Considering a plug-in, electric car? Consider your lifestyle.

Buying a plug-in hybrid or electric vehicle is more than just buying a car. It's choosing a lifestyle.

By Mark Clayton,?Staff writer / May 20, 2012

A visitor looks at a new Ford Focus Electric at the International CTIA Wireless Conference & Exposition in New Orleans earlier this month. These electric-only cars require the biggest lifestyle change, because you can only go so far before recharging.

Sean Gardner/Reuters/File

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Avoiding the gas pump by buying an electric-drive vehicle is nice conceptually. Who wants to pay $3 to $4 a gallon when you can cut the bill by about 75 percent by using electricity to tool around town?

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But anyone looking into the electric option quickly confronts a flurry of options: Do you go with a conventional hybrid, like a Prius, or a plug-in hybrid, like the Chevy Volt? Should you skip the gas engine altogether and go all-electric with something like the Nissan Leaf?

There are costs and trade-offs involved with all these choices, of course. But the first question to answer is: How big of a lifestyle change do you want to make? The answer may change as you become more familiar with the options. It certainly did for me.

I was just getting my head around the idea of someday buying a car that would reduce my (and America?s) dependence on oil when a reporting trip took me to Austin, Texas, to report on what a post-oil world might look like. One of my first interviews ? with William Jones, a medical doctor with a passion for helping people and for driving fast cars ? gave me my first taste of electric-car ownership.

Soon after meeting Bill, we were zipping around town in his cayenne-pepper red Nissan Leaf. Bill wasn?t shy about stomping on the accelerator. "It's frisky," he said.

Who knew that a Leaf can accelerate so hard that it pops your head against the headrest like a Porsche Carrera? Or that it sounds a little bit like a jet fighter (or vacuum cleaner) when it glides to a stop in the garage?

When one of his buddies asked why he would consent to drive a "glorified golf cart," Bill told me his rejoinder was: "It's no golf cart, it's like driving the Starship Enterprise." Cruising around Austin with only the tires purring on pavement and no engine noise at all, I had to agree.

On that same Austin trip, I drove with David Tuttle, a computer engineer, in his Chevy Volt, a plug-in hybrid with a small gas engine. He gets 40 miles on a charge before the car switches nearly silently to its gas engine. But that switch seldom comes because like so many Americans, he rarely drives that many miles in a single day.

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