There’s another option that I always like to remind people of when they lease a car. When the lease is up, don’t return it, instead trade it in.
You’ve got about a year left on your lease so this is a good time to start watching the numbers. Watch for when the trade-in value of your car is higher than the buy out amount.
For example, if your car is worth 25k, but the buyout is 20k, you can go to the dealer, tell them you want to trade your car in and you walk away with 5k in your pocket.
I’ve done that with my last several cars. In fact, I traded in my 3 year old Civic SI, that was in a major accident, and I walked off the lot with leased Niro EV and something like $8000.
It was a Honda finance guy that told me about that trick and it’s worked every time I’ve done it. I think on the 2 or 3 previous cars I’ve had, I typically ended up coming out 1000-2000 ahead, which I would just put down on the next car.
This does require your lease agreement to actually have a buyout clause. When used car prices spiked a few years ago (when I traded in my Civic), I recall hearing that some manufacturers were removing that. Presumably to both make sure they’d get the used car back and to make sure they don’t end up paying a ton for it if the used car market spikes again.
In the case of my Civic, for example, they gave me $27,000, less the $19,000 buyout, for it. Had I turned it in to a Honda dealership, they would have paid Honda Lease that same $19000 buyout and sold the car on their lot for 27k and I’d walk away empty handed.
Modern heat pumps will work at temperatures as low as -30.
Not exact, but you can think of it as a freezer module, with the freezer part on the outside. The cold “freezer air” is pushed to the outside, and the warm air is pushed to the inside of the car.
wow. I just charged my LEAF at 9.6 cents CDN per kwh. (About 6p) I’m not including the 21 cents/day basic cost, as I consider this just gets rolled into my general household use. But let’s call it 7p/kwh. 5 times less than you pay.
We are, at time of writing, pretty much the most expensive country in the world for electricity prices.
Wasn’t always the case and may not be in the future but for now it certainly makes the EV calculations less compelling for me.
I’m in the sweet spot of EV use:
Travel less than 50km/day on average
Can charge at home
Relatively cheap electricity rates
Mild climate
Free weekend charging a 5 minute walk away
It’s a lot near me that charges for parking at the chargers M - Sat. Sunday the meters do not accept $$ and parking is free; so charging is free too. I expect this will be changing in the not so distant future.
There is still some other free charging nearby at malls and rec centers.
Near me we have free level-two charging at a restaurant, a Walgreens, and a grocery store. The Walgreens makes the least sense, as you can’t get much of a charge in 5 to 10 minutes. I do like the one at the restaurant. In two hours I get more charge than I needed to get there and back. It was more of an issue with my plug in hybrid, as my full EV never “needs” a charge like that. I probably only bother using it about 1/2 of my visits. I never use the other two I mentioned
When I got my EV, people at work asked if I’d considered installing an EVSE there, for customers to use and I told them basically the same thing. Sure, it would be nice for me, but a single, Level 2 charger isn’t going to bring in more customers since most people are only here for a few minutes. L3 maybe, but a bit out of our price range. What we’d end up with, more likely, is people charging their cars overnight.
Sure, I think those figure tip the balance in EV favour for you.
However, I was interested to see a UK article that says that a new EV car is, on average, £22k more expensive than an ICE car.
If I were in the market for new vehicle right now, all the cheap electricity in the world can’t make up for that kind of shortfall over a typical car ownership period (4-5 years)
My Mach E will never pay for itself, and consumer solar panels never recover their ROI in 20 years versus dumping $40,000 into VTI for 20 years. People do fun things because they’re fun, not necessarily for an ROI. Why do people buy Corvettes?
If you wait for or five years, though, there will likely be a wide selection of less expensive EV’s that do break even with ICE.
I’m not knocking other people’s choices merely pointing out that for many of us who make such choices on a purely practical level, the sums don’t add up at the moment.
perhaps, and if the charging infrastructure and reliability issues are sorted (which they should be) then it’ll perhaps be a more viable option for me.
I’d be interested in digging into that article more. I suspect they are comparing apples to oranges; comparing cars where the EV is in a different category/has more options than the ICE car.
For myself, I bought a 3 year old EV. Cost $12,900 CDN. I’ve had it for 4 years now.
No doubt that’s true but again, for people who aren’t particularly fussed about bells and whistles and just want a simple a to b transport with a decent capacity then even the bottom level of the EV market is substantially more expensive.
The cheapest “family” size EV on sale in the UK is around £27k. There are multiple options for ICE cars that will perform the same task that are over £12k cheaper. Again, that’s a chunk of change that the EV is unlikely to pay back over the course of 4-5 years.
I don’t, I think it was Auto Express and I can’t recall what detail was included but I think we all know that like for like the EV’s are definitely substantially more expensive to buy.
i.e. I can find a new VW golf from £24k and the ID3 is around £40k and a new fiat 500 from £14k and the EV version from £27k. nearly double.
Those are big differences, particularly for people who are buying that sort of car and, as we speak, there are only limited circumstances where the EV option turns out to be the better financial and practical choice.
FWIW, we recently got a 2019 Nissan Leaf, for which there is a handy app that will tell you mileage and (if you plug in your electricity cost) £/mile to boot.
Since getting it, we have done 1399 miles for 439 kWh (so just under your 3.2 miles/kWh figure) which at 35p/kWh should work out at your £11/hour but the app tells me it’s actually £9/hour because of the magic of regenerative braking. Per the app, I have only consumed 366 kWh, with 73 regenerated for “free”. That’s c. 1/6th of total energy used, so it’s not negligible.
Also, once we get our charge point installed, our energy provider will give us a night time charging rate of c.7p/kWh which will make an enormous difference - definitely something worth checking out.