I heard someone said that, at the end EV will cost you almost the same as gasoline vehicle, if you have to change the expensive battery every so often. Can someone please give me more info on this? Thank you so much.
I believe this is the total cost of ownership calculation.
https://www.caranddriver.com/shopping-advice/a32494027/ev-vs-gas-cheaper-to-own/
This is great. but maybe factor in if you have solar. I can generate my own free electricity but I can’t generate my own gas no matter how many visits to Taco Bell.
Even without solar there are lots of places to charge for free (slowly, but it adds up)
Also gas is way more expensive than that here in CA. And gas prices fluctuate like crazy. Electric prices generally don’t.
My electric company gives me monthly credits because I let them control when my car charges based on demand. I just set it up to “be ready by 7am”. Combined with solar it makes my charging cost negative.
OMG, my 0.99 L gasoline car is still a lot cheaper than any of the electric options I could come up with. I guess the year of the electric car isn’t here yet. Then again, I couldn’t even charge the car at home, so there’s no hurry to switch any time soon.
For people who don’t have access to charges at home, like apartment dwellers. Owning an electric vehicle becomes a lot less convenient, cuz you’re not getting the efficiency from solar panels, or late night charging. You’re at the whim of the price of fast chargers.
But the math is constantly changing, it’s good that it’s a viable option for a lot of people. I look forward to a more sustainable future.
To put on my engineers hat for a minute, I honestly would prefer that we switch over to hydrogen fuel cars rather than electric battery powered cars. Batteries are more e-waste, not recyclable, unlike hydrogen.
But that’s a pie in the sky dream
I see great potential in hydrogen, because we could produce lots of it by dumping excess solar and wind energy into electrolysis. That would mean that instead of burning coal, oil and gas in peaker plants, we could use hydrogen for grid balancing. Assuming we had that sort of hydrogen infrastructure for the grid, we could obviously put some of the hydrogen for road vehicle use as well.
In the short term, cost is going to be an issue, but that can be overcome through economies of scale. However, safety is a bit tricky due to the explosive nature of hydrogen. I’ve heard of various creative solutions but they always come with serious drawbacks. So far, storing hydrogen in a pressurized tank seems to be the least awful option out there. On the other hand, electric cars will happily ignite from time to time, so I guess we’ve already accepted a certain level of danger when it comes to vehicles.
Car batteries last more than 10 years in cars, have a second life as static storage for likely much more than 10 years, and we currently have the ability to recycle over 95% of battery materials into new batteries.
Hydrogen used in fuel cells has a round trip efficiency of around 30% (compared to 90%+ for batteries). If the hydrogen was generated from solar power, we would need 3 times as many solar panels to drive hydrogen cars vs battery cars.
Most (98%+) of all hydrogen is currently made using fossil fuels. The most common method is methane steam reformation. The methane (natural gas) is combined with high pressure, high temperature steam. The methane reacts with the steam to produce hydrogen and carbon dioxide.
The carbon dioxide is usually vented to the atmosphere (some places capture the CO2, and use it to pump oil out of the ground where the CO2 is also released into the atmosphere).
The hydrogen also contains less energy than the methane that was used to make it.
The availability on street charging for those without driveway is really the only thing holding back mass adoption, IMHO.
I’ve heard that the electrical grid wouldn’t be able to handle it if every car was electric. Not just the energy production, but also the wires buried under the streets.
A gas car costs twice as much as a gas car after like 100k miles or so… you end up paying for some random ass shit that broke every couple months. Alternator here, transmission there, radiator, head gasket, O2 sensors, rusted out muffler, injectors… it’s not like your gas motor just keeps on trucking forever and doesn’t nickel and dime the fuck out of you as it ages. An EV is mainly just gonna lose some capacity as it gets elderly, and isn’t likely to have random little repairs as often.
If you ain’t super well off, you roll your shit til the wheels fall off, and with an EV, that’s just going to mean that the Tesla that goes 300 miles on a charge today, in ten years, is gonna be a Tesla that goes 150 miles on a charge, and there’s going to be people that will rock that old ass battery pack for as long as itll keep rocking, and a lot of those packs aren’t actually going to get replaced at the age everyone is claiming they will be.
Battery pack might be the whole ass cost of the car, but poo-pooing EVs over it is disingenuous if you ask me.
The main counter to that is that EVs are very difficult to repair on your own, so when something breaks, you’re going to be taking it to a specialist shop. While you’re right in saying that ICE components break, let’s not act like electric motors are indestructible pieces of machinery
How is an EV harder to repair on your own than an ICE? I think you’re wildly underestimating the shade tree tinkerers of the world.
Sure, an EV contains a bunch of proprietary software and configuration, but so do ICE vehicles, and people have been hacking that shit for decades. They’ll swap out the whole ass controller if that’s what it takes :)
They’ll swap out the whole ass controller if that’s what it takes :)
And we all know the ass controller is the most important part.
I have never in my life repaired a car on my own, so that means nothing to me.
Bought an electric car in early 2020. Costs me a few bucks a months to keep charged, tops. I have spent literally 0 dollars on maintenance for it. There are just plain fewer moving parts. It’s a battery, an electric motor, and that’s about it.
So that’s 3.5 years (so far) of paying practically nothing to operate a smooth-driving, quiet vehicle that still gets almost 300 miles per charge and operates primarily off the wind power I buy from my utility company.
I expect to drive this one until it can’t hold a charge anymore, and then I’ll get another one.
that’s just going to mean that the Tesla that goes 300 miles on a charge today, in ten years, is gonna be a Tesla that goes 150 miles on a charge, and there’s going to be people that will rock that old ass battery pack for as long as itll keep rocking
That 150 mile battery pack is still hugely useful with zero refurbishment as a stationary utility power battery. A Tesla model 3 Long Range (330 mile version) is 75kwh. A brand new Tesla Powerwall is 13.5kwh. So that old 150 mile battery is equal to the capacity of 5 and half brand new Tesla Powerwalls.
There’s already a solar power generating company using old Nissan Leaf batteries to store excess generated electricity, then putting that electricity back on the grid at peak times to earn money.
It looks like you can construct scenarios where ICE cars are cheaper than EVs by a fine margin, for instance a mid-sized car that you own for just the wrong amount of time in a country with a high gas subsidy (the United States, for instance) that you don’t drive much. However, for most scenarios, it seems you’ll save 10-15% on the total cost of ownership.
The acronyms TCO (total cost of ownership), ICE (internal combustion engine) and EV (electric vehicle) may help you should you decide to continue research on your own.
One thing to note is that car infrastructure maintenance (e.g. upkeeping roads and bridges) is often paid for in substantial part through a gas tax. Electric cars don’t pay the gas tax, so they are essentially freeloading. In the future, this may change, but this is one reason why EVs are currently cheaper than ICEs.
My state hits you with a tax you can pay per mile or once a year with registration, and was fairly expensive, so not really true here.
That sounds sensible. Car use is heavily subsidized, so someone is paying for those miles. It makes sense that a greater proportion of that cost falls on the driver.
At least in Georgia, I actually pay more in “gas tax” by owning an EV because I just don’t drive enough but the yearly cost doesn’t reflect miles driven
In Australia, roads are paid for out of the general tax pool, and from a proportion of the registration cost. Fuel excise goes into the general tax pool and doesn’t directly fund roads.
This hasn’t stopped states from trying to implement a distance based tax on electric and low emission vehicles.
Victoria introduced one under the guise of needing extra money to pay for roads. It was a state-collected tax. The federal government collects fuel excise, so the state wasn’t losing funding from electric car owners. The new tax collected didn’t even go toward roads.
There were numerous other critical issues with this tax, but it’s still running.
Distance based taxes are economically better because they internalize the externalities of driving. That is, driving more benefits the driver but is paid for by the general tax pool. This means people are encouraged to drive more than they should because the true costs are borne by society as a whole (including non-drivers) and not the individual driving.
Isn’t most (non-environmental) road damage done by commercial trucks?
Maybe paying for roads by taxing fuel was always going to be a losing battle since mpg requirements have been trending upwards for decades.
Large trucks (semi-truck, big-rig, 18-wheeler, etc.) cause around 200,000 times the damage to roads per distance driven than cars.
Even accounting for the lower number of trucks than cars, in Australia trucks cause around 50,000 times more damage to roads per year than cars.
In Australia, commercial trucks pay less fuel excise per litre than cars.
There is obviously a LOT of car infrastructure that is not used by commercial trucks: residential streets and parking lots account for most road surface area. There are also many other externalities besides maintenance like pollution and accidents. By not properly taxing distance driven, we are essentially subsidizing car use.
I pay for that infrastructure when I register my car. As in, I pay easy more than an ICE car does. Way more. There is no freeloading going on. It is just a propaganda point used by oil interests to discourage people from adopting evs. The freeloaders you are looking for are the corporate interests who are using my lungs to clear the poisons they are spilling into the air with their diesel engines. Those are the freeloaders you are looking for. Protip: you can spot the freeloaders in a crowd real easy. They are the ones pointing their fingers and yelling “freeloaders”. Projection is a powerful tool
Oh please, your modest increase in registration fees do not cover all the externalities of cars. Cars still enjoy TONS of subsidies, including free parking, free highways, etc. In fact, 60% of the surface areas of most cities in NA are devoted to cars.
It’s hilarious that you think you’re fighting “Big Corporate Lobbying” by defending EVs. I don’t know where you get that I’m in favor of ICEs. I am against car dependence entirely. You’re being brainwashed into thinking environmentalism is just about buying another expensive product instead of fighting the car lobby entirely.
I have an electric car from 2011. The battery has had no maintenance, and hasn’t been replaced.
So far the car has had 2-3 new 12V batteries, at least one new set of tires, windscreen wipers replaced once, and the air conditioner filter replaced a few times. I’m not aware of any other maintenance done to the car.
I suspect the car could have driven up to 150km (95mi) when new, and is now down to 80km (50mi) range. It gets driven no more than 10km in a day, so I suspect it will still be useful to me for another 10 years.
It has saved me a huge amount in fuel, and has barely cost me anything to run.
You should really change your wipers more. The blades crack and become ineffective with age even if unused. Maybe not every year but every couple years!
Silicone wiper blades last many years and don’t crack. They’re about twice the cost of traditional but worth it in the long run.
My current set is from 2018.
I’m fairly certain my car doesn’t have a coolant system, but thanks for the reminder. I often forget these sorts of things.
Out of curiosity what kind of vehicle? Cause most EV’s and Hybrids have a cooling system for the batteries.
