Driving a backwards stupid ICE machine vs a say a Model 3 is like the music experience of an an old 8 track cassette tape deck vs the convenience of listening to music on an iPhone X. Might be able to listen to the 8 Track music in your Chevy Vega or on your old analog stereo at home and its one album per cassette. Tape breaks and with a bit of winding you might be able to graft it back together. iPhone grants solid state instant instant access to 40 million songs with perfect clarity anywhere and maybe you pay a small subscription or maybe you don't, you can even make the music with the phone. And you don't wait or have to drive anywhere to get new music. EVs: Radically better cost of ownership and soon to be lower initial cost Much better fuel costs like 7x if you do it right. Radically better performance Way safer Radically more reliable, likely last way longer too- cycles on batteries not an issue anymore. Way easier to fix. Even better in the snow (note popularity in Nordic countries) Order of magnitude more convenient- coming EV's don't even need to be plugged in and always start the day fully charged. Close to zero emissions especially if you cut the cord with a solar roof and power pak New ICE cars shouldn't even be legal and are increasingly banned- limits the exposure on this who wants to smoke tail pipe. Radically better noise vibration and harshness Self driving- it doesn't make sense for anything but BEV even if Waymo chose a PHEV for prototypes- won't work for anything but BEV. BEV is what makes the 10x reduction on what people will pay for transport possible that RethinkX says is coming with 5-7 years. Not causing useless wars and climate displacement, not an excuse for imperialism and getting rid of an in-bread radically economy undermining poison pill that petrol is. We hollow out and lose our public sector over the stupidity that petrol is. You're undermining the cult of cowboy petrol- it justice. Helps cuts the right's money- a great good. Petrol industry thinks it won't be disrupted- it will disrupted harder and faster than any example yet in history- that's karma, bunch of necons aren't going to be able to stop this when they are still trying to outrun tribunals.
Is it possible to make up the difference in cost between a battery car and a comparable sized ICE from the difference in cost per mile for electricity and petrol? If so, how long will this take?
There are four variables you'd need to account for in calculating the answer: 1. Price of gasoline 2. Price of electricity 3. Which EV (or at least the EV's MPGe rating) 4. Which gasmobile (or at least the EPA's MPG rating) Obviously the best we could do is an estimate, since the price of gasoline will vary over the years. Also, it may be difficult to estimate the actual cost of electricity if you get into multi-tier pricing and/or off-peak charging. For example, you might compute based on always charging during off-peak hours, but after buying the car you might find the need to occasionally charge during daylight hours. I have not personally tried to use any of the online calculators for that, so I can't give a personal recommendation, but here is an article comparing three such calculators: From EV Obsession: "Electric Car Cost vs Gas (Calculators)" -
I think if you try you'll almost always be able to get about 1/7 the cost of fuel out of an EV. This based on petrol having a long term 13% economic efficiency vs EV at about 90%. That considers the entire chain of infrastructure including things like the ICE machine at the end that spends about 70% of the fuel in the tank heating the atmosphere. But its also a consideration of the thousands of wasteful excluded steps for an EV where in the case of solar roof and a battery where the car charges exclusively from this system where energy comes to you and aside from the price of your system it is free and where the parts in that system are solid state like the car and made of cheap and abundant elements. Something that is not understood is that petrol is never going to get better. It is already built out and at scale with fully mature tech. The tech needed to improve its fundamental efficiency at the infrastructure level would obviate its use. Its assets are politically and economically stranded and going EV not only radically cuts useless outrageous and destabilizing petrol welfare it gives a massive strategic advantage to a nation's cost of goods. In not to many years from now petrol will be seen as the biggest scam in human history and there will hell to pay which will include a massive reparational debt. Its not really a carbon tax anymore its a carbon debt to be paid with interest.
I think the fact that it costs three times as much for an ICE as it does for an EV is a good start Taking the figure of $3.42 for gasoline and $1.10 for an EV we can go on to take the 40 miles a day average for both and calculate that in a day one would spend $2.32 more on the ICE's energy supply. (Assuming an exactly equivalent EV and an ICE existed) That's about $850 dollars a year. So if the EV cost $8,500 more than the ICE, for instance, you would break even in 10 years. In fact, it would be rather longer because the EV buyer would lose interest on the $8,500 each year. If he could get 1% he is losing $85 dollars a year so I guess it would take eleven years plus a bit to break even. Obviously, there are other and probably more important considerations, so this sort of rough and ready sum is somewhat academic. But I suppose if EVs became more popular, the demand for petrol would fall, and with it its cost, extending the payback period even more. On the other hand, a conflict in the middle east might cause it to rise. Similarly, the cost of electricity might fall if more and more of it comes from renewable sources, although in the UK the benefit of free power has gone to the utilities rather than the consumer!
The benefit has gone to shield the petrol scam. One of the bests things about renewable is having the fixed cost. But gas can't drop too much or the petrol scam goes out of business. Its already direct state subsidized to well over 100% from direct state subsidies. But soon the initial cost of a EV will be lower a purchase so the recoup and lower total cost of ownership will hit right up front. But given the certainty around the power price and the certainty around fees and bans. Its an insurmountable difference. Even 6 months ago there were studies showing a lower total cost of ownership for low end EVs.
When that day happens things will change some but the masses still love their gas cars. It's an undeniable feature of the day. Sent from my Nexus 5X using Tapatalk
I don't think the price is the dominating factor. It is the greater convenience of conventional cars that makes the difference. They offer 100% availability which BEVs don't, so its not too surprising that 98% of car purchasers prefer ICEs.
Except that is absolutely wrong, I mean you couldn't be more wrong. Look at the top end of the market the rich prefer crushingly dominant Tesla in the money is no object market. And they prefer it not just because they are bunch of liberals or greener conservatives, they prefer it because it outperforms straight up. Do you have a gas station in your garage? Do you think the rich like going to the gas station? Do you think anyone does- really almost no one. Its been a discounted area but at some point the whole surface of the car will collect sunlight and at that point leave your car out for a week and you've got a couple days transit- that is 100% availability what petrol has is not.
I am not really interested in the rich as there are too few of them to make much difference to the market. The point is that electric cars are massively inconvenient to a third of Americans who have no private facilities to charge them and would have to find public ones. In Europe, the proportion of people who can't easily charge their cars is over two-thirds. Moreover, if you get home from a trip which has exhausted your battery, the car is useless for hours after it whilst it's being charged. Compare this with ICE cars. Charging is a few minutes once a week or two. After that, it's ALWAYS ready to go. You don't have to fiddle about plugging it in, or look for a public charging post, and if you suddenly need to go out again after a long trip the car is ready and waiting to go. You will not have to wait for it to be charged. Hydrogen offers similar convenience. After several years of advertising hoopla, a selection of over 40 models to choose from over a wide price range, plus grants to buy them, the car buying public is still avoiding them in droves. Sales are growing but at about one-sixth the rate of hydrogen cars, of which there are only two expensive models available, and a dearth of filling stations. I imagine the driving experience of battery cars and hydrogen cars is more or less identical. It might be hard to tell the difference. The prices of the two are roughly comparable, as is the performance, so I see no other explanation other than convenience for the failure of batteries and the success of FCVs - if that is what happens. I don't understand your aversion to filling stations at all. I tend to pop in en route to something else or when it suits me. when the gauge reads about a third. It takes two or three minutes, and I don't have to think about it again for a week or two - or more. It is expensive - I am currently paying about £1.20 a litre in the UK, but I can easily afford it, and it will turn out less expensive than the depreciation on a battery car. I suspect a five-year-old battery car might not be worth much as by then its battery capacity will have degraded significantly and will need replacement.
The rich prefer Tesla because: It's new It's tech forward It's fashionable It's trendy It's a status symbol Its for early adopters It's got green cred at Whole Foods If Apple sold a green colored iPhone 10 which was $2,000 but let everyone know it was made with 100% renewable energy and recycled parts they'd sell to the same crowd, basically. Teslarati noted that the X has an overwhelming mom bent, that it's only outdone % sales to women by the Escalade, G, and Range. Great expensive trucks, but also highly status symbol driven (as really anything this price is). It's truly a handbag that happens to be a car. The 3 is also early adopter driven. Less the status symbol price was but more the middle class symbol (like a BMW 3 or Benz C is) but with the Whole Foods bent.
I suspect you are right about the rich and their motives for buying, Feed the Trees, but there are too few rich people around to sustain the BEV market. To succeed, you need to appeal to the mass market, and the less wealthy you are, the less you can afford to buy a car that turns out to be a turkey. If you look at the monthly plug-in sales figures, half a dozen or so cars are experiencing significant growth, but the bulk of them are selling roughly the same number every month. Some show slight growth, but equally some show falling sales. This doesn't look like a healthy market to me. I suspect the growth is still - generally - to the rich who can afford to buy cars as toys. They have yet to achieve mass-market appeal.
@ Martin Williams That is all utter nonsense. The non compliances makes that aren't sht in the segment of BEV are Tesla and Rimac and soon to be Nio. The rest is deliberately compromised compliance crap. Look the wait for Model 3- that disproves your claims about demand completely- never in auto history has that happened and the S and the X only back that up. Look at Tesla's valuation, unlike the other backwards crap firms its actually got a higher valuation than its book because the market believes in its future, it and the public clearly don't if you're talking about GM or VW- the fail convincingly firms. BEV's radically outperform heavy slow hydrogen machines- go check the stats. FCVs are probably being bought by their own makers to save face the numbers are so tiny they don't count. The model of convenience you describe is backwards and wrong. When it set up right you never have to even plug it in, it manages the charge and for the 1/3 of people you say in the US don't have access to their own charge point there is electric autonomy model which only makes sense under BEV- they won't even need to own a car or ever care about insurance or ever worry about fueling one up etc. Its just a subscription.
