The price of EVs is the only thing keeping me from replacing my 13 year old car. Everything I would consider buying is just slightly too high for my budget and needs.
EVs are purely novelty item at this point. An EV vehicle is fundamentally simpler than a gas car in terms of parts required, and should be cheaper to make and way cheaper to buy new.
Also you would see way more functional tech in regards to EV, like for example, cheaper battery packs that don't offer as much range and are power limited, but keep the price low. Or trunk mounted gas generators with fuel tanks for longer trips.
I just spent over $100 filling up the gas tank of our backup car. We used to fill it about once a week. That's $5200 a year in gasoline at current prices. So, if the EV lasts 6 years (ignoring the discounted value of money over time, and the ever increasing cost of gasoline), it costs negative $4200 vs. whatever the retail price of the ICE car is.
Which is annoying, because I want one.
For a remote worker with a vehicle that moves irregularly an EV is still cheaper and easier and more convenient. A battery charge doesn't "go stale" and you aren't going to get engine rattles and knocking or accidentally melted fuel lines from "old electrons".
We always buy ethanol free gas too, which lasts for years. I don't even empty our lawn mower over winter, it doesn't matter with real gas and a sealed tank.
If you are filling up less than once a week/once every two weeks you are risking stale gas and extra wear and tear on an internal combustion engine when you do use it...
No, the gas will have to sit much longer than that. We drove our previous EV for twelve years, while filling up the ICE Scion about once a month (if that). That Scion is still running just fine twelve years later. Don't even ask how long the gas sits in the VW camper van. I'd bet real money I go out, turn the key, and it'll fire up just fine.
I'm all for encouraging folks to get an EV, but inaccurate information only hurts the cause.
Anyway, thank you for your refreshingly grounded-in-reality comment.
Followed by
> I know people are all super hyped about feeling like they are helping the environment
I hope the irony isn't lost on you here.
I wouldn't say that there is "little basis in truth" if there is an entire industry of fuel additives to make things safer/cleaner/"better" for infrequently fueled ICE vehicles and entire gossips worth of advice on how long a motor should run before highway speeds, etc to make sure that the fuel is safe.
I chose a short time window because the problem I was referring to was total cost of ownership and long-term build up/slow break down, so I don't believe it was "inaccurate" just very (intentionally) pessimistic. I'm sorry it wasn't clearer enough that it was a pessimistic estimate on longer term horizons. I definitely understand there are lots of anecdotes and data on both sides, and that I have a stronger distrust of gasoline than many people do (in part because some of my own anecdotes).
Yes it does- cells slowly self-discharge when not in use and have their range affected by temperature swings to the degree that, for certain cars (mainly the Leaf), the weather will dictate if you're going to make it to work and back or not.
>an EV is still cheaper and easier and more convenient
I can't buy an EV for $10,000 that has more than 60 miles of maximum range and recharges in less than 10 minutes, so every one of those points is wrong. Oh yeah, and I don't have to spend an hour per week waiting for it to charge it because it holds what is, at current burn rates, a month's worth of fuel (I can't take advantage of home charging unless I want to move and thus burn several hundred more a month on rent- and several hundred dollars can buy a lot of gas).
The electricity itself might be cheap but everything else isn't.
>generally increasing the risk of expensive maintenance
Cars that run on gas are extremely reliable even past 100,000 miles, and have been for the past 20 years now (even the American-made ones). I give worse odds to the electric power packs that by their nature are cumulatively damaged when refueled; exhibit A being the Leaf, of course.
> I can't buy an EV for $10,000
Again, cheaper with respect to total cost of ownership. The point remains that that TCO is cheaper even if you can't find some super cheap ones in up front costs (yet).
> recharges in less than 10 minutes
May I suggest a horse? If this is your qualification for an EV you are tilting against windmills.
> Oh yeah, and I don't have to spend an hour per week waiting for it to charge it because it holds what is, at current burn rates, a month's worth of fuel
I'm really confused by your math here: EVs hold on average a "month's worth of fuel" for you so you'd need to charge it every week? Isn't that just an hour a month charging time then if it is a "month's worth of fuel" you are charging?
> Cars that run on gas are extremely reliable even past 100,000 miles, and have been for the past 20 years now (even the American-made ones). I give worse odds to the electric power packs that by their nature are cumulatively damaged when refueled; exhibit A being the Leaf, of course.
Plenty of Leafs have already made it past 100,000 miles on their first and only battery. Statistically the number of replaced batteries in Leafs is insignificant.
Plus, recent Leafs finally have active battery temperature management. The excuse of "but Leaf battery degradation" is on its way out, sorry.
E.g. "The excuse of "but Leaf battery degradation" is on its way out, sorry" - this is just silly. It's not an excuse. It's a reason. If the reason goes away, then great. But to pretend that people are making excuses betrays a very shallow way of looking at things.
When in fact, what they're saying is true. It may not be the case for everyone, but for a lot of people's situations it will be. It would be good to understand the additional situations people are in that might be becoming EV-accessible, but we can't do that if people such as yourself are endlessly brow-beating people.
The Leaf battery degradation "problem" is an excuse because it's an over-exaggerated thing that mostly ever affected several early model years of Nissan Leaf and a few early model years of Tesla. (GM did a lot more winter testing early on and made a big deal about battery heat management right out the gate. Other manufacturers picked up that message either from GM marketing or their own winter testing.) Since then Tesla and then Nissan both developed active thermal management for their batteries and any recent model years have them.
Even with all the model years that were affected, in general real-world usage and used market sales suggests that it is not a problem. The vast majority of batteries in cars are still in their "first use" as a car battery. If there is "degradation" in the battery range, used owners rarely notice or care (the range they buy it with is the only range they've known), and "degradation" of the battery is rarely to never the reason given that a car has been listed on the used market in the first place.
As far as I'm aware there's no industry at all for replacing Tesla batteries. I do know that there's a small boutique industry replacing Leaf batteries but most of what I've heard about that are anecdotes such as one about an owner of a 2008 Leaf, that had already done a decade of service as that first owner's family car, getting a new battery not because the old one was "too degraded" but because the new battery was a big enough range boost (above 2008 spec, even) to not just keep a beloved family car in the same family for another decade but also bump it from being less of a "secondary" vehicle for the family and more of the primary vehicle role.
There's no evidence in the used market that anyone needs to replace a battery after 10 years in an EV, but there are heartwarming stories of at least some owners have wanted to a replace a battery after 10 years because they love that car that much.
Outside of the first decade-ish of Nissan Leaf and the first half-decade-ish of Tesla, every other EV has active thermal management and battery "degradation" is nearly nonexistent after 10/15 years and we'll start to see soon what 20 years looks like, but current evidence suggests that batteries really do last the lifetime of a car. The exterior of the car, according to current used market statistics, is more likely to be in a state where the car needs to be scrapped entirely than the battery to appear significantly or noticeably "degraded". As with most statistics there are certainly outliers and you can find plenty of well publicized cases of especially individual Nissan Leafs with noticeably "degraded" batteries, but part of why they get publicized so much is because they are such rare events to the used market and often make interesting stories. (Who those stories sometimes benefit in keeping people afraid of a boogeyman of EV maintenance costs that mostly doesn't exist, I'll leave as an exercise to the reader.) If you dig you can also find fun counter-examples like the "'million mile' Leaf taxi still going strong years later" type things.
So that's one of the largest range maintenance myths.
The above poster also included several common charging myths. Charging an EV is sufficiently different from refueling an ICE that most of the people that think they "need" "10-minute charging times" either don't understand some of the difference or don't care to learn. No one expects a gas tank to be as full as possible every drive and only fill up once a week or once a month. The same is true for an EV, you don't need a full charge every night to be satisfied you have the range you need for that drive/that day/etc. Though home and destination charging is an interesting game changer from that previous status quo, too, because in some cases you can have a full charge every morning you park at home or after you've run a bunch of errands near a charger. Cars spend a lot of time parked and everywhere a car is parked is a (slow) charging opportunity, which is a massive change from gas stations which need to be highly centralized and fast because it is always and forever an inconvenience between two points. Our electric grid is everywhere and massively distributed. Everywhere the light touches can be a place to charge. I've charged my Volt in campgrounds in the middle of nowhere on a random camping plug I found. I've charged it at home in a shared garage where so far I haven't convinced the board to install L2 chargers, but an ordinary wall outlet still charges more than my average daily commute over night. (Or, at least, the last commute I had before remote work became more common.)
Certainly on trips you do have more reason to need a "fast charger" along your route in that "inconvenience between point a and point b" way, and on paper the shift from a "10 minute refuel" to a "20-30 minute charge" sounds like a huge time loss, but refueling is an active process you are supposed to (for safety and legal reasons) watch and be active in every step of that process, whereas charging is a passive process. When was the last time you felt you needed to watch every minute that your phone was plugged in and charging? It can much faster than refueling time to just plug the car in and check that it is locked, at which point you are free to wander to a restroom, buy a meal or snacks, check social media, and other things you are likely to do on a rest stop, all without worrying about your car or needing to watch a (dangerous) refueling process. It's a different experience. It's not necessarily a worse experience, in some ways I think it is quite a bit better. (Teslas and more recent cars [CCS chargers, "NACS" chargers] "know" their own payment information and can pass it to a charger network during charge handshake, there's not even the dance of pulling out a credit card and running through a wordy terminal or annoying "charge network" app, just plug the charger in and the car knows the CC information to send for you and how much you want it to pay for a charge. Support for such chargers isn't yet universal, but the capability is expanding.)
Car charging is just different from refueling and some of it you may not understand until you own an EV. A lot of "range anxiety" turns out to be nonexistent with just a tiny bit of daily EV use and a slow appreciation from learning of home charging opportunities (even at 120v "trickles" of standard US wall outlets!), destination charging opportunities, and the subtle differences of "fast charger" easiness/laziness versus "refueling" active and busy. (Including the overlap of "fast charger" and "destination charging" where you may run errands or see interesting sights or find other productive uses of charging times that gas stations are never quite as convenient to.)
Relatedly, did you know that Nissan has a division like Tesla's PowerWall? Do you know why you haven't heard or seen from that division? Unlike PowerWall, Nissan's division promised to source entirely from "second use" batteries. (Most PowerWalls are built with new batteries straight from the factory.) Nissan keeps the division on the books, but so far has sourced so few "second use" batteries in the real world that they've not actually built much or delivered much or done any consumer marketing for that battery wall division.
When you supercharge these cars (with a dcfc), with a high amperage high voltage charger, heating in cold weather or cooling in warm or normal weather really reduces wear and tear on the battery and keeps battery life good. It's just the case that the leaf did have this serious problem - there must have been one or 2 other cars without battery management systems, but the leaf is the only one that seemed to sell in large quantities.
Corolla gets 32 mpg average. If you drive 10k miles a year, you spend about 312 gallons which is about $1000 in fuel costs give or take at regular 87 octane gas prices.
Nissan Leaf is 7$ to recharge the 40kwh pack, for a range of 140 miles. For 10k miles, you need about 71 charges, which is about $500. Thats $500 per year difference, so you need >10 years to break even for the cost of the cars. And then, if you live in an area without convenient chargers, you pay secondary non-monetary costs for planning around charging.
Insurance costs are also higher for a more expensive car.
As far as battery goes, if you look at something like an ebike battery made out of LG 18650 cells, you get an approximate cost of $10 per cell including bms and assembly. Nissan leaf has 192 cells, but the battery pack costs way more than $1920, its closer to $4k. Huge markup.
Lets hypothetically say that leaf had appropriately priced battery pack, which was $2k in stead of $4k. Thats still a $4k markup over corolla. There is no way an electric motor and controller cost an extra $4k over a ICE engine.
Like I said, novelty. You are getting scammed.
Nissan Leaf advertises 105 MPGe which is 3.12 mi/kwh.
10,000 miles / 32mpg * $4.8/gal = $1,500 a year for Corolla fuel 10,000 miles / 3.12mi/kwh * $0.38/kwh = $1,218 a year for Leaf electricity
This is ignoring things like charging losses but also oil and filter changes.
10,000 miles / 32mpg * $2.92/gal = $912.50 in fuel and 10,000 miles / 3.12mi/kwh * $0.11/kwh = $353.00 in electricity
Which means they have less stuff to break and thus less operating expense, yes. But the main cost block for an EV is the battery pack and power electronics - the ICE industry has had like a century of time to optimize every nook and cranny out of the production line, whereas mass manufactured EVs are only a decade or so old. (Yes there have been historic EVs too, but they differ so completely from today's EVs that there is no way one can speak of continuous experience building)
The thing is, the operating expenses are way lower, for a small increase in base cost. No need to replace oil every so often, if you're running a diesel no AdBlue and no regular periods of increased fuel consumption to clean the particulate filter, no need to replace a clutch, timing belts or transmission, even the brake pads last longer because regenerative braking doesn't create any wear. For fuel, if you're somewhere in the suburbs, place some solar panels on your roof and enjoy virtually free, clean energy while the rest of your neighbors fuel human rights atrocities in OPEC countries.
And the comfort of driving one is waaaay beyond ICE cars. Even your base Tesla Model 3 completely floors most affordable ICE cars at a red light drag race, they're so silent, no vibrations but those from the road, better handling because of the extremely low center of gravity, no headache inducing smell from cold starts in the winter...
How many people can afford a mortgage, a brand new car (even with the tax credits), AND solar panels all at the same time?
Sure there are down payments you have to plan for, but I'm not really sure what your point is. Yes, if you can't afford a new car you can't afford a new car.
But the whole point of financing things is to come out ahead in the long run.
...which has interest costs associated with it. A $300k loan at 5% over 30 means you pay an average of ~$9k a year just in interest alone. And thats before all the other things that you have to pay for when you own a house.
EVs are expensive primarily because of the battery at this point. And the secondary reason is the tremendous demand combined with reduced availability of cars leads to dealers adding their dealer markup. There have already been EVs that sold for a lower price with software locked batteries that you could upgrade later. Almost 10 years ago Tesla offered that. There were cars with gas extenders like you described almost 10 years ago, the BMW i3 is one.