Doug George loves his Tesla.

Or, in his case, Teslas.

The Ottawa man owns two of the high-end electric vehicles. He was the first in Canada to take possession of the Model S sedan. He also owns a discontinued Tesla Roadster he bought 5 years ago.

“The car is just such a fun thing to drive,” he says. “And it’s also so efficient and inexpensive to run. I don’t see why anyone would want to go back to gas after driving one of these.”

More and more, it seems people are agreeing with him.

When George bought the Roadster he says there were four in Ottawa. Now there are over a hundred Teslas in the region. He says there would be more except that Tesla can only make them so fast.

They are expensive. The Model S starts at around $70,000.

The flipside is you’ll never have to stop at a gas pump again. George says a full charge costs him around $8. “Its range is over 400 kilometres on one charge,” he says. “So on a nice day you can drive from here to Toronto.”

And Tesla has even built free “supercharging” stations along Highway 401 to make sure you can get home again.

It all points to the notion that the electric car has stopped being a novelty, and has become a viable alternative for the green-minded, and/or the gas price-weary.

And it’s not just Tesla.

Lower-ranged, and lower-priced electric vehicles, or EVs, like the Chevrolet Volt are also becoming more popular as urban runabouts. “Oh yeah, there’s tons of them. You’ll see a lot of them around the city,” says Mike Leroux, General Sales Manager at Surgenor Chevrolet Buick GMC Cadillac in Ottawa.

The industry is responding.  Tesla is introducing a new model and has plans to ramp up production. Chevrolet is rolling out two new EV models, the Bolt and the Spark. “The product is just getting stronger and stronger and making more sense,” says Leroux. “So I think the percentage of electric vehicles out there will increase dramatically over the next 10 years.”

As the popularity of EVs grow, so too does the number of free EV charging stations. There are now around 50 in the capital region alone. Five years ago there was just one in all of Ontario. “I would actually have to drive to Toronto by going through RV campgrounds and plugging into their outlets,” recalls George.

Just another example of how these quiet-running electric cars are quietly gaining ground on their gas-guzzling cousins.