ONE VOLVO AND A CHOICE BETWEEN ELECTRICITY OR GAS. HOW DO YOU CHOOSE?

Convenience. It all comes down to convenience.

- SCOTT EVANS

Our society is built around the convenience afforded by the internal combustion engine. Whether moving ourselves or our goods, gasoline and diesel have made everything possible. As has a network of hundreds of thousands of branded gas stations around the globe; miles apart or across the street, they allow us to refuel a vehicle in a matter of minutes.

This is the market reality facing electric vehicles. They’re catching up quickly in price, range, and performance, but even the best haven’t reached parity yet. When you ask which version of the same car you should buy, the answer is a question: What price will you pay for convenience?

For clarity, it’s useful to remove variables by examining a vehicle offering both types of power trains, in this case the Volvo XC40 and its gas T5 AWD and electric Recharge T8 AWD variants. It also helps to remember where we came from. The automobile arrived before the gas station, just as the electric car came before the electric vehicle charger. Bertha Benz had to convince the local druggist in Wiesloch to mix her up some ligroin (a petroleum-based solvent) to complete the world’s first automobile road trip when the ol’ Benz Patent Motor Car ran dry. Today, you can buy gas nearly anywhere.

Just as there was a druggist in nearly every village in 1888, there’s an electrical outlet in most inhabited places today. Depending on the supplies the druggist had on hand, it’s an even guess which would be a slower fill-up. Today’s gas stations can dispense 10 gallons per minute. High-speed electric chargers and the electric cars capable of taking advantage of them are narrowing the gap, but there are fewer than 150,000 of those chargers globally, and they’re not at all evenly distributed.