You use miles?
Also, there are a number of EVs that can manage a 210 mile trip these days. But your electric costs are high.
I rarely drive that far, and would probably choose an ICE for that trip. An EV would work well for me because i rarely drive more than 60 miles in a day. And I’d keep an ICE as my second car.
In the UK we are still using miles but buying fuel in litres, go figure.
And yes, nominally there are plenty of EV’s that can do more that 210 miles. Indeed the EV that I was going to buy (the one in the video) has a 320+ mile range.
The bit that often bothered me was the inability to find out what the real-world range was under a variety of driving conditions. (e.g. load, temperature, speed etc). Seeing as those conditions appear to have a much greater effect on range for an EV than is the case for ICE.
Seeing as at least 50% of my driving is done under such conditions I was always going to be interested to see what the real range would be.
The link that I give does do that in a way that other tests don’t. It seems to show that even with a 300+ mile range, the vehicle I was going to buy is very susceptible to those variables and would actually struggle to do 210 miles without charging in the way that I use it (and I don’t think I’m an extreme case).
I’d be very interested to see the same set of tests run on other models from other manufacturers. I can’t imagine that the technology is so different or the laws of physics so altered that much the same outcome would not result.
A back-of-the-fag-packet calculation for our 750 mile annual run to Austria, fully loaded, all systems on, 0C temperature and 80mph autoroute and autobahn running was worrying. Sure, we could hire a car for that particular journey but that just makes the cost of owning an EV even more expensive and the only reason I’d ever buy one is if it is at least as user-friendly as an ICE and is cheaper overall for the length of time I’d own it.
that is a million miles away from true at the moment.
Plus, insurance for the ICE I did buy was £350 a year. I got a quote for the EV…….£1220. eeek!
Those are crazy electrical costs. 206 miles is about 51 kWh in most EVs. You pay £0.46/kWh for off-peak electricity? That’s about double what I pay and I have some of the highest rates in the US. For me, that trip would cost $13 (or £11).
Yeah, I pay about $0.12 per KWh.
My peak rates are pretty high–$0.51/kWh, last I checked–but off-peak is half that and EVs make it trivial to charge at the best times.
I had to vote “I will never get one” but that is because I will never buy another car. I live in a big city (Chicago) and easy walking distance to loads of mass transit. When that doesn’t work there are taxis and Uber/Lyft and when I need a car for a short jaunt there is Zipcar and if I really need a car for a weekend there is car rental (also within walking distance). All that is much cheaper than owning any car, all things considered.
That said, I am buying a charger for my parking spot in my building as an investment in my property. The building will have one go installing these things so now or never. I have family that could make use of it if they visit and I am considering renting the spot and that could help.
Yep, the UK has very high charging costs.
Also, the claimed miles/kWh are not replicated in the real world. As can be seen from the test video.
I also don’t think your consumption claim holds water. You might get somewhere close to 4 miles/kWh in a single driver, unladen car in good weather on a warm day when not doing 70+mph on a motorway but in the use-cases I’m interested in that will not be the case.
So for me, those 206 airport run miles would use pretty much the whole 77kWh of the battery. I’d certainly have to charge up to be certain of avoiding range anxiety.
If I had a cheap overnight charging plan for EV’s (00:00 to 05:00) and could fill the battery up it’d be about £8 for a full charge. However, such a tariff would mean that my electricity rates at all other times would increase so that figure would not be so simple to calculate.
The minimum and maximums were calculated using standard home electricty tariff and fast-charging public options. In the UK they are both expensive.
Of course, even at your rates and claimed consumption that £13.40 saving over an ICE across 200 miles works out as a saving of 6.7p per mile.
If I do 12,000 miles per year and only ever charge at home the very best I could do would be to save £800 in fuel costs. That doesn’t even cover the increase in insurance.
And of course electricty is more expensive here, and I do at least half of those miles away from home charging and 4.0 m/kWh is not attainable in the way I use the car in the real world and an equivalent EV in the first place would cost me £20k more.
I understand the attraction of EV’s but I’m dubious that being any cheaper is a realistic claim.
So the equation is easy for me. The EV is less user-friendly and more expensive.
It’s not just fuel though. EVs are cheaper to maintain than ICE.
In the UK, the fuel would not be much of an overall saving for me. Assuming half my fuel costs are public charging and half are at home I’d be spending an average of 45p per kWh. If I could get a really optimistic 3.2 miles per kWh overall then I’d be spending (3750 x £0.45) = £1700 on fuelling the car via electricity.
For petrol, the costs are likely to be about £1850. Not really a huge saving.
Servicing for my current car is £250 a year, for the EV that was going to be £122 a year.
So taking insurance increase and service decrease into account plus a minimal saving on fuel costs and reduction in vehicle tax a year I’d be about £350 worse off a year running an EV. Unless there are other savings that I’m not aware of.
Of course none of that takes into account the huge chunk of extra cash needed to buy an equivalent EV in the first place.
FWIW, I think you need to factor in regenerative breaking.
Per the app for the EV we got in April, we’ve done 6345 miles in it. That much driving has required 1932kWh of energy, which works out at 3.3m/kWh.
But 405kWh of that was regenerated. What I’ve put into the car is 1527 kWh. Which works out as 4.2m/kWh.
If your EV were getting similar regeneration, then on the calculations above you would be paying something like £1350-£1400 a year for an additional £300-£350, so much nearer par.
That seems unusually low. You know your expenses but this seems like an oil change and a rotate the tires cost.
Eventually, there were be a MUCH bigger service bill. Machines wear out and stuff needs major repair or replacing. That will be expensive. Way more than £250.
I just sold my previous ICE car and pulled out all the service receipts and that figure represents the top-level service. An oil change interim service is a lot less.
In the 8 years of owning my previous car, (5 years of that is out of warranty) I had to replace the water pump and timing belt at 80000 miles (£600), Glow plug replacement at 100000 miles (£125) and discs and pads replacement once each, front and back (£450 in total). That was it.
Even avoiding that (and assuming there are no out-of-warranty costs for an EV) it still doesn’t tip the financial scales in the favour of EV.
I thought electricity rates in the UK were capped. According to this, the cap recently dropped from £0.30/kWh to £0.27/kWh. Is that not the case? How are you lucky enough to pay almost double the cap?
Where have I said I pay nearly double that? I certainly don’t.
How much regeneration is happening when you are cruising for 3 hours at 70+mph? i.e. the use case that I am concerned with.
Have you watched the video I linked to? It shows the sort of consumption that you can expect when using the car in that cruising mode. Regenerative braking doesn’t help much if at all.
Also, I don’t quite understand what you telling me about your consumption read-out.
Does the car say it is doing 3.3 m/kWh but is actually doing 4.2m/kWh? Which figure is it using to estimate range and how accurate is that?
I thought you said you paid £0.46/kWh - not quite double £0.27/kWh, but much higher than the cap. Is that accurate?
ah! I see your confusion. I was talking about how much on average I’d reasonably expect to pay per kWh, and…bolding mine.
Gotcha, that makes sense.
Although I think that’s an extremely skewed assumption.
and it is a function of the pretty brutal public fast charging costs in the UK and the fact that I’d have to rely on many of those for the sort of trips that I do.
If I was purely charging at home it’d perhaps be a different matter.
EVs will not work perfectly for everyone, nor will they save fuel cost for every scenario. Personally, I’d pay more for the experience of driving an EV, but that’s probably not true for everyone. As it is, I pay $0.04 to $0.05 per mile in electricity costs. I have had no maintenance costs yet for either EV (2019 and 2020 models).
YMMV