Michelle Reynolds drives for Uber in Sacramento, and she’s lived in Sacramento for 11 years. Two years ago, she got her electric vehicle.
“The only kind of downside would maybe be long distance road trips if it’s hard to find a charger, but I haven’t experienced a lot of that recently,” Reynolds said. “I think I’d only go electric from here on out.”
Reynolds said she averages between 300 to 500 miles a day, and her car’s range is about 280 miles. She owns a gas car as well, but she rarely uses it.
“It’s so cheap when I charge at home,” Reynolds said. “It’s fractional for what I pay in the gas vehicle.”
An Arco gas station on the corner of 4th Avenue and 65th Street in Sacramento, CA on May 19, 2026.Ruth Finch/CapRadio
Interest in electric vehicles is on the rise, according to car shopping site Edmunds. According to AAA, the average gallon of gas in Sacramento has risen to $6.10, compared to $5.05 a year ago.
Peter Mackin is the president of SacEV, a Sacramento-based electric vehicle enthusiast group. He said that in the early days of electric vehicles, before cars like the Tesla Roadster came out in 2008, if you wanted an electric car you had to be a little more DIY.
“You had to take a gas car and rip out all the drivetrain and put in batteries and an electric motor and controllers and stuff and do it yourself,” Mackin said. “Our mission has evolved quite a bit since the beginning.”
These days, SacEV focuses on educating and advocating for the use of electric vehicles in Sacramento. Mackin said that if you can charge at home, you can save over $1700 a year driving electric.
“Even if you have to run an extension cord out of the garage and plug your car in that way, EV is a no-brainer,” Mackin said. “If you have to rely on public charging, it gets a little trickier.”
Victor Mendoza lives in the Bay Area, but drives his electric car to Sacramento three days a week for work. He doesn’t have a charger at home, and said that it can be difficult to navigate.
“I think time, unfortunately, is not on your side, especially if you’re busy. For me, it does require me to plan out my charges as opposed to just being at home,” Mendoza said as he was waiting to charge his car at an Electrify America charging station in the parking lot of a Target. “When I’m out here in Sacramento, though, there’s a lot of charging stations that I could use, so it’s pretty convenient in that sense.”
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Charging electric vehicles takes more time than pumping gas. At public direct current fast chargers, charging an electric car to 80% can take anywhere from 20 minutes to an hour, depending on the model of car and its range, according to the U.S. Department of Transportation.
Most electric vehicles come with a charger that can be plugged into any standard AC wall outlet. However, these chargers, usually referred to as level 1 chargers, can take a while to charge your car, averaging between 40 and 50 hours to fully charge a battery.
The faster level 2 home chargers, which many EV owners use, can fully charge a car between 4 to 10 hours.
Mendoza said that he’s had his electric car for nine months. When trying to get a level 2 home charger, which requires a higher voltage plug than a standard wall outlet, he ran into some issues.
“I found out after the fact that I have to do some more work because I have an older house, which did have to factor into the timing it would take to install something at home,” Mendoza said.
After getting the correct wiring installed in your home, level 2 chargers can be another cost for vehicles that are on average $5,000 - $6,000 more than their gas counterparts when purchased new. However, in Sacramento, SMUD can help cover that cost.
SMUD’s Charge@Home program can offer up to $600 of incentives to help cover costs of installing level 2 chargers. Louie Dias, a Product Services Coordinator at SMUD and an EV owner himself, said that using the level 2 chargers is the ideal way to charge.
“It’s honestly just as easy as plugging in your cell phone at night,” Dias said. “When you wake up in the morning, it’s full, it’s ready to go and to take on everything that we’re going to need it for throughout the day.”
SMUD also offers lower energy rates to EV owners and free of charge EV advisors to any SMUD customer considering switching to an electric vehicle.
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