4-County unveils new electric car
4-County Electric Power Association is taking a step toward the future with the unveiling of a new electric car Friday at its regional headquarters in Columbus.
The new car, a Chevrolet Bolt, is capable of traveling about 280 miles on a charge and eliminates much of the preventative maintenance, such as oil changes and spark plugs, required on gasoline engines.
4-County’s Jon Turner said this is the first completely electric vehicle added to the company’s fleet, and 4-County is excited to see what the future brings.
“This is a project that sort of culminated from a lot of different places,” he said. “Quite honestly, we were a little hesitant to get in. We didn’t understand electric cars.”
Turner said the real excitement came after speaking with Seven States Power Corporation’s Brad Rains. Rains, who serves as director of distributed energy resource deployments, helped coordinate the installation of electric vehicle charging stations in the Golden Triangle area. He said electric cars have come a long way from where they once were, and they are going to continue to become better and more appealing to consumers.
“It costs about three cents per mile,” Rains said. “If you have
a gasoline car that gets 24 miles to the gallon, at $2 a gallon, it costs about eight cents per mile.”
Electric vehicles are cheaper to buy, cheaper to run and require less preventative maintenance that gasoline vehicles, Rains said. For the around-town driver, they are the way to go.
Turner said 4-County is working with Rains and Seven States to offer incentives for builders who install EV charging stations in new construction. 4-County is also looking to develop a database of information to assist residential customers who want to enter the electric vehicle market.
“What we want to be is with help from Seven States we can have chargers available for people, we can sell them to them, we can add charging stations,” he said. “We can’t wire them in right now, but we can give advice. We can help them understand what it’ll mean.”
4-County CEO Brian Clark said adding and electric vehicle and looking at the ways 4-County can be involved in building electric vehicle infrastructure is a great way to prepare to meet the future needs of its customers.
“This new addition to our fleet will give us some great insight on a technological wave of the future,” he said. “We can start formulating a service plan for what we feel is a growing trend. It’s very interesting.”