For new cars, especially with the tax credit (which most americans qualify for), EVs are cheaper. That's not even factoring in maintenance costs over 5 years nor savings from charging at home (of course not everyone can charge at home).
I'd consider an EV for my daily commute if I could buy a new one for $10K. I think that's a reasonable price for a small car that has maybe a 100 mile range.
But automakers are offering $50K cars and above that don't fully replace gas cars. No thanks.
The sticker price is just the "obvious" price you see when it comes to owning a vehicle. But everything else still matters, routine maintenance and gas alike. Ignoring it only sets yourself up for being surprised when those bills come due.
> I'd consider an EV for my daily commute if I could buy a new one for $10K.
I'd consider an ICE vehicle if I could buy a new one for $10K. Have a suggestion?
12,000 miles / 25mpg * $5/gallon = $2400
Maintenance is, at a very high estimate, $1000 per year, and that's paying a shop for everything - far less if I did it myself
Payments on a 5 year loan at 6% for a $40K EV (such as the Tesla 3) is $773/month or 9276/yr
On my local Craigslist I can find my vehicle, one year older but significantly lower mileage (85K) for $18000. I can find my vehicle but with more miles (222K) for $4000 (admittedly that sounds low and I have suspicions) or my vehicle with slightly higher mileage (115K) but in a higher trim for $11K.
You'll forgive me for continuing to drive my car or for buying an exact replacement rather than rushing to buy an EV.
No, but any ICE vehicle will not have the limitations of an EV. I was saying I might accept those if it were cheap enough.
It seems like it's you who's ignoring upcoming bills, by ignoring data:
People who like to stand out buy big cars. Big cars make people in small cars feel unsafe. So people replace their small cars with big cars. So, people in big cars buy bigger cars.....and so on.
So now every car has to have more 'safety'. Maybe if the car hitting me wasn't 5000lbs, at chest level and didn't accelerate like a bullet..... I wouldn't need more 'safety'. So now every one has bigger, "safer" and more expensive cars....... all while American road deaths keep growing with no limits in sight.
One day I will see a Ford-150 bed used for pickup truck tasks. Today is not that day.
I looked at EVERY used car in a 100 mile radius on every platform you can think of and the 2013 RAV4 with 105,000 miles at 15k hit the dealer lot the night before I purchased (they had multiple calls for that vehicle while I was filling out paperwork). Its because all the old people sold off there late 90's and 2000's cars that there STILL are no used cars anymore that aren't absolute junk (155k mileage plus junk selling for 15k - 20k). This lets dealerships sell new cars & trucks for way, way too much. If Cash for Clunkers never happened, used cars would be the competition for new cars like the Toyota Camry which are uncomfortable, basic vehicles but which set the pricing floor for the other manufacturers vehicle lines. No competition so set it at a high price point marketing it as new even though the rest of it is junk and then you can charge a premium on oyher vehicle options. (Hate the Canry but I love Toyota vehicles don't get me wrong).
All us poor people who just want a to work and back vehicle & who would buy off craigslist from private sellers don't have a market anymore and have to go dealerships. Pickups are overpriced I'll agree, and are faux status symbols, but the used market itself reaked havoc on trucks too.
Iirc the cheapest new car in the US market then was the Versa. And it was not $5k.
Even with this, a new Aveo for $12k in 2010 would now be ~$17k with inflation. New cars today seem to be around $17k and that includes the Versa and the Mirage. Of course wages haven't risen with inflation but that's another can of worms.
Maybe it was closer to 2010? Wouldn’t have been earlier.
Dealerships do sell under sticker with some regularity. Or they used to, LOL.
[edit] after some googling, I think they were two-door base-model (very base) Chevy Aveos. But I could have that wrong.
My SO managed to run out of gas twice since she hated filling up on the way home, and forgot to check on the way out.
To her, the utility of being able to charge our BEV at home is immense.
I'm willing to bet she isn't that dumb.
I will admit that I ran a car out of gas once in the last 40 years: driving to Flagstaff AZ in a Prius there aren't many gas stations and I ignored the reserve light and the beep because I thought I could make it. Nope! 5 miles short. Maybe the 3000' grade I had to climb just before had some influence. However... never again. OTOH, that Prius that ran out of gas traveled several thousand miles over the years at over 90mph across the West, getting ~40mpg which works out to ~400 mile range. That right there is the entire argument, done.
That said, most of the utility comes from not having to spend time stopping by a gas station to fill up. Just park in the garage and spend about 10 seconds plugging in the car, and it's filled up in the morning ready to go.
Do people who think the only use of a vehicle is the home-work-supplies circuit? Don't you ever take a weekend off and go out of town? You really want to deal with the whole rental car scenario when you're supposed to be off? Or, oh well, I'm just gonna commit to spending a good chunk of my time on this vacation sitting around twiddling my thumbs at a charging station. I got an acquaintance who drove a decaying Tesla with <200 mile range from Atlanta to NYC and back and then bragged to me "it wasn't that bad". Yeah, I was polite.
Lotsa magical thinking going on here. And I haven't even pointed out that in vast swathes of the country the rental car option isn't even remotely convenient.
In an EV, that's ~11 hours on day 1, charge up at the hotel, and do one 15 minute stop on day 2. Before I had an EV, I'd do the same thing, just with ~10 hours on day 1 and my stop on day 2 might be at a different place.
But this is traveling for leisure with family. It might be different if I were really desperate to get there fast. I'd never rent a gas car to save the couple of hours, but also arrive much more tired.
Even though I can afford it I've never bought new car. Call me lucky but I did not feel like I was paying for somebody else's problems either. All my cars worked fine for me. Some maintenance and repairs but nothing major / expensive. For example used Grand Caravan I paid $5K for on the auction cost me another $1K to put in proper order and then served me faithfully 10 years. Only got rid of it because the rust had taken the best of it.
The only maintenance my Camry will need for the next decade or so that does not exist in Tesla is regular fluid changes which amortize to about $200 per year
Ps in SF Bay Area and don’t qualify for tax incentives
The math is skewed even further once you add the extra $500 you pay for CA annual registration for an EV vs. Hybrid (personal experience, Mach-E vs. Accord Hybrid).
Definitely it's massively less compelling in areas with extremely high electricity costs. That's pretty much as expensive as electricity gets in North America, isn't it? I think it's significantly more compelling basically anywhere else. E.g. in Ontario where I live, if you're set up appropriately and charge between 11pm and 7am it's $0.028/kWh (CAD), i.e. less than 3 cents per kWh, or roughly 1/35th the price you're paying.
If I've done my math right, that's works out to be less than 2$ USD per 1000km? A difference of 108$/1000km is 1728$/year for the statistically average-driving Ontarian. Adds up pretty fast!
I live in Ventura County and the cheapest my electricity gets is around 33 cents per kwh. During peak it's a whopping 60 cents per kwh.
I also assume that chart includes baseline credits and averages out the tiers - your first kwh is cheaper than your 600th kwh. Any brand new EV charging will be charged at your top rates and be more expensive than what those averages represents pretty much everywhere in the US.
If you have an EV (or some other devices), you can qualify for the TOU-D-PRIME plan which gets you $0.23/kWh[1]; at this rate, for my car usage patterns, the Tesla Model 3 is a clear win over any car more than $25k or so. If you have solar, you can drive the prices even further down (I offset basically all of my 2022 bill, but 2023 was cloudier and rainier than typical and so I'm doing worse this year).
[1]: https://www.sce.com/residential/rates/Time-Of-Use-Residentia...
Here the EV time of use rate is 50-60 cents per kWh between 3pm and midnight and 34 cents the rest of the day.
Without spending another 10-20k on Solar, EV is a losing proposition at these rates.
In California of all places
I stop work at 5pm so I can power down my computer before electricity gets expensive.
And 8pm works great for us because in summer it can be 70 degrees overnight, and the kids start going to bed at 8pm so I can cool down the house a bit without paying crazy prices for that.
I do a lot of thermostat trickery in the summer. During the day we set it to 76, from 4-5pm set it down to 72 (to avoid running in the expensive hours), then we raise it to 78 from 5-8pm, then we set it down to 74 at 8pm.
RepairPal says the average annual cost to maintain a Model 3 is twice that of a Honda Civic.
I do agree, though, that there’s some novelty risk but (a) my numbers only include gas (and I’m not factoring my solar savings in at all because I ran the numbers before I installed solar) and (b) I’m spending quite a bit every year to maintain my Odyssey and basically $0 to maintain my Model 3 (only exception is I’ve changed the tires once, but I’ve gone through a couple sets of van tires in the same time period for a similar total expenditure). I think that I’d come out ahead even if I had to replace the battery (or sold the car when this is needed). Also, the depreciation on my Tesla over the last four years is much more in my favor than the van’s depreciation in the same time.
The 3 and Y seem to be doing better, as well as S/X after 2016, but those are still fairly new.
Yes, if other people have to contribute their money to the purchase of your new car, it's cheaper for you.
>That's not even factoring in maintenance costs over 5 years
Well, the data says that Teslas have some of the highest costs of ownership in the first five years.
Links please? I know a lot of Tesla owners and they have all said differently.