This is great and all, but any EV with a decent charge is expensive as shit. I’d rather just have decent public transit.
Bullseye
You can buy an older BMW i3 for $12-15k with a 70-100 mile range. No you’re not driving cross country with it, but you can certainly putt around town with one.
Of course the i3 is ugly as sin and I would never own one. But I have friends that have two and love them. I’m keeping an eye on the used EV market and waiting until the right style/price point to get one that has a 100 mile range to get around town.
As an EV owner, the total cost of ownership in terms of maintenance has been lower. No oil change, belt changes, or fluid replacement.
They’re coming down, it’s new technology, it takes time. The Chevy bolt starts at $26k and has a 259 mile range. The Nissan leaf is similar, albeit a little less range. Even the F-150 lightning starts below $40k and the ICE equivalent is around the same.
Look at the MG4, 200 mile range and very competitively priced.
Going on previous things I’ve seen, this must be from using public/fast chargers that have jacked up rates. Charging at home has always been vastly cheaper than gas.
But this is saying that, in Washington for example, you would save $80 charging an electric truck vs filling up a truck with gas
Easily. I have a model 3 and save about $40/m over a Prius and $80/m over a similarly powerful car. I’d imagine a truck would be even more skewed towards the EV.
The stipulation in the article was basically as long as you don’t use level 3 chargers for the majority of your charging it’s cheaper.
Longer road trips using level 3 charging was pretty much the only scenario where gasoline was cheaper.
Wouldn’t it be far better to compare fuel cost per mile ($/mile)? This graphic seems useless to me. Maybe I’m missing something.
@Hopscotch @mmatessa I can only speak for my situation but we’ve crunched the numbers.
Per mile it is half the cost per mile than my wife’s ICE car if I used only public chargers.
If I charge exclusively at home (which I do 99% of the time) it is a third of the cost per mile.
This is in Canada though, where gas prices are very high.
I did the numbers for Alberta a long time ago when electricity was really cheap and it came to 1/9 the price of gas. But that was cheap coal which we really shouldn’t have.
Of course it would trivally be. That on the other hand does not sell electric cars loaded with subscritptions nobody wants.
Wasn’t it always?
Unfortunately, I’d still have to drive 2+ hours to fill up anyplace besides home. I’d love to have a little EV for summer, but it’s just not feasible here in Northern Wisconsin, yet.
Was in a very similar situation in nebraska, but recently a dealership in the town over opened a few spots for charging, so it is spreading, just very slowly
Yeah, it’s only a matter of time, considering the push for electric trucks. But I’m not sure how viable they’ll be for most people, considering how cold it gets in the winter.
Madison here. Charging stations everywhere ;)
You also probably have more people in the surrounding block, than I do in the surrounding 10-20 miles. I’ll take that trade off.
…I guess…?
It’s all a matter of preference, after all. I enjoy convenience of places to go, things to do, good food to eat, people around me, decent public service, public transport and…of course… charging stations
Indeed. I get overwhelmed when there are too many people and too much noise. I enjoy being able to walk out my door, and wander the forest. I have a little grill up the street, but otherwise am able to cook better meals than most places, and certainly have better ingredients from my garden. I go into a bigger town ever month or two, Rhinelander pretty much monthly, and the likes of Wausau every 3-4 months, so I can scratch the occasional itch for something different then.
Great, but when are we actually going to redesign our society so that we don’t need cars? Electric Vehicles are not a path to lower emissions overall, and are also only “green” if you measure tail-pipe emissions and ignore all other aspects of vehicle ownership.
Not to mention the market costs of EVs.
EVs are a path to lower emissions, yes measured all aspects from cradle to grave. I mean c’mon this has been so well established you’re just lying. Yes we also need to get rid of car dependent cities.
EVs should also last a long time, far longer than an ICE vehicle. So overall costs are actually lower, though yes the initial price is higher.
You’re misunderstanding his point. Yes, from cradle to grave EVs are better than ICEs. But they aren’t better than other alternatives. The other costs the commenter is referring to is all the other costs of car ownership: building roads and parking lots, building sprawling car-dependant suburbs which destroy ecosystems and inflate infrastructure costs, the tens of thousands of annual car deaths and millions of car injuries, microplastics from tires, heavy metal dust from brakes, the induspitable contribution of car dependence to the obesity epidemic, the exacerbation of inequality, etc. etc.
EVs are better than ICEs but they’re still cars, that’s the main point. They’re touted as a solution to environmental problems: which they are not, period. The solutions revolve around better land use (eliminating zoning laws which establish car dominance and sprawl), less subsidization of the auto industry (it’s to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars a year in the USA), more subsidization of the public transit industry, and a commitment by people and politicians to build walkable places and enable car free living.
EVs are a small part of a complex and multifaceted issue. They are part of the solution, but only a small part compared to the commitments we silently ignore because of the plea that EVs will save us.
EVs do not last “far longer” then an ICE vehicle. The oldest EV is <15years old and Tesla doesn’t even support the original roadster anymore. They are built to be disposable so that Tesla can keep selling cars. Plus EVs have a large ramping costs in terms of batteries that far exceed anything an ICE vehicle will ever have. Even with battery recycling, which doesn’t actually exist yet at any significant scale, you still don’t have a standard design that is expected to work on any other vehicle model then the one it came with. This means that eventually there will be as many battery “types” as there are models of EV, and that also means charging won’t stay universal either. So eventually an old EV, say ~20 years, won’t be able to use public charging infra, even if the battery problem was sorted out.
When I see people advocating for EV’s I see people who don’t care about the problems cars cause.
Lol electric motors are so simple they can last a million miles. Batteries are the hard part, but you can swap batteries and Tesla was even aiming for a million mile battery. But you want to wahhhhhhhhhh the literal first production vehicle had problems lol.
Way to not address literally any part of my post. I didn’t even bring up the problems of the original roadster. I said that it IS NOT SUPPORTED anymore. Meaning that it’s life was <15years, which is NOT “far longer” then any ICE vehicle.
Then you just gloss over the meat of the post which is that batteries are an incredibly expensive and wasteful part of the cost of EV ownership, and that problem still hasn’t been addressed in >20 years of EV development. You think we can just “swap batteries” as if that isn’t an absurdly expensive procedure that most car owners cannot do on their own.
What does not supported anymore mean? It uses the same charge port I think. So no updates like a regular car? And I guess no brand battery swap if it dies? Has this happened a lot?
Current EVs are software driven and wirelessly connected. (It doesn’t have to be that way, but all EVs that exist in the market today are.) This means that if the vendor stops supporting the car with updates that eventually things like Charging won’t work anymore, and possibly other features. Not because their is any mechanical reason for them not to work, but because of the software reliance between charging stations and the car you are driving. It would be like trying to use Lemmy with Internet Explorer 5. It won’t work. Again it doesn’t HAVE to be that way, but Car Manufactures don’t want to sell cars anymore they wants to sell cars as a service, and the software support sun setting is part of that strategy.
I didn’t bring up [problem], I changed the wording to a [different problem] lol.
Batteries improve, you already have Tesla working on a million mile battery. Recycling will come, you’re just wahhhhhhhh it’s not here yet. It’s all wahhhhhh it’s not 100% right from the very start of the literal first production vehicle wahhhh!! You may continue your wahhhh rage, that’s all it is. Peace.
I’m curious what city planning without any cars would look like. I’ve been to parts of Europe, and the cities were very walkable. However, I didn’t see any industry in the places where I was staying. How would goods be transported? How would people in loud/polluting industries get from where they live to where they work?
Anyone have the answers to these questions?
Absolutely, these are all totally valid questions to ask and answer as we build walkable places.
Goods do need to move: from hubs (ports, airports) to distribution centers (warehouses) to their “last mile” destinations (stores, restaurants etc). Cars and vans are great ways to move goods even to destinations: even pedestrian streets allow delivery trucks in at low speeds and/or off peak hours. It’s just private cars not allowed in these people-centric places. Though bike delivery is increasingly popular in dense walkable places.
As for heavy industry, it’s true that these places tend to be underserved by useful transit. In a lot of walkable places these kinds of places do have transit: especially industrial parks which can be pretty dense if designed properly. But if transit is truly infeasible, driving is totally acceptable to these places. The goal of a walkable community isn’t to eliminate all car trips. They’re absolutely a useful tool that will continue to play an important role in our cities and towns.
The goal of a walkable trip is to reduce the number of car trips and eliminate the low hanging fruit. Going to school, going to the shops or to get groceries, visiting your friends and family, going to the doctor: in a lot of places these trips can only be done by car because of how we build our cities and towns. There will always be trips for which cars are the best tool: we just need to make it a goal to reduce those trips through thoughtful land use and city building.
Pretty irrelevant when the cost of EV cars is almost double. Stupid article.
Wake me up when EV cars are actually at a point of replacing combustion engines. Currently they are not ready.
Yeah I want an ev but can’t buy one until the costs are the same or lower than gas cars. Can’t afford anything more
My work does free electric car charging. I got an electric car in March and haven’t spent a penny on charging it since.
Over the four years I plan to have it before I sell it on, the lack of fuel cost is going to more than make up the difference in cost.
That won’t happen until people accept that 100 mile range is enough for 90% of commutes. Most of the battery capacity in current evs are wasted on marketing.
Most places you can’t roll up and insert a card, yeah? I heard proprietary apps are required a lot of the time
Yeah but it’s also nearly a duopoly between Tesla and Chargepoint, the latter of which I know to support NFC payments so it’s similar to tapping your card
Obviously “it’s OK there’s a duopoly” isn’t the most assuring argument, just saying after 3 years it’s been low on my list of challenges when charging
You should still be able to just walk up and tap your card. It should be no more difficult to use than a gas pump. It’s bullshit that you have to use an app so that they can collect data on you to sell to third parties.
Also yes
Here in the EU the law makers forced card payment. But you have to scan a QR code > put in your CC details in a form > confirm the request in your banking app obviously > wait for the charging point to confirm the payment and then you can go ahead. Also sometimes they charge you extra for those methods. Or anyone that Scans the QR code can cancel your charging. They argue “well you could have used our app or NFC card (which costs 20€ single payment but for each provider). I think it sucks. I did like the EV experiment and I love the driving of an EV but when it comes to long distance it’s just annoying as I’m constantly stressed looking at the ever changing “distance left” numbers. I feel like EVs still have a long way to go on each sides: the cars and the charging infrastructure.
I see multiple people mentioning an article, but where is it? I want to post this on other places but they’ll get mad if I don’t have an article link :c
Unfortunately the infrastructure isn’t there yet to support this in any meaningful capacity.
Charging is relatively slow, locations are still sparse in many places; gasoline still provides a lot of ease for the money.
That said, I’m interested in BEV/gas hybrids like the Prime line of hybrids from Toyota. For me, a Rav4 Prime can do 80% of my commuting on electric alone, but for a longer trip, gas is there.
If I didn’t already have a kia niro I would 100% be getting a RAV4 prime. 40 miles electric is bomb
It’s a great current-times compromise. In and around town is all electric, and the battery size is small enough that charging at home on 120v is still acceptable. I only have 100A service here, so installing another 240V for a dedicated charging point is a huge expense (unless I do a temporary switch with the dryer whenever I need to charge).
The caveat in the article is that, as long as you don’t use level 3 charging for the majority of your charging, charging an EV will always be cheaper than filling an ICE equivalent vehicle.
