Used EVs have never been cheaper. But are they a good deal?
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Even a ten year old Leaf for $4k is still useful to soak up the around-town driving that an average family does most of their miles in.
> Charging at home is part of the problem. They need to separately meter power for cars and increase the rate and add a road maintenance tax based on vehicle weight
I'm not sure why it was killed because that actually is an issue that has not yet been satisfactorily solved.
Many states pay for road construction and maintenance via a per gallon gasoline tax. Since EVs do not use gasoline they have turned to other ways to get EVs to help pay for the roads, usually by adding a flat annual registration fee.
In my state that flat fee is $150. That is equal to the component of state taxes on gas that go to roads on 270 gallons of gas.
If I had bought an ICE (non-hybrid) earlier this year instead of an EV I would have bought either a Honda CR-V or a Honda Civic.
I mostly do city driving. With the CR-V I'd have to drive 7300 miles to pay $150 toward roads. It would be 8600 miles if I mostly drove highway. With the Civic it would be 8600 city or 11000 highway.
I actually drive under 2000 a year, so if my EV driving patterns end up being the same as my ICE patterns I'm going to be paying a lot more toward roads than I would have had I gone with an ICE car.
It does look like my mileage will go up with the EV, possibly up to 5000 miles a year, but even then I'll be paying more toward roads than if I had bought an ICE.
I'd much prefer to have a mileage based road tax.
I'd be fine if they just looked at my odometer whenever I renew my registration and charge me then, but for a lot of people having to pay their entire share of road fees for their last year of driving at once would be difficult.
Separately metering my home charging and taking care of the road fee there would be great.
The premise of being taxed by mile driven is arguable. People benefit from roads even when they do not drive. AFAIU light passenger traffic has little bearing on the resultant maintenance costs, that most wear comes from heavy trucks.
I do not want separate meters complicating EV charging and accounting.
Gas was a useful proxy (and let them tune cars vs semi trucks) but tires would work about as well.
I bet the cost to permit and install a whole different metering system would be several multiples of $150.
That’s not even talking about how silent they are, the amazing acceleration that makes driving a joy, you can leave them idling when you’re waiting with no toxic emissions/guilt, no oil changes and because of the regen braking the brake pads have to be changed very infrequently.
I calculated it out and if I got a reasonable gas car it would be roughly 3 times more expensive per month to drive. It’s cheaper even than biking and taking the train to work (to be fair the train is expensive where I live).
I think this car will easily last another 150k miles with nothing more than tires and basic maintenance.
That said, I do miss an old stick shift gas car. EVs don’t give a feeling of life.
Given that you can expect to get well over 200,000 miles and/or 20 years out of a large liquid cooled EV battery, there are some screaming good deals out there.
Which is a statement about electricity prices more than gas prices.
Gas savings is oxymoron. You are getting a vehicle that drives at least 10x better. Can’t price that.
Does the same not apply to gas cars? In a different way obviously but the way any car has been driven in its lifetime affects its long term viability and you don’t have a great insight into it at purchase time.
Should be easy to see HV battery health, charge to 100% and check remaining range reported. Drive unit/other battery issues seem pretty rare and I'm not sure they're correlated with driving behavior, though I could be wrong.
I strongly considered used EVs, but reliability concerns scared me. I like to keep cars a long time, and the idea of a battery or motor going out in a 9 year old car was a consideration.
I ended up going with a Corolla hybrid, getting 50+ mpg with every tank. Maybe next time I’ll buy electric.
I was considering picking up an old leaf (or 2) as some buffer storage, so I can continue to feed excess energy into the grid during low solar periods.
Does anyone have experience of using a leaf in this way? Anything I should look out for when sourcing one?
V2H coupled with the right "onshore" hardware is exactly what you want: the car battery is connected to your home grid, and the ev battery works in tandem with your home ESS batteries.
I’m assuming would need a bit more hardware to coordinate when and how fast it should charge and the feed into the grid, so it wouldn’t try and charge from the grid (only the solar) and it wouldn’t feed more than is permitted into the grid.
I know some people who bought one of those little electric "golf cart" like vehicles to drive around the neighborhood.
It seems these cost between $15K and $30K!
I paid $15K for a used Nissan Leaf, with 150 miles of range, and a bit of the factory warranty still in effect.
Personally, I don't see why the Leaf gets such a bad rap. I would like more range than 150 miles, but this much serves all of my typical driving (including freeway, which the golf carts can't do at all).
The EV acceleration (and one-pedal driving) are awesome. No internal combustion vehicle can ever match the performance of an EV.
My expectation is that the overwhelming majority of people drive less than 150 miles the overwhelming majority of the times they leave the house, i.e. they almost never need the gas provided range.
I do still have a gasoline van that I use during long distance travel, but this is once or twice a year.
I think the overwhelming majority of objections only exist between the objector's ears.
I always charge in the driveway, and haven't bought gas in over 6 months.
Try it, you'll like it...