Benefits of Switching to an Electric Car

Five students from Central Junior High School's Challenge class: Lucy Cook, Cassie Schmidt, Madison Morris, Matthew Concho, and Cade McNeely, are currently working on the second part of the Lexus Eco Challenge. The Lexus Eco Challenge is a national competition through Scholastic. During the course of the project students are to find an issue in their community, which falls under the topic given, and come up with solutions on how to fix or help the matter. The students competed in the first part, where they held a litter pickup to help endangered species in the Mississippi River, and now they are on to the next topic: air and climate. For this section, they have decided on promoting electric vehicles. They have created brochures and placed several throughout Cape Girardeau.

Although electric cars are arguably more expensive than regular vehicles, they have many benefits aside from that. For starters, one benefit is that it costs much less to charge a car than to fill up a tank of gas. The national average amount of money it takes to charge an electric car is $0.12 per kilowatt, rather than paying $2.00- $3.00, the national average cost of gas. As for how long it takes to charge and how far they can go before another charge, it isn’t too terrible, depending on which model you have. It takes anywhere from thirty minutes to twelve hours, and they can travel forty to two-hundred miles in one charge. If you want a vehicle that can go a little further in distance you might have to look at a few options on the pricier side, like Tesla or similar companies.