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Comment by maximilianburke | Hacker News Reader

I wonder if such statements are taking total cost of ownership into account? After subsidies it's more expensive to purchase than similar models and trim lines of gasoline powered cars, but electricity is much cheaper than fuel and you have much less maintenance to do as well.

I drive about 800km per month and I'd pay $10/mo in electricity to do that in a Bolt, versus $150/mo in gasoline for my current car.

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What ? Even in Germany with it's high fuel prices i will get 800km with 50-70 EUR of fuel. Charging that 60kWh battery would be around 16 EUR worth of electricity here but only results in half the range. So still cheaper, but nowhere near your numbers.

> I drive about 800km per month and I'd pay $10/mo in electricity to do that in a Bolt, versus $150/mo in gasoline for my current car.

I don't get those figures at all... 800km (500 miles) is approx two-three recharges on the Bolt or about one tank of gas (depending on vehicle). Ignoring how incredibly cheap you are claiming electricity is ($5/full charge), there's nowhere on earth where a full tank of gas costs $150 (or even two full tanks).

Something went badly wrong when you came up with these figures.

My car gets 8km/L real-world, so 800km is about 100L of gasoline. At $1.50/L for its required 91 octane gas, that's $150.

Electricity is $0.08/kwh for the low tier where I live (Vancouver, Canada), so $4.80 to charge the 60kwh battery from zero.

The Bolt has an EPA range of 380 km. So, I was figuring that it would require two (and a bit) charges to hit the same 800km number.

8km/L is 2.35 miles per gallon. That's hilariously abysmal. Are you driving the space shuttle crawler?

Chevy Tahoe is the epitome of enormous gas guzzling SUV and it gets 8x that, at 16mpg.

They probably confused l/100km with km/l. 8l/100km is quite a common fuel consumption figure (~30mpg).

I don't know how they didn't notice this though, because most people have a general idea of how often they fill their car and how much it costs.

Check your units. 8km/l is 19 mpg.

there's nowhere on earth where a full tank of gas costs $150 (or even two full tanks).

Ever been to Australia?

AU$1.50 / litre, 60 litre tank, $90 per fill, two full tanks AU$180.

60 Liters == 15.8503 Gal $1 AUD == $0.76 USD $180 AUD == $136.8 USD

So it costs you $137 USD to fill up your large tank twice.

That's pricy, but not as bad as it sounds without unit conversion.

Ah, yeah, didn't even realise I was cheating a bit there.

> there's nowhere on earth where a full tank of gas costs $150 (or even two full tanks).

My vehicle holds 30+ US gallons. Filling up once is USD$75 at Costco (yesterday). Figure $90 at a regular station. (depending on the price of gasoline.) Filling up twice will probably exceed $150.

The 30+ gallons get me about 500-540 miles typically.

The cost of petrol in Canada meets the figures quoted in the parent post. Gasoline is about $1.30/liter around major metros in Canada; a Toyota Corolla gets about 5.7 km per liter (highway). 800km would consume about 140 liters of petrol, about CAD182.

> a Toyota Corolla gets about 5.7 km per liter (highway).

This article lists it as[0]: 4.9 L/100 km on the highway.

That's $52 Canadian, not $182 Canadia. I'm pretty sure that 5.77 km/liter figure you're quoting is 100 km/liter making your figure off by a huge amount.

[0] http://driving.ca/toyota/corolla/reviews/road-test/road-test...

Indeed, I just grabbed the first search engine result, which must have been wrong.

Here's the Toyota source: http://www.toyota.ca/toyota/en/vehicles/corolla/specificatio...

For the lowest model, for highway mileage, it's 6.5L/100km. CAD67 for an 800km highway trip. That is great gas mileage!

I'm still wrong. Even for a Ford F150, which gets 9.6L/100km, it's still only about CAD100 for the trip.

According to the US EPA, a Corolla gets about 30mpg, which Google tells me is 12.75 kpl.

You won't get 200 km per charge in Canadian winter. Merely half of that.

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