Need a car? Just lease an EV
After many years of urban cycling, transit, and now-defunct ride share programs, we finally needed a car for medical trips, baby stuff, and seeing friends but opted to say 🙅 to the internal combustion engine. This is a quick summary in case others want to do the same but know as little about cars as I did.
Caveats: this advice is probably very 2025 Bay Area-centric, but probably works for a lot of geographies. If you need a car or are updating your existing one, just don’t get an gas-power car.
As of July 2025, the $7500 discount on EVs is set to expire on October 2025 because of the ‘Big Beautiful Bill’.
Cars
Criteria: DC-fast charging speed (< 30 minutes to 80%), cargo capacity (> 20 cu ft), and range (> 300 miles).
We ended up with a 2024 Hyundai Ioniq 5 SEL RWD, two year / 12k mile lease negotiated with a dealer entirely over text and then delivered to our house. The amortized cost to us has been about $600-$700/month for the life of the lease with about $2k fees and registration at signing. This was my first car ever and if we’d had an existing insurance this entire process (from form to delivery) could have taken an afternoon (which I thought was crazy).
I also looked at the Ioniq 6 (a Tesla-style sedan), which has better high range due to its drag profile, however it only has 11 cu ft of storage, about as much as a typical fridge.
Alternative if you’ve got the stomach for it: great deals on used Teslas.
Other Details (as of 2025)
Leasing and Insurance
EVs, EV power electronics platforms, and EV-related standards improve every year so you may want to consider getting a two year lease and upgrading. In the Bay Area, it’s been been easy through Leasehackr. You can provide a provisional proof of insurance through the website, after which you’ll need the exact vehicle identification number (VIN) from the dealer. Notably, you don’t even need to visit the dealership to see cars: I received photo confirmation via the dealer, did paperwork live over the phone and email, and arranged for delivery.
If you have other insurance you may be able to get a discount by bundling your other insurance through the same provider.. You’ll need to provide the exact VIN to the insurer to get a real policy. All that said, I think our two-driver policy through State Farm is expensive.
Some states have special clean car incentives for car pool lane and tolls. In California, the leased car will arrive preregistered by the dealer, after which you can apply for clean air decals and FasTrak.
Charging and Range
Hyundai currently provides free 30-minutes of DC fast charging through Electrify America and new, non-Tesla EVs are newly compatible with Tesla’s Supercharger network via the NACS standard. If you’re at home, you can easily charge your car overnight by attaching an off-the-shelf 40A ‘Level 2’ charger, like from Grizzl-E or Leviton to a 240V NEMA outlet. If you don’t have this outlet and but space in your circuit breaker panel, it costs about $400 to have a NEMA outlet installed. We don’t drive much, so keep our car top-offed with a regular 120V, 12A Leviton charger running from an exterior outlet to our car.
Things that suck: I actually don’t know what someone who’s renting in a multi-family situation or apartment building should do. I’d love to hear more about what this is like.
Apps: Route Planning, etc.
There’s a ton of fragmentation around car charging networks. Here are some of the good ones that also integrate with Apple CarPlay:
- A Better Route Planner
- Uses a model of your EV to determine range and do route planning.
- PlugShare
- Unified view of all available public chargers across all networks.
