Electric vehicle charging cost

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.