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This is the barrier for me too— my family lives in a walkable, downtown community and our overall driving is 5-10k km/yr. It would be fun to have an EV, but from both a $$ and eco point of view, I think if you're already committed to a low car lifestyle, your best option for some time yet is to carry on buying lower-efficiency vehicles that are at least 4 years old.

This prevents an existing vehicle (for which the carbon cost to manufacture it is sunk) from being abandoned, but using it as a backup vehicle means it won't be driven more than a minimum, and having your gas be "expensive" on a per-km basis creates the proper incentives to avoid driving except where necessary.

Just commit and sell the car, our driving was about double that and we do not miss it a bit now. Still drive about 1000 km/year in rentals, but we are trying to minimize that.. It's especially nice as a family to primarly transport yourself in other ways were you get to spend time together interacting freely instead of being stuck in a car.

Economically it's more or less the same, but a better quality of life.

We've thought about it. One of the main barriers is honestly the combo of a) out of town family and b) young children. Installing carseats and boosters in a rental is a giant pain, and the train/coach schedules aren't dense enough to permit a reliable day trip to a location that's a 60-90 minute drive away.

We do have another family in our circle are are carfree and they make it work with a combination of rentals and every now and then they borrow our car in exchange for babysitting and other favours.

Depends on the seats. We have seats that you just put in. They are held in place by the seatbelt. So there's a bit of extra carrying the seats, that's all. We bought them because they were top scoring in a crash safety test.

The real gap is with short-term car shares where you want to walk to the car, do your errand, and then walk home. Most carseats aren't great for being carried on foot or taken on public transit. So that leaves you with only doing rentals when the time period is long enough to make it "worth it" to bring the car home on either end of the trip for seats in/out.

We're in a similar situation. Can walk to everything we need so we only end up driving about 3500 miles (about 5KM) per year. I've got an old 98 Honda civic which "only" has about 130K miles on it (meaning it's good for at least another 70K miles) and still runs great. I can't justify the expense of an EV given these criteria, though I'm looking forward to getting one someday.

My 2017 Volt is what took me to my 2018 Model 3. Now I can no longer see myself driving any car that is not electric. This from someone who loves the sound of a good muscle car even to this day.

GM's issue has always been they have played the compliance game while claiming otherwise. Even Ford is doing it now with the Mach E by limiting availability to 50k models, a number a third of the sales of vehicles they have cancelled for low unsustainable sales.

I never bought my TM3 to save money, buying any new car pretty much is a losing proposition. I bought it because it was cool. It was the closest I have even seen to those dream/concept cars from the seventies and eighties. All those cars with radical exteriors and even more radical interiors. Well someone built it.

Is it perfect. No. However as an EV is had my most important feature. Range. I could care less about its 0-60mph times. I want range. I want to drive to my friends in the boonies and back in all seasons without having to divert to charge. I want to be able to skip chargers because I have the range to do so.

Plus remember, every range number given should be hedged by multiplying it by 0.90 as no manufacturer suggests charging to 100% all the time.

On a side note : Do not buy FSD. Tesla will not let you transfer it to another Tesla and even right now trade ins to Tesla are hit and miss as they have been giving ZERO dollars on trade for the feature. You don't need it for lane keep assist or traffic aware cruise control. I don't care if you believe Tesla can or cannot deliver it, the simple matter here is they don't honor you by giving you anything for it on trade; something that Elon claims to be looking into

Mach-E started as a compliance EV and the realised that their compliance car might not sell at all and they would have to lose like 10-15k on each one of them, and potentially sell them in fairly large numbers compared to compliance cars of the past.

So they have a team inside Ford and they basically told them to go all out on the vehicle and they did a nice job. These guys however are still sort of separate from overall Ford and the car is basically designed to sell well and not lose them to much money. Ford has the issue that they simply don't have battery supply to scale their EV production.

They are getting batteries from LG in Europe right now but all new capacity is basically already reserved for all the Europeans. They simply can't copy the Model Y and sell 300k a year, specially because to match the Y in specs, they needed to put more battery into it.

I agree with your point on FSD. They said they would start to value it during trade in now, but even so, when you sell it privately, if the buyer doesn't want FSD its harder to sell, its limits the pool of people who want it.

Do you have a source on the Mach-E history?

This was Ford's own narrative when they announced it. Almost every article written about it in Nov of 2019 shared that narrative.

https://arstechnica.com/cars/2019/11/heres-everything-we-kno...

https://www.motor1.com/features/382783/ford-mustang-mach-e-b...

Ah sorry, I mean specifically the economics discussed - loss per car for a compliance car, the need to produce more compliance cars, that the car is expected to lose money still.

I'd be quite interested in a peek behind the curtains with that much detail, but I don't think that much has been said publicly and I wonder if it's just the parent making inferences.

It is conjecture but we'll founded.

GM lost money on every Volt and loses money on every Bolt. Tesla is rumored to sell at a lost and make up for it by selling clean energy credits to the likes of Fiat Chrysler.

It's well known that all of Ford and GM's past EVs were compliance cars.

The details are important, though. The industry factors R&D in to gross margin, and typically reports of per unit losses include it.

If you spend $1bn to develop a car you sell 100k of break even, you just lost $10k per car. But that doesn't mean you're going to lose twice as much if you double the production.

If they were going to lose 10-15k per incremental unit, that's horrific and I'd love to know the details, that's why I'm asking.

I honestly don't know how to reconcile R&D costs but I dislike how they're applied per unit today. R&D is a sunk cost and the technology gained from it can be applied beyond the original scope. I get it because bean counters want to point fingers when it comes to penny pinching.

It's not as if GM goes back and adjusts the R&D % applied to the 97 Corvette when they sell an LS engine. The R&D cost of every subsequent vehicle that reuses something off the shelf is going to be cheaper.

I'm not defending the way they amortize, but if you don't take it in to account, it can lead to some poor conclusions.

Tesla R&D is so ridiculously efficient. I wouldn't be surprised if a Model 3 from scratch costs traditional auto companies an order of magnitude more to develop.

So the first EV models inevitably come out, amortizing a large amount of R&D over a limited run, and it looks like an absolute disaster for margins.

It doesn't necessarily mean things aren't going well - although it certainly can!

About the start of the as compliance yes, but I don't have link right now. This was said in a video interview, maybe with Autoline? Not sure. But it was some of the top guys on that program.

The detailed economics is conjecture, based on different statements and some assumptions. Sorry, I didn't want to come across as this being certain knowledge. Maybe the lose on the Mach-E are still pretty bigger. Maybe they changed from the compliance because they wanted to have a flag ship for marketing.

This is just how I interpreted it, they wanted to sell a 'compliance car' that they could actually sell for a premium price and have premium options on.

I always thought of the volt as twice the complexity, twice the responsibility.

You still have to keep track and change the oil, and the coolant. You still have a water pump and spark plugs and all this other stuff to keep track of.

AND you have all the EV worries like the battery.

It's true that the Volt does have a lot of complexity - however you also have access to the existing infrastructure for gas cars.

My solution was a leaf and a gas vehicle (which pretty much went unused)

I do suspect that the ICE portion of the Volt could be a lot simpler than a regular gas powered vehicle since it's not directly connected to the wheels. A generator configured to run primarily with a fixed load size and in its peak efficiency zone is different from what you find in the typical gas car.

In Gen2 Volt it is actually connected to the wheels in some modes. It's not a series hybrid.

But its maintenance is very low. Very little wear on it.

For almost all normal use cases, the Volt gen 2 is a series hybrid. The engine only runs when the battery is depleted and it operates in a non-stressed, constant rpm mode where it is supplying charge to the EV motor that is buffered by the battery. There is a parallel hybrid mode but it is only triggered under extreme conditions.

As mentioned the volt has the electric motor, gas motor and wheels all part of the same unit.

On the other hand, the bmw i3 is a serial hybrid. I think the two models are basically an EV and an EV+generator (range extender). One got more subsidies than the other.

What I wonder about is - what happens to the i3 when the electric battery is depleted and all you have is the generator? Can you maintain speed? Will you run out of battery first or run out of fuel?

I am on my second i3+rex. I love the things to pieces.

In the US the rex comes on when the main battery is down to 7% charge. (Europe or re-coding the car allows you to set when it comes on -- up to 75% I believe? I haven't coded either of mine) You can actually outrun the rex engine with the right combination of high speed, climbing grade, or cold weather. If it gets to 0% the car will literally shut down. A serious warning appears at 2% about this.

I've never had mine below 2.5% (there is a setting on the driver display that allows you to display this number). It takes uphill driving over 75mph in cold to really draw down those last few % and outrun the range extender.

The rex tank is 9L, so it adds about 70-100mi to the total range of the car depending on how you drive it. We add a few gallons a year to ours, as the EV itself is sufficient -- it's great for those surprises life throws you where you need another few miles.

$0.02. :)

I would have agreed with you but Consumer Reports did a study https://advocacy.consumerreports.org/wp-content/uploads/2020.... that said this wasn't the case.

"Analysis of real-world maintenance and repair cost data from thousands of CR members shows that BEV and PHEV owners are paying half as much as ICE owners are paying to repair and maintain their vehicles."

"The data were filtered to remove: ● Incomplete responses. ● Vehicles that reported traveling less than 2,000 miles in the past 12 months. ● Vehicles that reported traveling more than 60,000 miles in the past 12 months. ● Vehicles that reported maintenance costs of over $20,000 over the past 12 months. ● Vehicles with more than 200,000 total miles."

that doesn't change the responsibility angle. granted, I might be more acutely aware of it because I've always bought used vehicles.

Way less effort than a a regular gas car. If you don't use the ICE very often, you only have to service it every 1-2 years. The electric system is very simple and requires almost no maintenance.

EVs (increasingly) have cooling loops for the batteries. They can likely be very low maintenance, but the stuff is there.

Are any of these using pressurized systems, do they even have an open side? Complex systems like the Tesla do have pumps that could potentially go bad.

Hopefully lithium batteries aren't reaching 200f degrees;

2013 Volt owner. What you are saying is, on paper, true I guess. The actual situation of me and all my Volt friends is that the cars are VERY reliable. I have 128K miles (105K EV miles) so my engine has only 22K miles after 7 years. Besides tires, ONE oil change and a front-end CV issue -- I've spent zero on maintenance.

FWIW, my next car will be a Model Y.

I've never had a vehicle that required less maintenance than my 2017 Volt. Up to 100k KM on it now and I've changed the oil once + tire swaps and some rust removal on the brakes because they don't get much use due to regen. That's all. But 88% of my travel is pure electric, so. The ICE only needs as much maintenance as you use it for.

In practice, a PHEV like the Volt is more reliable and has less maintenance than an ICE vehicle. The engine in the Volt only runs in the rare cases where the battery charge is low. When it does run, it generally runs at a constant, low stress RPM while supplying power to the electric motor with buffering from the battery. This is generally acting like a series hybrid. (The parallel hybrid mode is only activated in some rare cases). The result is that the EV motor is used for most miles and the gas engine lives a rather pampered life.

The car also keeps track of gas miles and gives you an estimate for remaining oil life. Under typical usage, that results in an oil change every couple of years. I think that the spark plugs are 100K plugs so they will eventually need replacing but not often.

I have a PHEV (Ford C-Max Energi), and with low miles the oil change interval is two years, rather than my gas only vehicles with a one year interval. I may be a terrible person, but I don't really keep track of the other intervals; if something needs doing, it'll likely come up when in for the oil change or make a terrible noise.

Also, the just off lease C-max was very inexpensive, and gets huge gas mileage, so even if it explodes, whatever. It got me a carpool sticker for a year too.

The Volt is boring, ugly, and slow. I don’t know what they were thinking. It looks like it was designed by soccer moms in a focus group session.

Yep. I think a big reason why Teslas are so popular and other EVs (and to a lesser extent Hybrids like the Prius) are not is the styling. Teslas look like normal cars. The others look like caricatures.

It's subjective, but the styling of Volt, Bolt, Leaf, Prius, i3, id.3 are all turn-offs for me.

The Tesla M3 is rather homely and ill proportioned, though

It's a compliance car, they only wanted to sell as many as they needed to. This is pretty standard procedure. The car is passable but unappealing in most regards beyond the power train so that it appeals to only a very small segment of the population.

I'm assuming you haven't driven one. They are not slow. My wife uses one asa. commuter car and it's fantastic. We just went through a long research phase of hybrids and surprisingly ended up with a Volt. (Chevy isn't really on my radar otherwise.)

Come on, man. It is literally slower than a Honda Odyssey.

I was looking at Volts two weeks ago.

You can get a 2018 year model (premier trim level w/ driver confidence 2 - the highest possible trim level combination) with 13,000 miles on it for $17k.

Due to living on dirt roads I passed on it, but it's a pretty good deal if you commute and can charge at your destination. 52 mile range all electric, 400 miles combined range.

I live rural Canada and drive plenty of dirt roads and have a Volt and ... no problems ever.

It's got fairly low clearance, but it's heavy and has excellent traction. Handles excellent in snow with good winter tires.

The front splitter wouldn’t make it up my drive, much less the road. Cybertruck instead!

The bodywork will self-clearance if you let it.

Electric engines are much simpler and should last a lot longer than ICE, so that extra upfront cost will be divided over a lot more miles, and there will be a lot less maintenance expense.

The motor yes, but a gas tank lasts forever while a battery doesn't. Batteries have gotten a lot better, but I think you need to look at the whole car, not just the motor, to make a fair assessment of durability.

I do think that electric has a lower maintenance cost, even accounting for the battery, but it's not that low that i think you can make up a 30k price difference.

If you plan on keeping the car for 10 years and drive 1000km per month. The up front 30k are 3k per year or 250 per month. That's quite a lot of an additional fixed cost for not having moved yet.

you can replace a tesla battery pack for 12K (after the warranty expires at 120K miles or 8 years), which i would imagine is probably be close to/less than the maintenance costs of a ICE vehicle after 120K miles/8 years

But if it's similar to the maintenance cost, you've not gained anything on the initial cost differential. Making it still the worse investment.

You can get a four year old ICE car with 40K miles for ~$12K, so that’s probably too much to spend on maintaining a much older car (unless you’re sentimental about it).

Do you think they'll still be making the batteries for an 8 year old car then? Ideally you'd be able to swap a newer battery that is better in some way in then, and maybe even have it a little cheaper than it is today if battery tech continues to get better, gonna be interesting to see how that plays out.

If the electronics and computer industries are any guide the manufacturers will "recover" those savings through desupporting software / forced upgrades. Either that or go to a pure leasing model since the car's software driven propulsion is now completely proprietary protected IP that you won't be able to have fixed except through them.

Yeah I think for EVs especially, leasing is going to be pushed hard, maybe even the only option.

If you really care about cost and that is your only measure, then of course a Model 3 isn't it.

However, you can get insane deal on some EV, like the Bolt. They are not close to Tesla in terms of many things, but if you just need to everyday driving, its perfectly reasonable.

You can’t gauge cost per mile without taking resale value into account, and tesla resale value is great, while the Volt? Not so much.... I’d bet if you owned each vehicle for 3-4 years then sold and actually did the math, the tesla would be ahead.

I find it unlikely that the depreciation on a $40K automobile is less than on a $30K one. If one is selling a car after only three years they should have leased it.

How is the cost per mile higher in a Model 3 than a hybrid? As far as I know the model 3 is basically the most energy efficient EV on the market, in terms of KWh per mile. The Model 3 is lighter, more aerodynamic, and has more efficient motors.

The parent has edited their comment, but the issue is that the sticker price on the Model 3 is still too high— you need to drive it for a super long time/distance to recoup those costs.

Or sell it. Resale value in Tesla’s is quite high compared to a Volt.

Apparent resale value, perhaps -- that is, what people ask for them. What they actually sell for is a different story. I am trying to sell my Model 3 Performance right now. After owning it for just over a year. It seems to have depreciated about a thousand bucks a month.

Well and who knows what they'll be worth in four to five years, particularly as battery tech continues to improve.

Interesting, why are you selling so soon?

I replied to another person who asked the same question. TL;DR: Reasons, none of which have to do with disliking the car.

Why are you selling?

Partly because I'm a car spaz (I seem to buy a different one every couple years), and partly because I'm now fully remote with no expectation of going back to commuting, so I'm barely driving 50-100 miles a month. Having a nearly 60K car sitting in the garage doing nothing but depreciating is not a great plan. It's my third car, I don't really need it in any case.

It's definitely possible. It just depends on local gas and electricity prices.

For example, in CA current regular grade fuel is about $3.40/gal. A Prius gets 60mpg, which works out to 6c/mile.

For electricity, the average rate in CA is 24c/kWh. A model 3 uses 250 Wh/mile which works out to 6c/mile.

So exactly the same price per mile. A small change in either fuel price could advantage one or the other.

Of course you can take advantage of overnight lower EV charging rates, or drive to an area with cheaper gas, but at least with current average energy prices, there isn't a huge difference in per mile energy consumption costs.

The base Model 3 or the SR+ (probably) are pretty efficient. But the dual motors are a bit more thirsty. My wife's Bolt weighs 500 pounds less and gets substantially better economy from every kWh than my Model 3 Performance does. Whether I drive like a jerk or not.

The tesla model 3 is 15kWh/100km, mucho more than the Hyundai ioniq 11kWh/100km.