By Julian Spector
The people who stand to benefit the most from electric vehicles often aren’t the ones who’ve been able to get them. A Bay Area financing startup hopes to change that.
Zevvy wants to make electric cars accessible to the millions of Americans who commute many miles each day and tens of thousands of miles each year. These workers typically can’t afford the premium of a new electric vehicle, and they can’t lease one because they’d blast through the mileage cap. As such, they end up in the used car market and rack up steep annual bills for gas and maintenance.
The EV market hasn’t found a way to reach these customers effectively, contends Zevvy founder and CEO Andrew Krulewitz. But that needs to happen, both for drivers’ pocketbooks and for the planet’s health.
“If you think about maximizing an EV’s impact, financially and environmentally, you want it driven as much as possible,” Krulewitz told Canary Media.
Put another way, there’s a big difference in avoided carbon (and tailpipe) emissions from electrifying the personal vehicle of someone who taps on a keyboard at home every day versus someone who drives 60 miles to and from work every day. Similarly, the personal financial savings from reduced fuel and maintenance costs add up the more miles are driven on an electric vehicle.
The trick is getting your hands on one. Zevvy hopes to make this possible with a new type of financing product based on proprietary analytics. Drivers can sign up for a lease with a minimum commitment of six months. The monthly bill combines a fixed fee of several hundred dollars plus a variable fee of “only a few cents for every mile they drive,” and there’s no cap on mileage per month.
Zevvy calculates the fixed fee to be cheaper than a monthly loan payment, and the per-mile fee should result in drivers saving money compared to what they’d pay to keep burning gasoline, Krulewitz said. On Tuesday, the company raised $5.4 million in seed funding led by MaC Venture Capital. It’s a relatively small funding round at a time of massive investment in climatetech, but it’s enough to bring EVs to 1,000 California commuters in the coming year.
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