Electric vehicle charging cost

Take the most expensive "you can hear your watch tick" Tesla.

Bring it down here...

It will sound like those tin cans tied to the rear bumper of a newlywed's car...

I am pleased to arrive at my destination in one piece. I frequently drive 400 miles in one day. Getting a "recharge" takes 10 minutes. Down here if you stop at some lonely place for an hour, you'll be wearing a barrel on the side of the road in no time.

JaxDad wrote:

garyemunson wrote:
Having driven electric going on 7 years (first a Volt, then a Caddy ELR) I will never go back.

No engine noise/vibration anymore. You may think your vehicle is smooth and quiet but that perception goes away once you ride in an electric car. Acceleration is like the hand of God shoving you down the road.

I'm amused at all the people with absolutely no experience with electric cars who seem to think they know so much about them.

I must admit, I’ve never driven either of those cars, but I will say the wind and road noise in either of my Tesla’s is FAR greater than it is in most of my ICE vehicles. Ditto smooth, and hands down better handling.

As for the ‘hand of God’, apparently he really does have 2 hands, because my V12 bi-turbo ICE shoves me down the road even faster than the Tesla, and sounds FAR sexier doing it.

Noise is another red herring.

Driving my F250 down the freeway (not towing), I have to listen carefully to hear the engine. Unless I'm just gunning it off the line, it's the wind and tire noise that you typically hear. EV's aren't immune to wind and tire noise

drsteve wrote:

Oil changes--where does one get a $20 oil change?--filters, brakes, random electrical sensor failures... fuel pumps, injectors, O2 sensors... ICE vehicles have very complex control systems that fail on a regular basis. I see a lot of "reasonably new" vehicles in repair shops. And again, if this guy is going to ding EVs for battery replacement ten years down the road and call it a deal breaker, while ignoring the many routine and not so routine costs of ICE vehicles and their enormously complex drivetrains, I'm going to call BS on it. He's not even close to impartial. He has an admitted interest in seeing Tesla stock fall.

Wallyworld or the local repair shop...but even if you want to argue $30 (they haven't made a replacement EV for big diesel pickups yet). I get an oil filter with the oil change.

Yes, things can fail but haven't changed a fuel pump, injector o2 sensor in years. As complex as modern engines are, they are incredibly reliable. In fact if you go by complexity, new engines are exponentially more reliable than 60yr old engines which which are drastically less complex. Complexity doesn't not correlate to less reliability.

Also, it's naive to think the electronic controls on EV's are immune to failure.

EV's have brakes and suspension parts that still need repair so you really need to dial it in to the engine/motor and there just aren't a lot of failures or ongoing maintenance...yes some but not enough to move the cost needle on average.

Not going to wade into the fray here but for what it’s worth, most of us driving EV’s rarely use dc fast charging. For us maybe 6 to 10 times a year. So most of us pay what we pay at home. For us that’s around 11 cents per KWH. We plug in at home a couple times per week. We occasionally use DC fast charging when on road trips.

Maintenance. For two years for two cars it has been a 1.79 for a jug if washer fluid.

Where we live, 100 percent of the power comes from water power.

If an electric vehicle doesn’t make sense where you live and doesn’t suit your needs don’t buy one. For some of us they do. Plus at least for us, they are a lot nicer to drive.
To each his own.

When people say there electric car is being charged with solar power I like to ask where that increased demand for power to charge their car will come from.

As electricity currently has to be generated as it is used all the renewable power is being used, at any one time, as it is generated so any additional demand , like plugging in your electric car, will require some other power plant to increase output to charge your car. This other coal or gas fired generator will pick up the output to support the new demand to charge the electric car.

So in reality all charging of electric cars is done by a fossil fuel power plant. The exception to this may be if you have solar panels on your house and you disconnect them until you want to charge your car and the only use them for the charging of your electric car. How many people do this?

The power companies utilize all renewable resources first and any additional demand has to be generated via conventional sources.

Someone will now say that we will not need conventional power plants someday but until commercial grade batteries exist that can economically store gigawatts of energy fossil fuel power plants will be required. Solar plants only make electricity when the sun shines and wind only when to wind blows. Sometimes at night the wind does not blow and you may still want lights and power at your home!!

So how long do you think it will be until the government realized how much gas tax it is losing and starts to bill EV users $$$$. Add that to your EV cost SOON!

drsteve wrote:
Oil changes--where does one get a $20 oil change?

My Toyota dealer just sent an email coupon for a $19.95 oil change.

road-runner wrote:

drsteve wrote:

The article is misleading in that there is no mention whatsoever of the significant routine maintenance advantage enjoyed by electric cars. The author points to battery depreciation as being the big cost difference while ignoring that many conventional vehicles incur major engine or transmission repair costs within the ten year battery life span.

Hard to believe a guy who presents himself as a financial analyst specializing in the auto industry, i.e. an expert, would miss something like that.

Maybe he missed the major engine and transmission maintenance costs because it's a statistical non-issue. For my own data, I have a 24 year old car and a recently totaled 23 year old car, both with over 250k miles, plus a 9 year old car. None of them have needed any major engine or transmission maintenance. No heads or oil pans removed, and no transmission work beyond fluid changes. On the other side of the coin, the use of $0.24 per kWh seems on the high side to me. And a critical piece of missing information is that the article does not compare the Tesla to conventional cars, but to hybrids. The headline "Tesla Model 3 Costs More To Charge Than A Gasoline Car" is dishonest and misleading. With that in mind, I'm reluctant to believe anything in the article.

Three vehicles is not really data. It's more of an anecdote. Modern cars are reliable, but repair shops are busy nonetheless, and shop time is $100 per hour. It's not a statistical non-issue, and if this article was honest, it would have been included.

Hi Gdetrailer,

I can't even let my remote start generator sit for 2 weeks. If I do the battery is so dead it doesn't even click. Todays cars have a ton of parasitic loads.

When there are several million electric cars with "smart" home chargers the batteries may well be used for load balancing, reducing the need for peaking plants.

Here is a video that may interest folks:

https://youtu.be/CxS7XeIh_i4

The video suggests that everything but the electrolyte may be recycled.

Gdetrailer wrote:
At least with a ICE, it can sit for months on end and not have to be plugged in, wasting the power grid capacity.. Imagine what would happen if there where several million EV cars plugged into the grid 24/7/365 all sucking up hundreds of watts of energy..

Yeah, the power companies will love you for that..

MEXICOWANDERER wrote:
Take a new TESLA. Drive it until it needs a battery. How much much does a new battery cost -- installed and car pointed out of the shop?

STOP! I don't want to hear about a reclaimed or rebuilt battery.

I asked that very question of several employees of the company. I got answers so similar they must have been scripted.

The average of all the replies went something like “Well that’s not really a question that can be easily answered. Your existing battery would be evaluated as to how much we would credit you for the core, the labour charges could be from X to Y, we would of course give you a loaner while we have your vehicle, and a bunch of other variables.”

When pushed the answer always came back to something like “Somewhere between (US) $10k to $13k currently, but commodity prices are always fluxuating........”.

As an aside, a friends Tesla was recently written off, the company offered him an EXTREMELY generous discount on a NEW car in exchange for his John Hancock on a form assigning his right to the remains. Far more than common sense or economics would dictate.