|
> The readership for hacker news skews wealthier, I know, but truly, there are a lot of people who buy cars for 5-10k and drive them for the next 8-10 years, with rarely an incident. This is EXACTLY who should be buying an electric car. If you're commuting around 15km each way, then you drive aboout 15000km a year. Over 10 years, in a gas car you're getting something like 7L/100km, which at local gas prices here in Ottawa is around $13,000 over the life of the car. For the same amount of driving over 10 years, an electric will cost you about $2K in electriciy. And that's not counting all the other money you save in things like oil changes and reduced brake wear and the fact that the electic is a lot less likely to break down since it has fewer moving parts. Right at this exact moment, car prices are all crazy because of supply shortages, but in pre-covid days I bought myself a second hand 2015 Leaf for around $15K. If I'd wanted to buy a gas car and keep it for 10 years, to break even on gas and oil, I'd have to have bought a second hand gas car for around $3-4K, and even pre-covid, that didn't buy you anything that would run trouble free for 10 years. Yes, eventually I'll have to replace the battery pack, and that will be expensive, but even up here in the frozen wasteland of Ottawa where my range drops precipitously in the winter, I seriously doubt I'll have to replace it in the first 10 years, so if I opt to do that, it will be instead of buying another car later. All of this ignores any rebates you'd get for buying electric, too, which makes the gas car even less attractive from an economic standpoint. Everyone's financial situation is different, and there's certainly people for whom that $3K gas car will make sense, but long term the electric is going to win from a financial perspective. |
That 2k cost for electricity you mentioned is for people charging at home, in their garage, with their own charger, and the latter two are things that people who live in the city are probably not going to have.
https://walletburst.com/tools/electric-car-savings-calc/
At 57 mpg (which is what the latest prius gets), and gas at 2.50 a gallon, and assuming electricity costs 0.13 cents per kwh, you only save 150 bucks a year in gas. Thats 12 dollars a month. That's nothing. If an electric car costs just 8k more than an equivalent gas car, thats 50+ years to break even.
12 dollars a month - broke people are just going to work an extra shift or 2 and make that money and not think about it. Better than than missing work because you couldn't find a spare charger in the city, or paying 20 bucks for a fast charge overpriced public charger.
As an aside, using a fast charger just once - just one time a month - is likely to eat whatever savings in electricity you would otherwise have from buying an EV.
I will concede that if you use the calculator above and plug in $5.00 a gallon, then the average payback comes down from 50+ years to around 10. But - at least in the states, the places that have gas at 5 dollars a gallon also have electricity kwh costs of ~30 cents per kwh. And if you plug that into the calculator, the payback goes back up to 50+ years. Actually, the numbers are suspiciously quite similar. It's almost as if you can't win. Is it a conspiracy? I don't know.