Posted on 12/28/2021 8:40:56 AM PST by RicocheT
Compelling new evidence reveals a disconnect between the metrics used to analyze fuel costs and the realities that EV drivers face on the ground.
The More You Consider, the Worse EVs Look Again, the new research is just the first installment in a larger series, but its results are undeniably head-turning. The study found that:
Commercial charging rates are two to four times higher than residential rates.
Level 1 chargers cost an average of $600 to install and can take 20 hours to fully charge an EV.
Level 2 chargers are much faster but cost $1,600.
“Full charge” is a misleading term because charging past 90% is slow, difficult and unadvised, which means you get far fewer miles than the advertised ranges would have you believe. Gas vehicles, on the other hand, are good for 300-400 miles per tank.
Considering all of those factors, and presuming a greater reliance on commercial charging, it would cost $8.58 to fuel a mid-priced gas car that gets 33 mpg for 100 miles at $2.81 a gallon. Comparatively, a mid-priced EV — Tesla Model 3, Nissan Leaf or Chevy Bolt — would cost $12.95 per 100 miles.
Annually, presuming 12,000 miles driven, it would cost $1,030 to drive a gas car versus $1,554 for an EV.
This article originally appeared on GOBankingRates.com: Which Really Costs More: Charging an EV or Filling Up Your Tank With Gas?
(Excerpt) Read more at yahoo.com ...
1. Don't compare apples to oranges. So don't compare a mid-size gas pickup truck with a small EV car. If you're thinking about getting an EV, look at an EV that's comparable in service for the gas car you'd otherwise keep or buy.
2. Think about your use. If you plan to use it for trips then you have to look at charge costs at charging stations. If you plan to rarely use it for trips (i.e. you and your wife need two cars anyway, might as well have one gas car and one EV to have the best of both worlds), then focus only on residential electricity rates.
3. Be real with expectations. Just like gas cars never get as high of mpg as advertised, EV's don't get as high a miles/kWh as advertised. And completely ignore mpge, that's such a contrived "metric". For instance, I'm interested in the F-150 Lightning because I like/need to drive mid-size trucks. It proports to get 2 miles per kWh, I'm going to drop that by 5% and assume in reality it'll get 1.9 miles per kWh (similarly to dropping the advertised mpg by 5% to get the true mpg, and that is on highway miles). I'll drop it another 5% for a total of 10% (1.8 miles per kWh) because of inefficiencies in charging the DC battery from AC power.
4. Look at your true power rate, not what the power company states as its official rate. Last month I paid 12.97 cents per kWh. I derived that by looking at my total bill, subtracting the monthly base rate they charge even if you consume no power, subtract all monthly riders they add to it, and subtract the tax percentage on those (in Alabama it's 4% tax rate on power). Whatever's left in the bill is what I call the overall usage charge for the month. I then divide that by the kWh the bill says I consumed from them to get my true kWh rate. I don't care how much of that is the stated rate, how much of that are riders added to it, and how much of it is state tax. All I care about is that increasing my power consumption costs me that much per kWh. (This is a calculation I used studying 2 years' worth of power bills before I decided to install solar and figured out how much each kWh saved. The same applies for adding kWh for things like an EV.)
5. Be realistic about how much you'll drive it. I drive on average about 200 miles per week. My old used mid-sized pickup gets about 15 miles per gallon. Gas costs me $2.89 lately. That means it costs me $38.53 weekly for the 13.3 gallons of gas I buy on average each week. If the F-150 Lightning gets 1.8 real miles per kWh (that's per kWh I supply to it from my AC), then it would cost me $14.11 weekly to buy 111.1 kWh's weekly (I know I'm billed monthly by the power company, but it's easier to think of miles and gas consumption in weekly terms). So the next question is if the $24.42 in weekly projected savings will pay for itself, and if so, how long would it take?
6. Add up the other costs I won't bore you with here. Be sure to include: a difference in insurance rates (if you're replacing an old car with only liability insurance with a new car you'll make payments on and have to, therefore, pay extra premium for comprehensive insurance), one time costs to set up the chargers, but also include inflation expectations for gas and power (I assumed 3% inflation for my calculations, though I fear the Dims will make energy costs keep skyrocketing to force us to repent from our ways), include interest on car payments (if you would otherwise replace your old used car with another used car, if you're like me you wouldn't make payments on it because you've saved enough to buy the next used car, thus buying a new EV is a major difference), no oil changes with an EV, plus costs of oil changes going up with inflation (thus saving more later than the first year), but replacing your battery in an EV at 10 years, etc.
7. For my calculations, I assumed I'd get none of my "free" power from my solar system going into an EV. If I do (I expect it to be 20% to 30% of all my miles coming from my solar system) I'll count it as gravy on top. If I don't get an EV, the savings I get from my solar system and converting my gas appliances to electric ones will pay for itself in 10 years (that includes paying the interest on the HELOC I took out to pay for most of it, and also includes the tax credit for installing solar). If I get an EV, the extra cost will pay for itself in 13 years (that includes paying off the solar costs too). That makes me think that getting an EV isn't worth it ---- except for one very important thing. Getting an EV would give me a hedge against gasoline price inflation, similar to the hedge I somewhat have against power price inflation. As far as overall wealth-building / avoiding expenses goes, an EV isn't worth it. As far as going to sleep at night hoping the Dims don't mess up your financial plan as you go into retirement by jacking up your energy costs, an EV might be worth it.
A Tesla owner in Finland decided to blow up his electric car with dynamite after a battery replacement was going to cost $22,000.
“Buying an electric car means never having to worry about buying gas ever again.”
Cost of replacing battery for a regular auto-between $100 and $200. Cost of replacing a battery pack for an EV apps $15,000 plus. Wonder if there is an increase in fire insurance for EVs?
I really think most people charge up at home. Or not??
Again, it’s a helluva lot different when EVs are a small segment of the market than when everybody will be driving them. Expect some kind of electricity rationing and higher electricity costs.
Yeh, the folks I know charge their Teslas at home. I also know that their daily drivers and road-trip vehicles run on Gasoline.
An electric could be a great second car for an urbanite.
Nothing really comes to mind.
EV’s produce less noise but I’m not sure if my music would sound significantly better given that vehicle road noise is so much louder than engine noise.
I am a musician and monitor my composition mixes in the car as a final check. But I am an anomaly. Few other people would probably even care about such things. But that’s the only possible thing that comes to mind.
Putting costs aside there is the hassle factor of constant worry about recharges and limited ranges. That’s the deal breaker to me.
That’s my biggest concern. I’m preparing for a world where a lot of people have EV’s and my electric rates for my home go up because of it.
Don’t they mandate some kind of noise so that people can hear if a car is coming?
“I’m wonderin’ where people buy gas for $2.81/gal.”
In Texas. Local stations ~$2.59
I used to travel a lot by car, 20-30K miles x year for work. As part of my road trip SOP, I would normally stop and top off my gas tank 30-50 miles before I hit any major city. That way, if there was a traffic jam, accident, construction, or other delay, I'd have close to full tank to get me through with AC in the summer, heat in the winter and no fear of running out of gas.
More often than not it proved unnecessary, but there were multiple occasions where the practice saved me from running out of fuel in the middle of a busy interstate spur or bypass. Topping off like that in an EV on a long trip would add hours and hours to an already long trip.
The point is to get rid of individual transportation, altogether. (Insert Airplane! reference here!)
Which is why the road tax will not be collected only at commercial charging stations.
“My real complaint is the myth that electricity comes from the tooth fairy. “
You’d think they’d know that oil comes from the oil fairy.
Regarding the article, it doesn’t mention the price per kwh of the electricity. How can there be a comparison without that?
Sams Clubs have the cheapest high test.
Recently purchased a Rav4 Prime plug-in hybrid for my wife. It gets about 2.8 miles per kWH of charge, and 38 mpg on gasoline. Using 13¢ per kWH (which is what I pay at home) to charge and $3.199/gal for gas, electricity costs about 56% as much as gasoline per mile. The car has a 400 mile range with a full tank and fully charged battery. There are four “free” charging stations in town, two at local libraries, one at the power company, and one at the Toyota dealer, but unless you’re going to stay a while, it’s not worth the wait. A full charge costs me about $2.00 bucks at home, so waiting a couple of hours for a free charge is no bargain, unless I got nothing else to do. Commercial charging stations are few and far between, but generally they would run a little more than a deuce. A full charge gets about as many miles as a gallon of gas, so any time I can get a full charge (from zero) for less than a gallon of gas, I am ahead.
Commercial charging stations would have to charge about 26¢ per kWH to cost more than gas at $3.50/gal.
On Cape Cod, electricity costs 23 cents per kwh if you shop for best “supplier” rate, or 25 to 26 cents if you don’t. Much of New England has electricity costs that are 50 to 100% greater than the rest of the country m
Throwing this data point into the discussion.
See Moe higher education does pay off.
One fellow at work told me his electric bill almost tripled charging his car every night. When he got the solar array on his roof he says it’s about normal now.
That’s the kind of information that seems near impossible to find.
My daughter has one two year old. She is a “stay at home” mom that is always on the run. She was going to get an SUV but I mentioned the idea of a minivan. She was open minded enough to consider it and did some research. They live in the Seattle area.
Anyway, she bought a Chrysler Pacifica “plug in” hybrid. She absolutely LOVES that thing. All the other soccer moms drive SUV’s and she just casually loads the toddler in back with the remote controlled SLIDING doors that stay out of the way. And because all of her driving is less than 20 miles, typically, the standard gasoline motor hardly ever kicks in. But if they need it for a road trip, it still has the full size engine and the only thing they lose is the seats being able to fold down into the floor (it now has batteries).
If I lived somewhere where most of my driving was short distances, I’d be getting one of those. But I’m in the sticks.
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