Posted on 02/20/2024 5:55:29 AM PST by Red Badger
Buying an EV entails many other costs besides the vehicle.
Insurance is way higher. Some companies won't insure them at all.
Tires wear out quicker (20k miles) and are more expensive.
Video at link....................
That’s what I thought I wanted until I saw the pricing on the C8 Z06 and near impossible to obtain. This is a better fit for me and the LT4 is an awesome motor
My mpg isn’t quiet that bad but it’s usually around 11 or 12 in town
I think the MESSAGE that an EV sends makes the higher cost well worth it.
It is really easy to double your market share from 50 cars per month to 100 cars per month. But once you get to 500 cars per month, the number of customers with cash burning a whole in their pocket for your new form of new matters. By that time the once new NEW EV model is looking like last years iPhone.
Only Tesla has been successful at delivering the value proposition to its influencers that the service pack software is worthy of calling it a new model. Well the same engineer/marketing and imaging team also has delivered the new X that looks like the old Twitter, but the love/hate factor has gone up by 20. I am conservative and know internal combustion backwards and forwards, first guy on my block to have a laptop tune my car to weather conditions, but if the media hates Tesla, I might want one.
If Chevy could get people to love/hate drive their new corvette style... dealers would not be selling them at below MSRP to get out of floorplans. Tesla on the other hand cuts prices so they do not have to rent lots to store finished product.
My wife is considering an EV since our son likes his so much. The two places my wife travels any distance are both about 300 miles away. While charging stations are available along the routes, I estimate charging will add about an hour to the trip both ways. Both our current vehicles get well above 30 mpg and can easily make these trips without stopping for gas, but we choose to make one stop on these trips to top off our gas tank and make a bathroom break. Both can easily be accomplished in less than 15 minutes. Our son claims he can top off his EV in 20 minutes where he stops on his way to work, but charging times vary a lot depending on the charger and of course weather conditions make a difference too. I would be very wary of making these trips in below zero temperatures and would have apprehension on very hot days when temperature extremes affect both battery charge and recharging times. Adding a home charger is a $3,000+ expense and may require an expensive upgrade of your electrical service. EVs have many hidden costs.
I have a Toyota Sequoia. I make regular runs to Kansas City. 700 mile trip one way. I get there on two tanks of gas and in about 12 hours. NO WAY would I try that in an EV. Driving up through Kansas from the OK border there is nothing for miles but cow pastures.
My 23 model SS naturally aspirated 6.2 V8 has cylinder deactivation and manages 28 on the HW
We like our cow pastures and low population lol
I encourage as many people as I can *not* to move here
1) Don't get an EV unless you need two cars anyway (i.e. married) and one of them is a gas/ICE car.
2) If you have a pickup, it has to be the ICE. EV pickups won't do some of the chores I every now and then use my pickup for without stopping too often to charge.
3) Don't get an EV or any car if both of your cars are working fine anyway. Wait until you need to replace one of your cars.
4) Don't get an EV unless you have a place to set up charging at home.
5) Don't get an EV unless you plan to drive it at least 12K or maybe 14K miles per year of home charged miles to save enough on gas to be worth it. For all the talk on FR posts about EV's being good only for urban driving, IMHO that's incorrect. It's better to be an EV owner in a somewhat rural area like I live where we have to drive a lot of miles just to get to town and back. LOL
6) Don't get an EV before doing research on most of the road trips you'd take to make sure that the EV has plenty of fast chargers for that trip. This assumes that the EV will be your new car and, therefore, be the one you want to make most of your trips in. During road trips my wife wants to stop every 150-200 miles and walk around for 10-15 minutes regardless of which car we take. Thus our road trip driving habits are conducive to taking the EV. We drove it all the way from Alabama into the northeast U.S. and east Canada and back with no problems charging. But that would probably not be the case if we decided to take a road trip through sparsely populated west Texas or Wyoming (which we don't plan to do, but if that happens we have the ICE pickup).
7) Don't get an EV if you plan to use it for long trip driving in harsh cold. Again, we live in Alabama where that's not an issue. And even if you live up north it's probably no problem having an EV for local driving in the cold AS LONG AS YOU CAN CHARGE IT AT HOME. But if cold driving will be somewhat regular where you live, then perhaps the 12K mile threshold in bullet point #5 above should be 14K or 16K miles per year to handle the fact that cold weather makes the EV operate less efficiently. Again, if you can charge at home you should have no problems getting from point A to point B for local driving. But you use up a lot more power doing so and reduce the odds that getting an EV saves enough gas to be worth other costs that come with an EV (unless you drive a lot of miles).
8) Before getting an EV look at the weight increase and assume it'll increase your tire replacement costs proportionally. Our EV crossover weighs about 10% more than the ICE crossover it replaced (but about 10% less than our ICE pickup). I had to replace the tires on it at about 27K miles, but those replacement tires still look new at 44K miles (17K-ish miles on the "new" tires). So maybe the first set didn't last long because they were factory tires. We'll see. However, even with some tire replacement increase, that's probably offset by lowering how often you need brake repairs, with most braking done by regen braking. So far that seems to be the case.
My wife and I had to replace her ICE crossover anyway. I replaced it with an EV crossover. We drive it 26K miles per year, with 16K of those miles charged at home, in the south, and 80% of the power in our home is free from solar. If you have tons of solar making most of your power free like I do, then the threshold of miles for step 5 is probably more like 8K per year to be worth it. Obviously for us it's way worth it. But it works like that if you and your wife quit saying "her car" and "his car". We say "the EV" and "the truck" with the understanding that if either of us has to drive somewhere that day, it's in the EV to save gas. If we have to split up and take 2 cars that day, whoever drives the most takes the EV (unless it involves pickup chores).
If the government had to mandate anything, my not mandate regenerative hybrid vehicles, or hybrids in general? Increased fuel economy in the 40mpg range is beneficial is it not? No excessively heavy batteries, and though different from traditional ICE vehicles, folks understand hybrids to a certain extent. Still a pain to work on, etc, but they make sense as a “crossover” into the world of emmission free transportation.
disclosure: owner of a 2018 Lincoln Hybird MKz sedan.
They still spew the evil CO2 into Mother Erf’s atmosphere killing her with every trip........................
But 40+mpg gets us there faster!
They don’t want you to go at all!......................
The whole point is to make personal transportation too expensive, between gas prices, taxes and insurance premiums.
My vehicles just need to be easy enough to work on. Which means I can also troubleshoot them without any gadgets.
My son bought a 2017 Cayman S last fall. Fun car on a race track, but very limited on public roads. I’ve had bigger adrenaline rushes in a semi truck (and there’s something about the mere presense of a big truck in traffic that the ‘4 wheelers’ HAVE to respect).
Of course there are those who disagree with this.
“It was possible, no doubt, to imagine a society in which wealth, in the sense of personal possessions and luxuries, should be evenly distributed, while power remained in the hands of a small privileged caste. But in practice such a society could not long remain stable. For if leisure and security were enjoyed by all alike, the great mass of human beings who are normally stupefied by poverty would become literate and would learn to think for themselves; and when once they had done this, they would sooner or later realise that the privileged minority had no function, and they would sweep it away. In the long run, a hierarchical society was only possible on a basis of poverty and ignorance.”
― George Orwell, 1984
Almost half the existing homes in this country don’t yet have a 200A service.
EVs are expensive toys.
If you want one, fine. No skin off my nose.
But EV mandates and government incentives have as much to do with saving the planet as CoupFlu policy does with protecting public health.
My biggest adrenaline rushes in big trucks were while driving in snow storms. It requires intense attention.
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