Your lease includes fuel?

edit: Nevermind, the "e" in Fiat 500e stands for electric.

OK, but can you charge for free?

If you can charge at work then yes, but even if you charge at home it's extremely inexpensive to be almost free.

I think I worked it out once to around three cents a mile and I drive around eight to ten miles a day.

Just out of curiosity, what's the yearly milage limit on that lease?

10,000 miles - it was also $4000 down, but you get $2500 back from the California EV incentive program so it comes to $1500 down and $90/month for a three year lease.

You can get lucky and find deals where the money down is even lower. I missed one where it was $1500 down so CA was basically paying you $1000 to take the car (or if you factor in the monthly fee cost around $60 a month).

Part of the reason for this is that it's a compliance car. I think the way it works is CA requires the MPG of your fleet to meet some very high standard. In order to meet this manufacturers that want to sell in the state make an EV with a very high MPGe that helps the average. Then they have to sell a certain number of them (it can't exist in name only). You can end up getting lucky.

[Edit] Looks like my understanding of the compliance car bit was wrong, seems to be just a hard requirement to sell some amount of zero emissions vehicles: https://www.thoughtco.com/what-is-a-compliance-car-85648

That won't be enough for most people - the average mileage driven per year for a male between 20 and 34 is almost $18,000.

https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/ohim/onh00/bar8.htm

I would guess it's enough when comparing to the people that are dropping car ownership for lyft or uber (especially considering that lyft and uber would be very expensive at those mileages).

While I don't disagree with you the context for this was "spending little on a car without driving a junker."

Uh... how? That seems improbably cheap.

They're inexpensive, you can usually just go to a dealer: http://autoweek.com/article/green-cars/smartphone-or-fiat-50...

FCA and other manufacturers sell or lease such vehicles at a loss purely to comply with arbitrary government requirements for zero emissions vehicles. So it isn't a sustainable situation, but in the short term there are great deals available to buyers in a few states.