Running an electric car is twice as expensive as a petrol one

Electric cars are up to twice as expensive as petrol or diesel vehicles to run...

Running an electric vehicle (EV) can cost more than 24p per mile, while a diesel vehicle is 12.5p .. 80p per kilowatt hour ...

A typical electric car will travel 3.3 miles for every kWh of electricity used, meaning rapid and ultra-rapid chargers currently cost the equivalent of 24.1p per mile.

This is about double the average diesel car, which will do 43 miles per gallon, resulting in a cost of 12.5p per mile at current prices. A typical petrol car costs 14.5p per mile,...

A return journey from London to Penzance would cost £148 in an electric car using rapid chargers .. compared with £77 in a diesel car and £89 using petrol.

prices at rapid chargers have increased by 5 per cent over the past year, despite a 30 per cent decrease in the wholesale cost of electricity.

Even drivers who choose slower public chargers – the threshold is 50 Wh of power, allowing a full recharge in around 30 minutes – are paying more per mile than petrol and diesel drivers.

They account for 17.2 per cent of all new registrations since the beginning of 2024. This marks a decrease from the 18.7 per cent high in the latter half of 2022.

rapid and ultra-rapid chargers currently cost electric car drivers the equivalent of 24.1p per mile, while slower chargers cost the equivalent of 16.4p per mile.

Sales of electric cars in Europe are performing even worse than in the UK, with figures showing registrations were down by 44 per cent in August.

And your point is?

I generally enjoy your contrarian posts. But WTF?
Just gave away a 2006 Canry SE with > 250,000 miles and replaced it with a 2025 Camry SE Hybrid,

New Camry’s curb weight is 3,535 lbs per documentation. I’ll eventually put it on a scale. Lots of them here in farming country.

Generally like it but is sounds like a Coors can compared with the real Camry. I imagine - as a biomed engineer /PhD biophysicist - that they are trying to counteract the weight of the battery pack.

Only 6,000 miles since purchase 30 June so am still evaluating. Haptics and driver assistance sucks. Spoken as happy owner and track driver of 2014 C7 Vette (with 2019 brains) and a ‘75 FJ-40 Landcruiser with Chevy small block, etc.

But hey, I can still carry 10’ CPVC piping or 8’ dimensional lumber with the Camry SE’s back seats folded down!

For short trips such as shopping or commuting an EV makes most sense. Unfortunately not (don’t take wrong) everyone can afford multiple cars.

Right on both accounts. I've enjoyed ICE vehicles for almost 60 years, working on them since my early teen years (pissed my father off when I messed up his car at 15 by rebuilding his carburetor). I've rebuilt engines and transmissions, swapped many parts and tricked out cars. So one car doesn't do it for me. I have the EV as a daily driver, a truck for hauling, and two classic sports cars for enjoyment.

My youngest daughter who lives nearby owns a hybrid, ideal for her and her daughter, for both long and short trips. She says she won't buy an EV when her 17-year-old hybrid gives out (still going strong). She definitely wants hybrids. Another daughter and her husband in Iowa own 4 ICE vehicles, similar reasons as mine, husband works on them. They own a couple classic cars, a truck and a Jeep SUV (because of kids).

Let people decide what they want, every situation is different. (Then there is my brother-in-law, who doesn't want ICE or EV. He bought a hydrogen powered car, wtf.)

I wish we didn’t have a tariff against BYD they have what would be the perfect hybrid for exurban and even rural people. It’s overkill for urban or suburbs. They have a hybrid that just did 2.2L over a 100km test drive not on a course but in a major Chinese city. Under $14,000 American and 2.2L over 100km is equal too 108 mpg in US gallons. Read that again they have a 5 passenger sedan that in gasoline series hybrid mode not using any of it battery pack they depleted that to zero first gets 108 mpg in real world use. If that car was on sale here at that price point you couldn’t manufacture enough of them it would singly corner the market.

What’s great about this hybrid its a plug in w/o th a LFP pack and 16kWh which in A LFP pack is all usable capacity that’s 80+ miles in a Tesla 3 sized car. This means twice the distance of the average American commute can be covered using cheap plug power which in my Tesla equals under 2 cents per mile in energy costs. 93 octane would be 13 cents per mile in the same sized Volvo that sits next to the Tesla. What this means is this $14,000 car can do the average American commute using 50% of its pack at under two cents per mile and it only needs an hour at 30 amp /240 volt at night to put that 40 miles back. That’s equal to running your cloths dryer for an hour so the grid is fine we all dry cloths and in my house its at least one load per day out puppers crate towels get washed once per day. Or one hour of a house sized AC unit again the grid is fine. LFP cells like to shallow cycled at 50% DOD they last 20,000 cycles look at the 1C rate note the scale is logarithmic on the left.

My former commute used to take an hour to cover 23 miles one way that’s 1/2C not 1C discharge rate and typical of a urban rush hour commute where 20 to 25 mph is the average moving speed over distance. That would be under 1/4C so 30000 cycles in an LFP pack which BYD uses in their blade packs on the cheaper models. They are moving to sodium ion cells in blade packs. -20C 90% capacity at those temps, 10C rates and 20,000 full DOD cycles vs 3000 for LFP their partial DOD life is effectively unlimited hundreds of thousands of cycles its also logarithmic for sodium ion cells at partial DOD.

A lot of urban commute will be under 1C discharge rates for a plug in hybrid or EV.

It took 2.5 hours one time to get from LaGuardia to the Holland tunnel from 3pm to 5:30 pm on a Tuesday in NYC. that’s 13 miles distance and less than 6 mph avg speed.I have seen slower French Quarter to Tulane University area 4 miles and over an hour 15 not counting circling for parking. Less than 3 mph in biblical New Orleans gridlock. A hybrid or EV excels at near stand still speeds they don’t idle and they only run the ICE at its higher eff points if it has an ICE at all.

https://www.powertechsystems.eu/home/tech-corner/lithium-iron-phosphate-lifepo4/?amp

This one.

https://www.adamasintel.com/1300-mile-range-14000-chinese-ev-you-wont-get-in-us/

A hybrid or EV excels at near stand still speeds they don’t idle and they only run the ICE at its higher eff points if it has an ICE at all.

Another good reason for a hybrid or EV. When stalled in bumper-to-bumper traffic, I'm not using hardly any energy while gasoline cars near me are idling away gallons of gasoline. My daughter has driven her hybrid back and forth across the country getting many hundreds of miles per tank, going between Kansas, Iowa, and Texas and back to California. That's why she wants hybrids instead of EVs or ICE, the better range mileage.

I've followed BYD news over the last few years and regret not buying their stock. Currently they don't want to deal with USA standards and won't sell here.

BYD is building a huge factory in Mexico so serve that and the Latin American market. Because of NAFTA those cars would be Mexican cars just like Ford or Chevy which both have factories in Mexico too. I’m debating using an LLC to get one if the 100+ Mpg hybrids from Mexico’s just title it using a Mexican shell LLC a subsidiary of my Wyoming C Corp. Mexican title ,Mexican plates cheap Mexican taxes too. NAFTA also means Mexican corp vehicles can be driven in the USA as long as they have US insurance on them, I carry an umbrella policy for corp liability insurance on my person regardless of what I drive since I lease, rent and operate other’s corp vehicles as a consultant. Pesky tariff and import laws are for the plebs any Corp gets around them by design.

As for gridlock I had a Prius 2023 last year on a lease in 5 mph grid lock crawl it was returning 90 mpg over short 5 mile trip lengths in New Orleans. Where you can at times walk faster to a destination than drive it. Were it not for August heat and humidity I would have walked it. No sense in an uber they are stuck in the same gridlock and you pay by the minute only saves the hassle of parking. City bus...in New Orleans only if you are insane and love bums and piss, the street cars where they go are nice and three dedicated ROW so they are efficient even in peak hours but hey let’s tear up all the street cars for Goodyear tires. True story look up the history of street cars and how every major city was blanketed with them and how Goodyear and standard oil got them ripped out in classic robber barons fashion. So hybrids make the most sense in urban and suburban areas. Add in plug in 100 mile range with a 20kWh pack that in today’s prices is $2000 in LFP cells one half That in sodium ion. Those cells let you cut your cost per mile from 12 cents to under 2 by shifting the first 100 miles every day from $3 petrol to 10 cents per kWh electricity. They also let you design a power train that can get 100 mpg by only running at peak efficiency to charge the pack just like a diesel locomotive. Which hybrid diesel locomotives are now a thing and they double the tonne miles per gallon of diesel and that’s a good thing as locos are already five times more efficient than semi trucks.

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