundtable discussion with CEO RJ Scaringe this week.
Rivian has been working on its own in-house charging network since 2020, with a focus of placing charging sites on the way to the sort of beautiful natural places that it has tied so much of its brand to.
For a primary example of this, Rivian opened its first “Charging Outpost” just outside Yosemite National Park in July, renovating an old gas station into a very cool ranger cabin-style spot to stop and refuel your car – and also yourself.
Now, it’s ready to open its network to other brands, which it announced last April. The goal was to open by the end of 2024 – which is fast approaching.
While Rivian stopped short of announcing a date for this at our roundtable discussion, it was clear that the announcement is coming “very soon.”
Scaringe told us that he was just reviewing the software that non-Rivian customers will use and that “it’s gonna be awesome.” So it sounds like there’s a plan to offer a separate app experience for non-Rivian owners, likely through the Rivian app (thus ballooning the number of apps that every EV owner needs to have… we need to do something about that).
Scaringe told us that RAN has now expanded to a total of 91 sites and around 700 chargers – which he says is around 4% of the size of Tesla’s Supercharger network, but that RAN has maintained high uptime as it scales. Scaringe said that if you would have asked him 6-7 years ago, he would have expected more successful third-party charging companies by now., but that now, out of all the charging networks out there, there are “only two great networks – and only one great scaled network,” namely Tesla Superchargers.
The others, which aren’t owned by an EV manufacturer, just aren’t as good. RAN and Tesla have ~99% uptime, where Scaringe said that other networks have sub-70% or even sub-50% uptime (this may be an underestimate – or maybe not – but the point stands that every EV driver can tell you Tesla is the gold standard here).
So Rivian sees it as important to electrification to offer another great network that can help give drivers more choices, more availability, and high reliability.
But how will that interface with the NACS transition? Rivian was early to hop aboard and announce that it will shift to using NACS and ship adapters to its owners, though its current vehicles still have native CCS ports even post-refresh (the Koreanbrands will be the first to offer native NACS ports on their vehicles).
We were quite interested in the timeline of who started the discussions to shift to NACS, and Scaringe told us that it was pretty much universal across the industry that as soon as Tesla released its NACS whitepaper calling it an open standard, car companies started talking amongst themselves about the potential of finally harmonizing on a single charging standard.
As of now, Rivian is still installing CCS cables, not NACS ones. It sounded like it intends to keep doing this for the foreseeable future, and that “the charging network will catch up” as cars transition to NACS. Until then, people can use adapters – and “in the long term, everything will go to NACS” as it’s just a better standard, and whatever remaining CCS cars exist will just end up using adapters.
This seems a little strange to make cars that aren’t (natively) supported on your own charging network, but Scaringe said that that’s the benefit of owning the network – cables are not too hard to swap out. So it would be easy to just change out the cable heads on existing chargers without having to build new sites or install new cabinets.
We asked whether they’d try a dual-charging-head strategy, with NACS and CCS heads on each cabinet, but it didn’t sound like that was in the plans. The cables will, at least, be long enough to reach both sides of the vehicle – an important consideration given the lack of standardization of charging port locations on EVs, as networks start opening up to multiple brands.
So – we’re looking forward to hearing more about Rivian’s efforts to open RAN, which ought to bear fruit quite soon, if the “end of the year” schedule holds. Stay tuned, as we’re sure there’s more news to come soon.
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Bernie Moreno, Republican U.S. Senate candidate from Ohio, attends a campaign event in Holland, Ohio, on Saturday, October 26, 2024. Moreno is running against Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio.
Tom Williams | Cq-roll Call, Inc. | Getty Images
Prior to announcing his Senate candidacy in April 2023, Bernie Moreno was a political no name. A former car salesman in the Cleveland area, his only prior experience in politics was a losing bid for Ohio’s other Senate seat in 2022.
Moreno has since accomplished the once unthinkable.
On Nov. 5, as part of the election that swept Donald Trump back into the White House, Moreno defeated Democratic incumbent Senator Sherrod Brown, who was first elected to the House in 1992, before winning his Senate seat in 2006 and chairing the powerful Banking Committee since 2021.
Moreno’s rise from unsung Ohio businessman to prominent political leader was no accident. His campaign was backed by $40 million from the cryptocurrency industry as part of a highly targeted effort to get friendly candidates elected and, perhaps more importantly, its critics removed. Moreno’s victory was one of the Senate seats Republicans flipped to take control of the chamber.
In total, crypto-related PACs and other groups tied to the industry reeled in over $245 million, according to Federal Election Commission data. Crypto accounted for nearly half of all corporate dollars that flowed into the election, according to nonprofit watchdog Public Citizen. Advocacy group Stand With Crypto Alliance, which Coinbase launched last year, developed a grading system for House and Senate races across the country as a way to help determine where money should be spent.
Crypto execs, investors and evangelists saw the election as existential to an industry that spent the past four years simultaneously trying to grow up while being repeatedly beaten down. Nearly 300 pro-crypto lawmakers will take seats in the House and Senate, according to Stand With Crypto, giving the sector unprecedented influence over the legislative agenda.
The crypto political lobby worked so well this cycle because it made something complicated, like campaign finance, simple: Raise a ton of cash from a handful of donors and buy ad space in battleground states to either support candidates who back crypto or smear the candidates who don’t. It also required thinking of candidates as a bit of a binary: They were either with the industry or against it.
Crypto companies and their executives mobilized rapidly, and they successfully figured out how to deploy their cash through a sophisticated ad machine across the country. They also took cues from what big tech got wrong. Rather than spending hundreds of millions of dollars on lobbying legislators post-election, the crypto industry invested in targeting their opponents ahead of the election so they wouldn’t have to deal with them at all the next few years.
For over a year, Moreno was grilled by Silicon Valley heavy hitters like Marc Andreessen, Ben Horowitz and David Sacks about blockchain technology, digital asset policy and the shifting terrain of global finance.
“They didn’t just jump in head first,” Moreno said, describing the scores of meetings that stretched back to his run in the primary. “We had to build a lot of trust.”
Moreno also met with Coinbase co-founders Brian Armstrong and Fred Ehrsam as well as policy chief Faryar Shirzad. Armstrong and Ehrsam did not respond to CNBC’s request, through Coinbase, for comment about the meetings.
Coinbase is the largest digital asset exchange in the U.S. and has been battling the Securities and Exchange Commission in court for over a year. The company was the crypto kingmaker in the 2024 cycle, giving more than $75 million to a super PAC called Fairshake. It was one of the top spending committees of any industry this cycle and exclusively gave to pro-crypto candidates running for Congress. Fairshake’s candidates won virtually every race that it funded in the general election.
“Being anti-crypto is simply bad politics,” Coinbase’s Armstrong wrote on X following Moreno’s victory.
As the price of bitcoin has multiplied by about sixfold in the past four years, SEC Chairman Gary Gensler has taken major crypto players like Coinbase and Ripple to court for allegedly selling unregistered securities and has avoided working with companies to develop new specialized regulations.
Meanwhile, Sen. Brown sided with the expressly anti-crypto Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., in targeting crypto for allegedly funding terrorist organizations, including Hamas. Brown became more vocal in calling for crackdowns of the industry after the failure of crypto exchange FTX in late 2022.
As FTX was spiraling into bankruptcy, Brown on Nov. 10 retweeted a post from the Senate Banking Committee calling the event “a loud warning bell that cryptocurrencies can fail” and can “have a ripple effect on consumers and other parts of our financial system.”
Thebipartisan Fairshakewon all but three races in the general election, spending big on Republicans and Democrats gunning for key seats. Protect Progress, a PAC affiliated with Fairshake, gave more than $10 million apiece to Democratic candidates for the Senate in Arizona and Michigan. Both won. Defend American Jobs, another one of Fairshake’s affiliated PACs, spent more than $3 million to support Republican Jim Justice in West Virginia, who will take the former seat of Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin when the new session gets underway in 2025.
In California, Democratic Rep. Katie Porter lost a Senate primary after Fairshake spent more than $10 million onads against her.
Those vetting Moreno wanted to understand what he would do differently than the current administration and regulatory regime, the senator-elect told CNBC in an interview.
“These are people who know how to vet investments, know how to vet people and they took that same discipline” with me, Moreno said.
It helped that he’d built a blockchain startup, a company called Champ Titles that digitizes automobile ticketing and registration.
“What they didn’t want was to put time, effort and energy behind somebody who, at the end, would be a disappointment,” Moreno said.
A spokesperson for Andreessen and Horowitz, who are co-founders of a venture firm bearing their names, declined to comment. Sacks, founder of Craft Ventures, didn’t respond to CNBC’s request for an interview.
Coinbase’s Shirzad met Moreno over breakfast in Washington in the spring. Moreno wasn’t an expert on the details of the policy issues he’d be pursuing but had a clear understanding of crypto technology and how it could be applied, Shirzad told CNBC in an interview.
“It was a really great meeting of minds between me as a policy guy and him as kind of a business guy that saw the potential of the technology,” Shirzad said.
Moreno was out of cash after spending all he had on a tough and expensive primary, said David McIntosh, an early backer of Moreno’s Senate bid and president of the Club for Growth, a conservative organization that focuses on American economic issues. Fairshake played a crucial role for Moreno’s campaign starting in the summer, McIntosh said.
Moreno’s victory over Brown “sent a really strong signal to Washington that the voters are going to support candidates who are pro-blockchain,” McIntosh said.
McIntosh noted that the Club for Growth spent $6.5 million to help Moreno with advertising in the primary through its different super PACs, including the Bitcoin Freedom Fund.
Brown’s office didn’t respond to multiple requests for comment.
Brown told Politico he hasn’t ruled out running for Vice President-elect JD Vance’s open Senate seat in Ohio, which will be filled by special election in 2026.
Moreno benefited from branding himself as the “change” candidate while Brown “became a defender of the status quo,” Shirzad said.
“Crypto thematically is a change issue,” Shirzad said. “It appeals to not only a younger demographic, but it also appeals to voters who want to change.”
Fairshake declined to comment on whether it would spend to block another Brown Senate run, but the super PAC has already raised $78 million for the 2026 midterms.
“We stuck to our core strategy from Day 1, supported pro-crypto candidates and opposed those who played politics with jobs and innovation, and won,” Fairshake told CNBC in a statement.
‘Most pro-crypto Congress ever’
The past two election cycles featured spending from the now-bankrupt crypto exchange FTX and its founder Sam Bankman-Fried, who was sentenced to 25 years in prison in March for stealing more than $8 billion worth of customer money through FTX.
This year’s contributor list was more robust but saw large sums of funding come from companies that have been at odds with SEC Chair Gensler for years. That includes Coinbase and blockchain giant Ripple Labs. Prominent venture fund Andreessen Horowitz, which has a large portfolio of crypto companies, was one of the other primary contributors.
A lot of crypto’s big names also gave significantly in 2024.
FEC filings show Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss were among the largest individual crypto donors this election cycle,giving a combined $10.1 million. Top executives from Ripple contributed millions, led by billionaire founder Chris Larsen, who gave around $12 million this cycle.
Coinbase CEO Armstrong gave over $1.3 million to a mix of PACs including Fairshake and JD Vance for Senate Inc. He also gave directly to Democrats and Republicans running for House and Senate seats. Coinbase Chief Legal Officer Paul Grewal attended at least two Trump fundraisers, including one in Nashville, Tennessee, on the sidelines of the biggest bitcoin event of the year.
Kraken Chairman Jesse Powell donated over $1 million to the Trump campaign.
Other individual crypto contributors include ex-Bitfinex strategy chief Phil Potter(over $1.6 million),Multicoin Capital’s Kyle Samani ($878,600), Paradigm co-founder Fred Ehrsam ($735,400), Union Square Ventures partner Fred Wilson ($1,4 million), Paxos CEO Charles Cascarilla ($198,500),BitGo CEO Mike Belshe ($119,825),Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko ($67,100), and Xapo Bank founder Wences Casares ($374,899).
This week, Armstrong reportedly met with the president-elect to discuss appointments. Within a day, conversations swirled about the potential for the White House’s first crypto czar. By the end of the week, SEC Chair and longtime crypto foe Gensler, whose term doesn’t expire until June 2026, announced he was retiring on inauguration day.
One of Trump’s promises to his crypto fans on the campaign was that he would fire the SEC head and choose crypto-friendly regulators if elected. Gensler may have taken a look at the pressure that faces him across Washington and decided it just wasn’t worth trying to stick it out.
“Welcome to America’s most pro-crypto Congress ever,” Armstrong wrote on X on Nov. 5.
An Amazon Web Services data center in Ashburn, Virginia, US, on Sunday, July 28, 2024.
Nathan Howard | Bloomberg | Getty Images
The power needs of artificial intelligence and cloud computing are growing so large that individual data center campuses could soon use more electricity than some cities, and even entire U.S. states, according to companies developing the facilities.
The electricity consumption of data centers has exploded along with their increasingly critical role in the economy in the past 10 years, housing servers that power the applications businesses and consumers rely on for daily tasks.
Now, with the advent of artificial intelligence, data centers are growing so large that finding enough power to drive them and enough suitable land to house them will become increasingly difficult, the developers say. The facilities could increasingly demand a gigawatt or more of power — one billion watts — or about twice the residential electricity consumption of the Pittsburgh area last year.
Technology companies are in a “race of a lifetime to global dominance” in artificial intelligence, said Ali Fenn, president of Lancium, a company that secures land and power for data centers in Texas. “It’s frankly about national security and economic security,” she said. “They’re going to keep spending” because there’s no more profitable place to deploy capital.
Renewable energy alone won’t be sufficient to meet their power needs. Natural gas will have to play a role, developers say, which will slow progress toward meeting carbon dioxide emissions targets.
Regardless of where the power comes from, data centers are now at a scale where they have started “tapping out against the existing utility infrastructure,” said Nat Sahlstrom, chief energy officer at Tract, a Denver-based company that secures land, infrastructure and power resources for such facilities.
And “the funnel of available of land in this country that’s industrial zone land that can fit the data center use case — it’s becoming more and more constrained,” said Sahlstrom, who previously led Amazon’s energy, water and sustainability teams.
Beyond Virginia
As land and power grow more limited, data centers are expanding into new markets outside the long-established global hub in northern Virginia, Sahlstrom said. The electric grid that serves Virginia is facing looming reliability problems. Power demand is expected to surge, while supply is falling due to the retirement of coal- and some natural gas-powered plants.
Tract, for example, has assembled more than 23,000 acres of land for data center development across the U.S., with large holdings in Maricopa County, Arizona — home to Phoenix — and Storey County, Nevada, near Reno.
Tract recently bought almost 2,100 acres in Buckeye, Arizona with plans to develop the land into one of the largest data center campuses in the country. The privately-held company is working with utilities to secure up to 1.8 gigawatts of power for the site to support as many as 40 individual data centers.
For context, a data center campus with peak demand of one gigawatt is roughly equivalent to the average annual consumption of about 700,000 homes, or a city of around 1.8 million people, according to a CNBC analysis using data from the Department of Energy and Census Bureau.
A data center campus that size would use more power in one year than retail electric sales in Alaska, Rhode Island or Vermont, according to Department of Energy data.
A gigawatt-size data center campus running at even the lower end of peak demand is still roughly comparable to about 330,000 households, or a city of more than 800,000 people — about the population of San Francisco.
The average size of individual data centers operated by the major tech companies is currently around 40 megawatts, but a growing pipeline of campuses of 250 megawatts or more is coming, according to data from the Boston Consulting Group.
The U.S. is expected see a growing number of data center campuses of 500 megawatts or more, equivalent to half a gigawatt, in the 2030s through mid-2040s, according to the BCG data. Facilities of that size are comparable to about 350,000 homes, according to CNBC’s analysis.
“Certainly the average size of the data centers is increasing at a rapid pace from now to 2030,” said Vivian Lee, managing director and partner at BCG.
Community impact
Texas has become an increasingly attractive market due to a less burdensome regulatory environment and abundant energy resources that are more easily tailored to specific sites, Sahlstrom said. “Texas is probably the world’s best experiment lab to deploy your own power solution,” the energy officer said.
Houston-based Lancium set up shop in 2017 with the idea of bringing large electric loads closer to abundant renewable energy resources in west and central Texas, said Fenn, the company’s president. Originally focused on cryptocurrency mining, Lancium later shifted its focus to providing power for artificial intelligence with the advent of ChatGPT in late 2022.
Today, Lancium has five data center campuses in various stages of development. A 1,000-acre campus in Abilene is expected to open in the first quarter of 2025 with 250 megawatts of power that will ramp up to 1.2 gigawatts in 2026.
The minimum power requirement for Lancium’s data center customers is now a gigawatt, and future plans involve scaling them up to between three and five gigawatts, Fenn said.
For data centers that size, developers have to ensure that electricity costs in neighboring communities don’t rise as a consequence and that grid reliability is maintained, Fenn said. Pairing such facilities with new power generation is crucial, she said.
“The data centers have to partner with utilities, the system operators, the communities, to really establish that these things are assets to the grid and not liabilities to the grid,” Fenn said. “Nobody’s going to keep approving” such developments if they push up residential and commercial electric rates.
Renewables not enough
Data center campuses run by publicly-traded Equinix are rising to several hundred megawatts from 100- to 200 megawatts, said Jon Lin, general manager for data center services at the company. Equinix is one of the largest data center operators in the world with 260 facilities spread across 72 metropolitan areas in the U.S. and abroad.
Developers prefer carbon-free renewable energy, but they also see solar and wind alone as unable to meet current demand due to their reliance on changing weather conditions.
Some of the most critical workloads for the world’s economy, such as financial exchanges, run at data centers operated by Equinix, Lin said. Equinix’s data centers are online more than 99% of the time and outages are out of the question, the executive said.
“The firmness of the power is still incredibly important for these data centers, and so doing that solely off of local renewables is candidly just not an option,” Lin said.
The major technology companies are some of the largest purchasers of renewable power in the U.S., but they are increasingly turning to nuclear in search of more reliable sources of electricity. Microsoft is supporting the restart of the Three Mile Island nuclear plant outside Harrisburg, Pennsylvania through a power purchase agreement. Amazon and Alphabet’s Google are investing in small nuclear reactors.
But building new nuclear reactors is expensive and fraught with delays. Two new reactors in Georgia recently came online years behind schedule and billions of dollars over budget.
In the short run, natural gas will fuel much of the power demanded by data centers, Lancium’s Fenn said. Gas is the main, short-term power source providing the reliability these facilities require, Boston Consulting Group’s Lee said.
The industry hopes that gas demand will taper off as renewables expand, battery storage costs come down and AI helps data centers operate more efficiently, Fenn said. But in the near term, there’s no question that data center expansion is disrupting technology companies’ emissions targets, she said.
“Hopefully, it’s a short term side step,” Fenn said of stepped-up natural gas usage. “What I’m seeing amongst our data center partners, our hyperscale conversations, is we cannot let this have an adverse effect on the environmental goals.”
Note: CNBC analysis assumes a data center campus is continuously utilizing 85% of its peak demand of a gigawatt throughout the year, for a total consumption of 7.4 billion kilowatt-hours. Analysis uses national averages for household electricity consumption from EIA and household size from Census Bureau.