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I got the EV in part because it makes money-sense to us (we drove it 26K miles last year, with 16K of them charged at home, thus we get tons of gas and oil change savings to make it worth taking on some extra costs that come with an EV).

Also, I was uncomfortable having all of our transportation eggs in one basket (gas). Our two cars are now one EV crossover and one gas pickup. If the Dims mess up one energy source, we can still travel with the other car.

Last but not least it's about our family being more energy self-reliant. I can't produce my own gasoline. But we have tons of solar. It provides 80% of all the power we need for our all-electric, 2,300 sq ft home, including charging the EV. From March through October (8 months) I could just about disconnect from the grid entirely. Almost all of my power pull from the grid is in the 4 winter months. If Brandon hadn't monkeyed with natural gas I would have kept my nat gas furnace and nat gas water heater.

As I soon transition into retirement in a few years, energy price inflation won't be something that'll worry me on keeping a budget. I'll have a small power bill + HELOC payment (the loan I took out to do the solar and other home energy improvements). The HELOC payment gets smaller as the balance is paid down. That's better than what I was doing before my energy project when I was paying a high power bill that kept getting higher, plus an ever increasing nat gas bill, plus ever increasing price at the gasoline pump (unless Trump's in office or it's an election year for a Dim incumbent).

And my solar inverters allow me to export data they track in 5-minute candles on exactly when and how much power moves from different points (solar coming in, how much my electrical panels needed at that moment, how much excess solar was used to charge batteries, how much battery power was used to power the electrical panels after the sun went down, and how much power was pulled from the grid). One reason my solar combined with EV is so efficient is because I was able to study how well my first version of solar did so that when I did my additions to solar (as well as buying the EV since it was time to replace my wife's car anyway), I knew exactly which components to add onto and how much. In other words, I knew how much to add (spend) to take advantage of economies of scale, but not add (spend) so much that I'd be fighting the law of diminishing returns.

Now that I've been using the upgraded solar for a year and a half, I know what it'd take to go 100% off-grid if the Dims implement a mark-of-the-best style social credit score, using energy as the weapon to control us. So far that seems to be their weapon of choice.