1. You live in a private house where you can charge the car? - Yes
2. You don't have a charger at home? - No
Simple, really :) . I always wanted to buy an EV but that's a deal breaker criteria. Also the secondary problem - author makes assumption about electricity price, but it almost doesn't matter at all if you are changing at the commercial stations only. They will charge you for as much as they want, and it would be a far far more than bare electricity price at home. I have once calculated a price to kilometers value at the nearest commercial charger in my city (not USA and not EU), it was about equal to the running a benzin car on a 95 octane fuel. At the same time my colleague was spending on charging his Leaf about 1/4 of the fuel price of his previous city car (using commercial electricity prices, not the home one, home electricity price would have been 1/8 to fuel). So the commercial markup of a charging station was 300%. Not very enticing.
Not to pile on but I’ll second some of the other commenters who have said that not being able to charge at home isn’t that big of a deal.
I live in a condo in a major US city and don’t have the option to charge at home.
From a convenience perspective, it’s truly turned out to be a non-issue. We’re at the point where I live that there are enough chargers around that I simply plug in once or twice a week while I’m running some errands.
From a cost perspective, it probably would be cheaper for me to charge at home, but it would be small and would take years to pay off the cost difference of having a charger installed. I spend so little on charging that I don’t really pay attention to it as an expense.
Obviously your situation may vary but I had a lot of anxiety about this and it turned out to be completely unfounded. Figure out where there are (ideally level 2 chargers) near you and you’ll be fine.
> From a cost perspective, it probably would be cheaper for me to charge at home, but it would be small and would take years to pay off the cost difference of having a charger installed. I spend so little on charging that I don’t really pay attention to it as an expense.
May I ask what you spend? I think here charging at home vs. at public chargers is a difference of up to 100% more expensive (~0.30 cents at home vs >0.50 at public chargers).
In eastern MA, I find level 2 charging is rarely marked up (and is not infrequently free). DC fast charging is 50-100% marked up, which feels pretty fair to me to be honest.
The thing I find pleasing is office park level 2 charging often charges the retail electricity rate, but they have a large solar installation and if they sell me electricity at full retail (including distribution charges), they make a lot more than selling it to the utility. That’s good for me (I get a charge at the same cost it would be at home) and good for them.
Yoy can do that and you might have enough panels to charge a few cars at once if you cover the entire roof with them. But even in ideal condition you’d need more than 300m2 of solar panels to charge a single car at 50kW and this would increase significantly if they don’t operate at 100% capacity.
So unless your goal is primarily virtue signaling you might as well just use the energy generated for lights and cooling since you’ll still need power from the grid for that anyway (unless it’s some hyper energy efficient shopping center with no fridges or cooling).
If you don’t need fast charging at home (i.e. you’re fine leaving it plugged over night) the fixed costs for a home charger a very low.
Unless the commercial chargers you use are exceptionally cheap or even free charging might cost nearly as much as gas for a similar car and 4x more than at home (obviously depends on your local situation)
Here it's actually cheaper to charge my EV on the public-chargers then doing it at home, europe has highly inflated electricity prices, but in my city all the chargers have fixed (low) prices, while my home electricity has risen from 21ct to 40+ct/kwh now.
It will probably get even better as soon as I can get solar on my house, but getting enough juice from public-chargers is sufficient.
Last weekend I even got a full (60+kwh) charge for free, as I was visiting Froscon, and the chargers in Sankt Augustin were all completely free, and there was a charger on the parking next to the venue.
If you have an accessible 120v outlet, it's extremely likely you can charge just with that. Evidence - had an ev since 2012, using only 120 volts. Only the most inefficient recent evs argue for higher voltage.
The reasons 120v garage charging won't work for you:
1. You commonly drive 200+ miles, need to come home, charge, driving 200 or 300 miles almost immediately.
When I need to do this I can go to a supercharger or fast dc charger, but that's rare. There's another alternative, I have used my house's dryer vent to charge at 30 amps, 220v maybe a dozen times in 10 years.
I was recently tasked with moving a chevy bolt what was parked on the street too long to save it from being impounded.
It had sat there for quite a long time and wasn't anywhere near full when it was parked. When I got it the battery was in the orange where it stops telling you how much range is left and just says find a charger. I belive this kicks in at the 15-20 miles remaining range.
I moved the car about 10 miles to a residential driveway that has a 120ac plug.
When I left, the car was indicating it would be fully charged in 60 hours.
That's two and a half days to do what a gas station can do in 5 minutes.
Bottom line is relying on 120 to keep your car charged up is a fantasy unless your car usage is so low you might as well have a bicycle instead of a car.
This is not true. Rule of thumb is 4-5mi per hour on 120AC. I drive a Leaf and charge exclusively at home on 120AC, zero problems keeping up with my non-bicycle-friendly commute.
If I needed to I could put in a 220 charger for a couple hundred bucks and a few hours of time, but I just don’t.
I was a little taken aback first time I charged my Bolt up with the 120V charger on an standard outdoor outlet. The time estimate said “9 AM” but I didn’t notice that it meant 9 AM two days from now.
I still only use the 120V outdoor outlet charger, since my usage is infrequent and adequately served by the 0.9 kW/hr charging, but it helps to know that a full charge does take something like 55 hours.
On the (hasn’t happened yet) occasion that I need more range than that, there’s a variety of level 2 and 3 chargers easily accessible in the area.
Even the least efficient EVs still get some charge at 120v. One of the worst offenders only gets 1 mile per kWh so that's roughly 1 mile every hour at home. Even if your inefficient EV is only plugged in for the roughly 8 hours you need to sleep, that's still 8 more miles of range when you wake up than you had before you went to bed. A lot of people like to discount that as "basically nothing", but a gas car isn't going to have 8 more miles it can drive when you wake up. It's a subtle seeming shift, but it's still a useful shift, because it adds up. 8 extra miles a night is still 56 miles a week you don't need to "fast charge", even with the most inefficient sort of EV and the least time at home.
Cars spend more time parked than in use by a great margin, even among those drivers that drive hundreds of miles every week. The US is at a disadvantage with our 120v standard and that a lot of people don't think 120v is "adequate" for EV charging ("it's only an additional mile per hour range in my inefficient EV Hummer!"), but we should normalize 120v charging because it should be easy and affordable to almost every household and a lot of shared parking. We've more than a century of experience installing "regular plugs" everywhere. We could start there and do a lot of good in the US to encourage charging everywhere a car is parked. We have to reduce the stigma that it "isn't good enough" because people can't think fourth dimensionally that 1 mile per hour is "adequate" because it is still more than the car would have had otherwise.
Dryer plugs are great, too, but we don't have as many free circuits in our fuse boxes and circuit breaker boxes as we'd all like to put extra dryer plugs in all our garages, because the US made the mistake of standardizing on 120v instead of 220/240v like most of the rest of the world. (Thanks, Edison.~) We can start with regular plugs, and need to destagmatize it/normalize it if we want cheap charging everywhere and less focus on "how do we install chargers" as if it's this deeply complicated bootstrap process. We have outlets everywhere, let's use them better. We install new outlets all the time for relatively pennies (the labor investments far dwarfs the supplies/capital investments), we can install them near every parking lot a lot cheaper than we can add 240v circuits to parking lots (or "fast chargers"). If we can start to think of it as "adequate" because it is still additive.
Search it for what? How is this a useful comment? Yes, the US has 3-phase 220/240 volt plugs. We call them "dryer plugs" out of habit and there aren't enough of them. Because they are "infrequent use"/"single use" plugs in the US most buildings don't have a lot of three phase circuits and expanding the number of three phase "dryer plugs" is relatively expensive. Expanding 120v plugs is much simpler in every class of US building today. That's exactly what I'm complaining about that we aren't doing more of, because it is much cheaper/easier and still a good start for the US. Level 1 charging is better than no charging.
All the dryer plugs I've seen are single phase. I don't think I've ever seen a household with 3 phase service. Our farm has 3 phase service but the house is still wired up to a single phase.
Using both sides of split phase is still single phase.
I see a good variety of EVs parked on the street here in Cambridge, MA, USA. There’s a decent local network of level 2 and 3 chargers that are regularly used to charge the cars, in the neighborhood and at various area workplaces. Some are owned by the city and only charge enough to break even on installation and electricity cost. Workplace ones are often subsidized by the employers as a side benefit.
Clearly it doesn’t work in all locations; yours being a prime example, but there are parts of the world where it’s feasible to own an EV without home charging.
I'm currently in the eastern EU, and while there a lot of EVs on the roads, the infrastructure is not usable for my personal use there too. No chargers at homes or near homes, not even in the new apartment blocks. No chargers at work parkings.
Honestly, I wonder how can EU ban selling ICE cars even in 10 years, if the infrastructure in so much lagging behind.
It doesn’t take that long to wire up new electrical stuff. Just the will to do it. We’re talking 3.3kw to 6.6kw a drop unless it’s a fast charger. (Edit-the wider spread the slower chargers probably the lesser need for fast chargers, too.) 3.3kw is about 120v/27.5A. Not negligible but no one worries about hooking up hair driers to the grid and they draw tons of power. Reference the places putting chargers on light posts and similar.
When's the last time someone and 10 of their neighbors dried their hair for 12 straight hours, though? It's not the instantaneous power draw from a single plug that people are worried about but rather the aggregate draw.
I think it’s perhaps mostly still within the margins that grids are built to tolerate. We’ll need to generate more electricity, but we might not need to rewrite all our streets. Also, it won’t be a step change, it will be gradual. NEW cars will be EVs by 2030 (or whenever), but most cars will still be old cars.
That turns out not to be a problem in the us, because the increased electricity use by expected ev charging is contained in our 2 or 3% increase per year. I expected this will be true for other places. Also in the us you find that people are using unneeded capacity at night.
I hear this view a lot - my main rebuttal is 'but can't top up your car with petrol/gas/diesel at home either'.
The infra around EV charging needs to be much much better, I totally agree with this, but the idea that everyone will be able to charge their cars at home just isn't going to happen
The difference is: You're not standing around waiting for my car to charge. Your parked to do something else.
Depending on where there is, there may well be enough density. Here, we have 129 stations, and half of them are free. It goes up to over 300 if you include the rest of the metro. We're not that large a city, either.
I just looked at the plugshare map of the city I'm at currently. It show 101 stations up to 60 minutes pure drive distance. Also that's all kinds of chargers, private hotel spots, small two post stations, big stations.
Lets charitably assume that ALL of them are inside the city and that ALL of them are fast 10 post stations. So that's a capacity for about a thousand EV cars. That's in 1 million population city. I guess that's not enough at all.
PS: and what do you do for several hours while your car charges at the station? Walk in circles around the small overprices station shop? Drink coffee?
We're driving from Chicago to Memphis (about 600 miles or two full charges of a Tesla).
First question is "is there sufficient charging in the 200 - 300 mile distance? If you run out of charge, its a bit more difficult than "call AAA to bring you a gallon of gas" ( https://tiremeetsroad.com/2022/05/28/aaa-members-will-tow-tr... ). I'm sure that tow trucks will get to the point where they also have a charger, but we're in new territory here.
The next issue is the time to fuel. With a road trip, this isn't a "park in the EV vehicle spot at Fry's while you go shopping". With a gas station, I'm in and out in about 3 minutes tops. A Tesla super charger station takes 15-30 minutes - 5x to 10x longer than regular combustion. Aside from the "you're there for 5x longer", this means that to get the same throughput of vehicles served at the station it needs 5x to 10x more space than the gas station. This is where its going to be real interesting.
EVs are great if you are returning home each night or are in an area where there are EV stations while daily errands are run. I have difficulty seeing them useful for distance travel and the situations where one charges midway each day.
The wsj article was kind of from an idiot. At the same time, it's true there aren't enough chargers and we are building them out and it should be as easy as "just drive".
Separate from that, if you have a tesla, this problem is not there because they have enough chargers and they are maintained. It's the clown car mixed private ev chargers that are broken, in bad locations and have low power. When tesla opens up their network (by adding the other common plug) I expect many of the other ev charger companies will go out of business or have to significantly improve their speed and quality. My 2012 tesla had around 250 miles range (drove it for 50k miles, after 3 years upgraded to the awd, still have that one, still has 265/270 original miles range.
Wall Stree Journal? no thanks. If you refuse to accept climate change then your opinions on EVs can't be trusted.
Doesn't Tesla have all this built in, and automatically tell you which charger to stop at based on optimal charge time (20% - 80%) and current usage of the chargers?
There's third party apps that do it for other EVs but I thought Tesla had this all tied up in a neat package?
> I'm sure that tow trucks will get to the point where they also have a charger, but we're in new territory here.
Tow trucks don't need chargers, they just need to drop your car off at the nearest charger.
This isn't even "new" territory: tow trucks tow things from point A to point B all the time. That's what tow trucks were built for.
It isn't "new" territory for EVs: Anecdotally, I had a friend tell me working as a tow truck near a "blind spot" at the time in Tesla's charging maps along an Interstate through one of the Plains states. (A blind spot that has since been filled.) There was a driver that drove that stretch regularly and couldn't get enough charge to make it to the next station so would regularly call for tow. (So regularly in that case that they'd call a day ahead or so and schedule it like an appointment and the tow truck would just be waiting around the "usual spot".)
> Aside from the "you're there for 5x longer", this means that to get the same throughput of vehicles served at the station it needs 5x to 10x more space than the gas station. This is where its going to be real interesting.
Though it likely will not ever need the exact same throughput because home charging and destination charging remove a lot of "local traffic" through fast chargers that gas stations still have to regularly serve.
Even in long distance travel destination chargers will shake up and decentralize a lot of the "station need". On a road trip you might not need "park at a Fry's while you shop", but you might still find use in "park at a restaurant while you sit down and eat" and "park at a cool gift shop while you shop for souvenirs" and "park at the neat tourist trap and explore a mini museum" and maybe even "park at a motel where you can catch a quick nap".
EVs could herald a return to the sorts of weird destinations that Route 66, as one clear nostalgia-filled example, made US long distance travel such an "exciting thing" and that lots of people have great nostalgia for even if most of today's Route 66 is a rusted memory of itself. I know plenty of long distance drivers that might like a small return to that Americana tradition of weird tourist traps and strange excuses to stop, and even AAA still thinks you should pay them for trip tiks even in the internet age of GPS because they still think they can find some of that nostalgia for you.
With EVs, we don't have to cluster around the logistics of gas stations anymore and could have all sorts of chargers "off the beaten path" (of the Interstates). What sort of weird local and regional places could install chargers? There's all sorts of creativity to be explored here.
Why would that be a valid rebuttal? From turning into a gas station to exiting, completely filling a gas tank takes, at most, 5 minutes and gas stations are everywhere. How long does charging to be able to travel the same distance take?
It's a rebuttal because it reduces local/regional pressure on fast chargers. If the average driver charges at home, fast chargers mostly only need to see the traffic of long distance drives. It's a move from strong centralization (gas stations are the only place to refuel a gas car) to much larger decentralization (in theory an EV can charge anywhere the electric grid touches and especially in the US the electric grid sure touches a large amount of the country, even "wilderness areas").
In terms of real world charging times added to travel the same distance, the raw numbers are generally for the same distance where you need one gas stop you need one charging stop. The charging stop is 15-30 minutes, which seems like a clear "loss" if you see gas stops as only 5 minutes. But gas refueling is a necessary serial task and you should not do anything else while waiting for your car to refuel. (technically, there are even laws that it is illegal to not watch your car the entire time), while charging is a parallel task and you can eat/hit the restrooms/do any number of other things while you wait. Experientially you may not notice any "lost time" in comparison of the two approaches depending on how you use refueling stops today. It sounds like a lot of lost time on paper, but you make up for it in parallel tasking.
I agree, but right now in the UK, aside from the odd token charging point in a supermarket car park, realiably accessible charging stations are few and far between, particulary outside major city centres.
Where I live (north west london), there’s a pilot scheme where they’ve installed roadside chargers on my residential street (these are pretty small - they look more like “cats eyes” than petrol pumps). I’m guessing that’s the future.
Let's imagine I need a car for a daily commute. Or work. After a day ends, I need to get it to the charging station, which is away from the home. I leave the car there and take a bus to the home. There I do something not engaging too much, because in 1-3 hours I need to get out again, at night, get a bus to the charging station (longer waits late in the evening too), then get the car to home and then finally I can rest. It's totally not an option. Also taking a bus or tram twice a day additionally is not free, and kinda defeats the economy part of the EV car.
PS edit: lets add some concrete numbers - the nearest station to my current home (in the peripheral region of the big city, but not the outskirts) is 10 minutes walk away, 2 (two) 22kW type-2 stations. The seconds closest station is 10 (ten) 100kW stations and it is 33 minutes away by bus with a single transfer. So I would need to wait for bus 4 times just to get to the big station and back.
You shouldn’t need to charge every day in a city. Also, a lot of people will be able to charge at home. You don’t need special infrastructure for this, you can just plug into it into the mains.
This doesn't take into account maintenance, which makes a huge difference !
My EV car (hyundai ioniq 2016) has now 100'000 km (62'000 mi) and I never once went to the garage for a service (except for tyres of course). Brake pads are still new, no oil change needed, etc..
Can't imagine how much it would've cost on a gas car
True, although there is also the advantage of convenience - all the time recovered from NOT having to go either fetch the materials and do teh maintainence yourself or bring the vehicle to the dealer/service station and wait. Count it as two hours each time, and it's easily 20 hours saved, more than half a work week that you are now free to do something else
Good point. Really depends what the difference in up front cost is. Anything more than $5k, and I think ICE is still prudent if you are not driving at least 15k miles per year.
Plus, ICE are time tested. The new EVs coming out have a lot of unknown risks and reputation to still build up. I do not mind letting others beta test.
yup, excellent points about the price delta and beta/gamma testing. I'm really enthusiastic about the technology, but will likely wait until my relatively good condition auto degrades and the EVs keep improving.
I have a 2012 petrol car with 72000 km on it and total costs of maintenance and (almost non-existant) repairs so far has been around $1500 (here in Poland). That's nothing compared to the extra upfront cost of an electric car. The economics are probably less favorable for petrol cars in countries where skilled labor is more expensive though.
There is a service interval that will (depending on where you are) mean you should do probably at least 5 services before 100'000km. True, most of those services will be mere inspections because there is simply nothing to service, but there will be a service schedule that has lots of items in it before 100k km. There are cabin air filter, maybe gear fluid (depending on model) and so on. For a new car, I'd do them just to ensure there is no fuss with warranties.
So in short: service intervals for EV's don't seem longer than for ICE cars at all. They are pretty typical car service intervals of 10k-15k km BUT the key is they should be cheaper.
Brake pads don't seem like they should be different on an EV. It's really just the engine components that should have less wear and tear and those only come into play at the 30k and 60k mark
Brakes get a lot less wear because you’re mainly relying on regenerative braking using the electric motors in reverse. If your driving style is gentle enough, it can bring the car to a complete stop in a reasonable distance. The mechanical brakes are then only engaged when the car is fully stopped already.
Adaptive cruise control in the us means jumping on the brakes every 30 seconds when someone goes straight from the on-ramp to the leftmost lane at 20 under the limit.
Electric vehicles don't use the brakes that much as they can slow the car down by switching the elctric motors from using electricity to accelerate to using the wheels to generate electricity thereby slowing the car down.
Case in point that whole situation "recently" where a woman got a Tesla with no brake pads installed on it.
Oil, filters and work on them is pricy at the official dealers (if you care about warranty). Also more failure points - turbines, injectors, gas pump, exhaust, gearbox, oiling system in general. Just a single gearbox or turbine failure can cost thousands. EVs are really cheaper in general, however you compare.
Where does getting an oil filter changed by a non dealer void the warranty?
Oil/air filters and brakes are $50 and $500 at most. Everything else is pretty reliable for a couple hundred thousand miles assuming a decent brand car like Toyota or Honda.
At US gas prices, I have yet to see an EV be shown to be a better value than a car/minivan/SUV/pickup truck, especially if driving 10k miles or less per year. The upfront cost on EVs is huge, and many alternatives such as minivans do not even exist yet.
I need to do yearly maintenance at the dealer (or if I exceed some fixed mileage before that), they do the oil change in the course of that. If I would skip yearly maintenance the warranty is voided.
I would not be able to discern 10k miles or less for a car is an outlier from those data points, it does not say anything about the underlying distribution.
Not to mention the whole female column is pretty much 10k and below, as well as men over 65.
This is a little bit better breakdown, but I could find miles driven by decile. I would assume it greatly differs by location and is greatly skewer by people who drive a lot.
Either way, the purpose of the miles driven per year in cost calculations is because after a certain amount of miles, the up front higher cost of electric is offset by lower per mile costs of driving electric. Assuming fuel costs stay the same, then people who drive less have less incentive to go electric.
It's not that any work voids the warranty, but for example I got extra 2 years warranty by servicing at the official dealer rather than somewhere else.
Maintenance in the first 100-150k (I really want to say ~200 but that will depend largely on the treatment the vehicle gets in the first 100) is basically nothing other than short term wear items (pads and tires) and preventative maintenance (transmission fluid at 50k, air filter at 20k, stuff like that).
As EVs get long in the tooth they will exhibit all the same "stuff between the vehicle and the road is wearing out" problems that literally every other wheeled vehicle on this earth exhibits. It's not like equipping a car with an electric drive train makes all the steering and suspension parts (that account for the bulk of the late in life maintenance) magically cease to exist
Except there are less parts overall in an EV. Way way way way less parts. And way way way way less fluids for said parts.
Less parts means less things to maintenance. Less fluids means less things to refill.
In terms of "wearing out" the big questions really centers on the battery itself. We're seeing pretty low battery degradation on Teslas that have been on the road for 5+ years [1]. The data indicates that at 100k miles they lose about 5% power, which is pretty good. This is data about Teslas specifically though (they're the only car company that has enough long term data at scale to do this analysis on) and every car company has a different battery composition.
But aside from the battery (which is a BIG aside), there is a lot less parts (especially moving parts) that have to be watched/maintained/etc.
"The brand also says that drum brakes offer superior performance and reactivity after long periods of disuse"
Sounds like marketing to excuse putting drums on the rear of a $50K vehicle. As soon as I back out of the driveway in our Leaf, because there's no regenerative braking in reverse at 5mph, it knocks the light layer of rust off the discs and we're good to go. I mean, we've been driving this car for eleven years, and not once from a cold start have we gone to hit the brakes outside the regen envelope (say, when we've charged to %100, and nowhere to put that regen energy) and said, "OMG! OMG! Poor brake performance!"
What VW really said in that link was, "doesn't need rear discs: regen braking".
One thing that is keeping me from getting EV is infrastructure cost.
Sure, maintenance is going to be cheaper and cost per km/mile lower, but there is simply not enough infrastructure where I live to charge the car. Friend of mine got EV. He lives in modern apartment where there are 2 charging stations for like 200 cars/garage. He was ecstatic year ago where he would charge whenever he want and it was free (due to subsidies) but now has to queue in own garage in order to charge it at all.
Based on anecdotes from colleagues it takes them ~10-20h every month to charge their cars. It also creates a mental load of "oh, where and when I'll charge my car next". To a ludicrous degree that some even can't plan life activities because they plan for their car to charge. If I put even like half of my hourly rate on the time spent maintaining car's charge calculations aren't attractive as they might seem.
On top of it sales of EVs grow much faster than infrastructure. With energy crisis looming I have my doubts.
That being said, had I had a house, I wouldn't care and take one.
I opened up the google sheet early, and seeing as it's open to public editing, the numbers have already been edited by people, because of course it will. Just FYI.
Edit an hour later: Well, let's just say more than numbers were altered on that sheet.
I have been waffling over the purchase of an EV for the better part of 2 years. Despite being cheap AF, the cost of ownership isn’t really at the top of my list of concerns. Mostly that is because the cars I like are far more expensive up front and make the math rough.
That said, if you live in the US, the Chevy Bolt actually makes the math pretty fantastic. If they don’t raise the price at the end of the year, it will be an incredible value. Right now, at 29k or 32k, the math including gas and maintenance turns positive very quickly.
The other negative is that the Bolt's battery tech is now a generation (or at least a half-generation depending on how you figure dividing lines) behind compared to GM's massive investment into the multi-vehicle "Ultium" platform. That may matter for the expected service life of the Bolt (compare to GM's recent cut of service on the Spark EV, a half-generation of battery tech just prior to the Bolt; though to be fair there were a lot fewer Spark EVs on the road compared to Bolts).
I'm still confused why the recent model changes to the Bolt didn't include an "Ultium upgrade" other than to keep costs down and not associate the Bolt with the R&D depreciation of Ultium just yet. But given GM's larger commitment to the Ultium platform and number of vehicle models they are now building on it, that's one of my remaining pieces of hesitancy against current models of the Bolt and its already "legacy" platform. (Though the other big hesitancy was the "recent" recall and how that made Bolts impossible to find in dealerships for just long enough that it passed my "impulse buy" window the past couple of years.)
I hope GM realigns the Bolt to the present platform and/or starts adding smaller vehicles to the Ultium platform. (Smallest currently announced is the new Blazer which is still much larger than I want as a car.)
(I'm an "ancient" Volt owner and have been watching GM's EV projects with great interest as I'm at about the point where I'd like to replace the Volt with a proper EV, but so far GM's EV strategy still seems a bit hit-and-miss and like "next year's models" might be the ones to watch for. From my perspective, at least.)
There's another option which in my case is much cheaper (and subjectively easier): buy a mazda2 for dirt cheap and only use it when you can't use public transport. Not only does it work out to be cheaper, it's also (in my opinion) much more convenient not having to find parking than not having to wait 10 minutes for a bus/tram/train.
Obviously, your mileage may vary (ha) based on where you live, but for someone who lives in Sydney it works pretty well.
Your use of the word "petrol" makes me wonder if you are aware of the difference between US gallons and UK/imperial gallons. UK gallons are larger volume and so give a higher MPG metric for the same vehicle.
There also are not many sub-compact cars marketed in the US, and the range of engine options is usually limited compared to similar vehicles marketed in Europe and the UK. Compacts like a Civic or Corolla would be considered efficient commuter vehicles by most people here, and might get around 40 MPG (US) in highway cruising and somewhere in the 30s as a combined figure (for non-hybrids).
It's not unusual for my 2-year old Elantra on my 48-mile commute to San Jose down 680 to reach 50 MPG. 47 for going back. I do drive earlier/later in the day to avoid the rush hour.
I'm not buying an EV to save money. Right now the economics are a bit skewed, but I'd buy an EV even if gas was $1/gallon. Emissions are the reason why I want to buy an EV. Ditto for going solar, etc.
This sounds like burning the candle at both ends and I can't help but think the attitude is counter-productive.
That is, if a gasoline powered engine is actually less expensive, why not drive the gas engine and invest or donate the savings towards alternative energy initiatives? That way EVs (and alternative energy in general) can flourish and become unequivocally better.
My opinion is that emissions cause enough harm that we need to not donate our way out the problem. To me that's like letting your pets have unwanted offspring and just donating to a local shelter to make up for it.
Mh, beside the issue of a spreadsheet itself [1] and the fact it's shared to the world [2] the real computation must be another: since crystal balls are out of service but luck is blind and bad luck sees very well... The right computation, witch happen to be pure logic NOT reducible to math, a thing soo many people forget is IMVHO "how likely is a diesel/gasoline shortage in the subsequent 1-8 years future?", "can I eventually charge LOCALLY on my own energy (p.v. typically) a BEV?", "can I sustain to buy a new BEV at current prices every 5-8-10 years?".
The answer to this three questions is not numeric, but it's the key. Having an EV to protect themselves against fuel shortage is meaningless if you can't charge it autonomously, being able to buy one but unable to sustain it's CapEx is a desperate action, that tend to have equally desperate consequences, otherwise if you are not living in a country who produce LOCALLY enough oil and have a population enough ready to fight if needed to get it an EV is not economically convenient, but it's a guarantee to being able to travel. The importance of such expensive guarantee it's very personal, depending on so many parameters that's more easy to estimate in person instead of trying summarize all of them for a generic solution.
Really of topic but IMVHO more HN-ish is the means the author choose to share: if in 2022 someone willing to do something AND SHARE IT to the community, a technically sound one, resort to such tech... Well... That means we are really in a sorry state. It's NOT a critic to the author, nor an indirect encouragement against sharing, is instead a sore consideration of the actual state of computing and widespread tech knowledge.
[1] spreadsheets should NOT EXISTS at all, they are a tentative from another era to provide a flexible calculator for tabular data to the masses and such tentative was and is a FAILURE: instead of simplify it complicate things and instead of empower users if force them toward very bad paradigms.
[2] witch prove the very limited scale of such collaborative model, perhaps to be confronted with the SCM model(s) AND the idea of sharing "active" documents (formatting + code) like org-mode files in Emacs or Jupyter notebooks etc where any user get the doc (so the logic) and instantiate it alone on in a small cohort witch is the sole example of live collaboration limited effectiveness behind the WOW effect.
Spreadsheets are one of the most popular and widespread computing platforms out there. Excel is almost surely the single largest no-code/low-code install and
monthly-active-users base.
I don’t see spreadsheets as a failure nor evidence of poor state of computing or technical knowledge. If anything, I think they’re useful, practical, extensively used, and evidence that computing is working for
people.
> Excel is almost surely the single largest no-code/low-code install and monthly-active-users base.
I'd argue even further that Excel is the most common flavor of LISP installed.
=IF(A1 = 1, A2 * 3, MAX(A3, A4))
is remarkably similar to:
(if (= A1 1) (* 3 A2) (max A3 A4))
The difference is mostly infix vs prefix and the naming of variables. Not only is Excel the single largest low code install, but its also a gateway to LISP if you introduce it to people correctly.
There is an n-ary AND function also; the documentation doesn't mention whether it's short-circuiting or not, and it doesn't return the last value if they are all true, just a Boolean true.
My two examples were more of a "show a clear correspondence between the syntax of excel and lisp" for the "if someone knows basic excel, you can introduce them to lisp."
If you want AutoCAD offer a real lisp, AutoLISP, some users use it regularly without even knowing that's a real and powerful programming language. That's anyway do not make autocad, nor in general that kind of CAD something better then an archaic crap since the '60s. Parametric CAD are the modern and technically sound solution since the early '70s, even if in some sector they never get traction due to technicians ignorance and reactionarism.
That's a good proof of inability to evolve of sooooo many people...
Many things are very widespread and are absolutely crap... Indeed MOST widespread and heavy used things happen to be crap.
Their failure is the fact that instead of simply they complicate life. And their users fails even to comprehend that since they do not know any other option. Oh, BTW the "no code/low code" is the biggest failure: users programming of classic system is the technical success, something simple enough that all users use without issue and still technically sound and effective. Dummy low-code/no-code modern environment who have already touched incredible horrific peaks like RENAMING a gene because excel convert it in a date prove only one thing: masochism is common and popular...
Should I buy an EV? Hmmmm...let me think about that. I'm currently driving a 2015 Honda Civic that I paid $12,500 for when it was three years old and it gets 35 MPG. I have a Suzuki motorcycle I paid $2500 for (also bought used) that gets 70 MPG. The combined cost for both vehicles is $15,000. I drive my car about twice as often as I ride my bike I'll put my combined MPG at 47 MPG.
I drive/ride about 10,000 miles per year, it's actually been less since I've been WFH and now permanently WFH, but we'll go with 10,000 miles. At 47 MPG I'm consuming 213 gallons of fuel per year. I know the gas price spike is subsiding, but for argument's sake let's suppose $5/gallon is going to be the reality within 5 years. That's $1,065 in fuel cost per year - and again that's calculating at $5/gallon for gas.
Cost-wise then I have $15,000 to purchase my car and bike and I have $1,065 in worst-case annual fuel costs. I do my own maintenance on my bike and my car has been costing $250/year so far in annual maintenance costs. Since I haven't had any serious maintenance yet I'll be happy to put my annual operating costs at $1,500. That gives me roughly $1,000 in fuel and roughly $500 in annual maintenance.
How do the EVs stack up? The cheapest used EV I can find in my area is $43,000. Off the bat I would have to spend $28,000 more in up-front costs just to purchase the EV. I can't buy that in cash so there are going to be loan costs too, but we'll ignore that for now.
How long does it take for the operating costs of car and motorcycle to exceed the difference in purchasing cost of an EV? 18.6 years! Since I've been ignoring the loan costs of the EV and I've been ignoring some maintenance you have to do on an EV then I'm going to go with roughly 20 years for the EV to start saving me money.
Remember, this was a used EV and it already had 60,000 miles on it. At 10,000 miles per year the EV would only have 260,000 miles on it - so it should still be in good shape for another 4-9 years afterward, but - I'm not putting 20 years in for a payback, especially when over the next 5-10 years we should be seeing some significantly cheaper EVs hitting the market that completely changes this payback calculation.
Cost of battery maintenance seems to be a huge thing I never see mentioned here. I imagine EVs will depreciate much faster in that arena. My 15 year old Ford Focus still gets 30 mpg and still goes just as far on a full tank.
Teslas are now old enough that there's large-scale long-term battery degradation data available. They lose roughly 1%-2% of capacity per year (that's a linear approximation, actual degradation is steeper in the early years, tapers off later). So after 15 years you'd expect 70%-85% of the range left.
Modern EVs have battery management systems that keep their temperature and other factors within the range that's gentle for the battery. EVs also have some spare "inaccessible" battery capacity that prevents them being (dis)charged to extremes that would shorten their life. 15-year-old EVs will be fine. EV batteries aren't your cellphone batteries.
Even my LEAF (which has one of the worst battery management systems in terms of having passive cooling only) is 7.5 years old and has around 85% of its original capacity.
I guess I don’t understand why that’s acceptable. 15% degradation takes you from what 350 miles from full to just shy of 300. How much worse is it in the winter? None of those things happen in ICE vehicles that are much cheaper than even the cheapest BEV.
ICE vehicles also lose range in the winter. Older EVs have resistive heaters but newer ones have heat pumps which use 1/3 the energy to produce the same heat.
It's way worse than that. Mine is a 2015, so has only a 24kWh battery. I'm down from around 90 miles to around 75 miles. Winter is less, but not catastrophically less.
When I was in an office, it was 8 miles away. Our grocery is 1 mile away. The farthest kids' friends house is 2.7 miles away.
As proof that there's utility there: the LEAF does more miles per year than our ICE car, so it gets plenty of use, even with the severely limited range compared to higher-end EVs.
As for why it's acceptable: the car was $22K new after incentives. In 7.5 years, I've just now changed the wiper blades and cabin air filter for the second time. I turn all the wrenches on our family cars and I have literally only put a wrench or socket to the LEAF once in that time: to remove and charge the battery after we parked it for almost 8 weeks when COVID first hit and my little OBD2 Bluetooth dongle ran it down. (Wipers and cabin air are changeable without tools, as is filling the washer fluid tank.)
If your regular commute is below 200-300 miles (I hope so!) it doesn't even affect your daily use at all.
I'm not saying it's great, but just want to highlight that EV batteries don't fail as quickly and catastrophically as you may expect from batteries in consumer electronics.
EVs aren't cheap yet, but overall cost of ownership can make sense. Other components of EV drive train are usually more reliable (fewer moving parts, not exposed to outside elements as much), and cost of fuel can be much cheaper. And switch to EVs is also motivated by factors that have indirect costs, like air quality and energy independence.
To downvoters: just keep on not accounting for emissions and environmental impact when you’re planning your next car purchase. Your children and grandchildren are going to _love_ having to face the consequences of your actions.
Can we stop calling a google sheet "something you made" ? There aren't even any intricate formulas in this one, it's just fuel usage per mile * money cost per fuel unit.
1. You live in a private house where you can charge the car? - Yes
2. You don't have a charger at home? - No
Simple, really :) . I always wanted to buy an EV but that's a deal breaker criteria. Also the secondary problem - author makes assumption about electricity price, but it almost doesn't matter at all if you are changing at the commercial stations only. They will charge you for as much as they want, and it would be a far far more than bare electricity price at home. I have once calculated a price to kilometers value at the nearest commercial charger in my city (not USA and not EU), it was about equal to the running a benzin car on a 95 octane fuel. At the same time my colleague was spending on charging his Leaf about 1/4 of the fuel price of his previous city car (using commercial electricity prices, not the home one, home electricity price would have been 1/8 to fuel). So the commercial markup of a charging station was 300%. Not very enticing.