Plug-in vehicles, battery-electric cars and plug-in hybrids are cutting US gasoline use by 45 million gallons a year. That means Americans are already saving $100 million a year in refueling costs thanks to EVs.
Those numbers come from the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS), which estimates there are almost 200,000 plug-in vehicles on US roads. Some 170,000 of those plug-in vehicles were bought within the past three years.
Plug-in vehicle sales in the US last year came up just short of the 100,000-unit mark, with EV sales rising 90 percent to 99,827 vehicles.
The Chevrolet Volt extended-range plug-in, Nissan Leaf and Tesla Model S battery-electric vehicles combined to account for about two-thirds of those sales.
Leaf sales doubled in 2013 while Tesla sales jumped by a factor of eight. Meanwhile, the four Prius variants that Toyota sold in 2013 totalled 234,000 units.
