cheaper to operate than an electric car?
 

I just did the math and it turns out that gas is so cheap right now that my 01 Insight costs less to operate than an electric car. If you get at least 54.4mpg, at $2.22 per gallon of gas and 14.07¢ per KWH of electricity, then you are equal to the fueling cost of an electric car.

At ~65mpg my car costs me a little over half a cent less at 3.4¢ per mile vs 4¢ per mile. Gas would need to rise 48¢ per gallon before i have an equal operating cost to an electric car. But even at current gas prices my Moms Prius could easily hit 54.4mpg or be not far off with her commute of nice rolling hills.

It's not something you think about because it's usually assumed an electric car costs less to operate than a gas or hybrid car. In my case it does not right now, and if you drive a Prius you might be close. Moral of the story is enjoy cheap gas while it lasts, it won't be for long.

The math:
2.22 / ((.1407 x 33.04) / 114) = 54.44
current gas price / (( cents per KWH x KWH in a gallon of gas) / Combined epa of Nissan Leaf) = the mpg you would need to equal the fueling cost of an EV

You can find out what your equivalent mpg goal for fueling cost would be by pasting this into google 2.22 / ((.1407 x 33.04) / 114) and changing for your mpg and kwh electricity costs.

But there is more to operating costs then just the price of gas or electricity. A 15 year old Insight is going to destroy any new car when you look at depreciation, insurance, liscense fees. My Subaru does and it doesn't average more then 25 mpg.

I did this same math recently. However, it depends on how much you're paying for electricity. Forum member "cowmeat" I believe is paying ~2 cents per kwh for his Volt by charging outside of peak hours.

Any 15 year old vehicle is going to destroy a new car on everything but fuel economy, at least in this state, and there still isn't much, EV or gas, that will beat an Insight. I'm just waiting for the price of used Tesla Roadsters to drop :-)

The electric equivalent to a gallon of gas costs me about 2.36 a gallon, and gas at the station down the street is about 2.25 per gallon right now. So gallon per gallon your math works . . .

But my Insight, which I hypermiled daily and was one of the higher mpg Insights on the site got less than half the gas mileage my Volt gets. The math only works if you don't factor in the giant difference between gas mileage in an ICE car and that of the average EV. My Insight was one of the highest mpg gas cars of all times, but I immediately doubled the best gas mileage I ever got in the Insight the first time I drove the Volt

I'm at a 98 mpg equivalent. Our electricity cost is very low at .08325 right now and gasoline price average is 2.37 a gallon.

Wow, Mass electricity is expensive; nearly twice the price I'm paying for hydro power.

It costs me about 2 cents per mile for EV, and about 4 cents per mile for gasoline in the Prius.

Many people have access to free charging from work or other public source, so it makes driving essentially free.

EV driving also has very low wear and tear costs, and therefore lower maintenance. It turns out that battery life has more to do with age and temperature than how often the vehicle is driven.

That said, there are many areas at the moment where gasoline prices are low enough that it's cheaper than electricity. Hawaii and CA come to mind.

I wonder how efficient an Insight converted to pure EV would be? It makes more sense to compare the cost per mile of gasoline vs EV using similar vehicles rather than cherry picking the most efficient type of one and the least efficient type of the other.

^ I'm thinking about doing a Leaf swap in the not too distant future. I might pick up a second cheap Insight with a failed battery to use.

Gallon per gallon actually works in favor of your Volt. At your numbers you save ~1 cent per mile with the Volt only using electricity. Your numbers come out to 99mpg for a car to have the same fueling cost vs your Volt so you have a good electricity rate which is good.

It looks like you're only using ev mode in your Volt, that is some sick hypermiling getting 150% from a Volt.

If anyone thought I was cherry picking i did factor in the better 114 mpge combined rating of the Leaf. And with how cheap gas is and the cost of my electricity i found i'd only need 54mpg to have the same fueling cost which i thought amusing.

I'd hope so! Years ago I did some fuzzy math with the Spark even though I couldn't buy it. Gas version vs EV at my local rates. A little hypermiling and ecomodding on the gasser. Including rebates, made up but less brutal than it is depreciation, charger installation, saving on belts/oil for the EV, needing to rent something a few times a year for my 500+ mile trips, gas would have to be $9/gal even three years after ownership to break even. To me that was an incredible difference that made me question how far we'd have to go to have EVs on the same platform to save money.

Thing about EVs, is that there's more to them than just economy. Electric torque is FUN, they're silent, almost vibration-free, and I think there's a "cool factor" that gassers don't have.

I did the sums when I bought my Prius, I was considering doing a PHEV conversion.

Turns out it would cost more to run on batteries than it does on ICE, and that's not accounting for the converison cost and eventual battery replacement.

On the OEM front a G2 Prius also works out cheaper to fuel then a brand new Leaf. A G4 just kicks it in the nads.

Most cars sold today have idle stop, so they're already silent at traffic lights, and at higher speeds, it's wind and road noise that predominates. For about $100/year you can offset a V8's CO2 emissions.

Not necessarily. With my Insight, the major wear & tear things have been a wheel bearing, tires, windshield wipers, &c - all of which are going to be pretty much the same on an EV, no?

The other major maintenance expense* has been replacement of the 12-volt battery. Curiously enough, both the EVs - Volt and Leaf - that I did a quick search on have 12-volt batteries, and people seem to have problems related to them.

*Which is a major PITA, because it seems to fail without warning (where with a pure IC, you'd notice weak starting), and the Insight won't run without a good 12-volt battery, so the failure leaves you stranded. Luckily the last time was only a mile or so from an auto parts store, so I could walk there, buy a new battery, and be on my way - but it could as easily have been 50 miles, in a place with no cell service :-(

Most cost comparisons assume the EV will be charged at home or free at work or Superchargers. What about the cost of charging at a charge station you need to pay for? There's a ChargePoint station in my city that is $1/hr the first 4 hours and $3/hr after. It's an L2 charger, so 6.6kw (or ~20 miles/hr according to the app). That's 15 cents/kwh if your car can take that much juice, 30 cents/kwh if your car can only charge at 3.3kw. Do other chargers charge similar rates?

Keep in mind that some of the super cheap electrical prices we see being posted are not based on a "bottom of the bill" price including all of the transmission fees and taxes. My electricity is running about $.125 right now. which is down $.01. Off peak might cut the price of the electricity in half but that would only reduce the total cost to $.105.
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Upstate NY, USA does have a very low carbon grid though where a gas car would have to make 120 mpg to produce less carbon than an average electric car at 110 mpgE.

My electric company (Lakeland Electric) charges 2.33 cents per kWh at night (versus over 12 cents during peak hours), but after factoring in everything else it comes out to 7 cents a kWh, which ends up being 2.359 for a "gallon" of energy.

That's a little more than a gallon of gas costs at the moment here in central Florida, but since my car (Volt) is getting way over double the gas mileage my former (Insight) got, I still dropped my fuel costs by more than 50% when I started driving the Volt.

Not that it matters much, since I was using less than a gallon of gas a day in the Insight anyway

Every little bit helps shift the paradigm.

Summer rates for in Iowa (Alliant energy)

June 16 thru Sept 15 0.09732 + 0.055 = 0.15232/kwh

Winter rates

13.6 first 500 kwh/month
11.4 next 700 kwh/month
7.7 everything else

Includes all fees

I think I could get half price rates over night but not till after 9 pm, but price is 1.5 or 2x higher during the day.

Looks like most Leafs are running about 200 w hr/mile or $0.03 summer. Winter $0.0272 21 or $0.0228/mile 2nd tier. At current prices the Cobalts at $0.046/mile

I'm pumped about the zero emissions, I've been wanting to make that switch for a while now!

You get electricity for just over 1 cent per kWh?

My rates are among the lowest in the nation, at 7 times that amount.

Sorry for the decimal place error. I pay about $.125 for electricity with all fees and taxes at the bottom of my bill.

But it's the early adopter problem, kinda like my problem with CFL lights. I put them in just about every socket in my house, starting back in the mid-90s when they were $15 or so each. Now I'd prefer the even more efficient LEDs (and have them for a few places like the kitchen, where the improved daylight light quality really helps), but the darn CFLs just won't burn out, and it'd be a waste to replace them...

Same with the Insight: bought it back about '03 (way ahead of the curve, there :-)) and it just keeps on running. Sure, if I had some 20-30 mpg guzzler, it might make sense to replace it with a new(ish!) EV, but to spend that much money for a marginal improvement? (Not to mention the range limitations.)

It is more accurate to do the math for an electric car on its own:

My lifetime average in our Leaf is 141.8MPGe = 237.6 Wh/mile. The official EPA equivalency is 33.7kWh / gallon of gasoline. Using your 14.07¢ / kWh price, that is 4.2 miles / kWh. So 14.07¢ / 4.2 = 3.35¢ / mile.

Also, you need to add in regular maintenance costs; which is essentially $0 for an EV. Angie's List says oil changes average $46, so 46 / 5000 = ~0.92¢ / mile. At 3000 miles, that is ~1.53¢ / mile. Tuneups cost more.

I use Mobile One 0w-20 in my Insight, and change it every 10,000 miles. 5 quarts runs about $25, and I can get ~2 oil changes out of a 5 quart jug. An oil filter runs ~$4. At 30,000 miles per year, I'm spending about $50 on maintenance.

My car came with service records going back to day one, and apparently other than having the hybrid battery replaced under warranty in 2010 (southern car) and tires, the only things that have ever been done to it (other than replace an axle, control arm and wheel my wife damaged in an accident) are that I replaced the clutch master, at about $60 from RockAuto, tires, and a $90 rear engine mount. I bought new brake pads because they were on sale for ~$5 each but the factory brakes still had tread left at 200,000 miles.


I think $150 in parts and $350 in oil over 210,000 miles seems pretty reasonable to me. :turtle:

You are spending more than I am on [regular] maintenance - we have spent $0 in 50K miles.

You have a fairly new vehicle, no? Wait a few years, and you'll be getting into shocks & suspension wear, just like an IC vehicle. Then you'll perhaps get into the 12-volt battery problem...

Really, the biggest maintenance problem I have with the Insight is having to pull out the battery pack every couple of years, and go through the several days long process of rebalancing the cells. This costs nothing (beyond the initial $100 or so for the equipment) because I do it myself, but could be a big expense if I had to pay someone else. That certainly wasn't a problem (or even a known thing) when the Insight was new; it's something that people discovered after years of use.

I'm at ($620, all but $10 oil, air and oil filters) $0.0037/mile all maintenance and repairs on my Cobalt that a EV couldn't have in 165,000 miles with a $7,000 car. Only other repairs have been 2 wheel bearings and a control arm. $11,500+ in fuel used though. ($0.13-14 per mile total cost except tires, insurance & registration that a EV would also have)

Niel's Forest would use $5,500 at the $0.1407 rate to go the same distance.

Right now gas is obviously way too cheap in the USA. There is no real incentive for Joe Public to even think twice about wasting it.

We are talking about regular maintenance. An EV drivetrain has about 15 moving parts, with very little wear and tear, and no vibration, and almost no waste heat. By definition, it will have less long term problems.

Frankly I can't wait for gas to go back up so I have a solid financial incentive to build/buy an EV. Until then it's a hobby. Even if both vehicles were free and the EV had unlimited range, the TCO of an EV would still be higher where I live due to high electricity prices. If I did mostly city driving or lived somewhere with cheap electricity, that would be another matter.

My Volt is pulling about three times the mpg you're getting in the HCH if that helps:D

And my electricity costs 2-3x as much as gasoline. :turtle:

Who are you calling "we" here? I think everyone but you is talking about ALL maintenance, and I think it's a little dishonest to talk about maintenance as though it only involves the power train.

Not necessarily. If you want to be technical, an EV power train has billions and billions of moving parts: they're just moving at atomic scale. Which is why, as I said above, the biggest long-term maintenance issue with my Insight involves the battery, and that didn't show up until the car had been driven for about 8 years.

The thing about the maintenance issues with IC engines is that almost all of them are trivial to take care of. Even a total engine rebuild is not out of reach of the average mechanically-inclined person. With an EV, it seems as though any battery problems require trips to the dealer for a complete replacement, and that's not going to be covered under warranty forever, you know.

Seems IC versus EV maintenance is rather like the difference between working on a standard PC and an iPhone. Almost anyone can replace or upgrade parts in a standard desktop/tower machine, or even build one from parts. Even notebooks aren't impossible to work on. But try working on an iPhone, or indeed, an i-Anything :-(

Instead you should convert your insight to a PHEV,

I am waiting for Mudder's Linsight to put into my project insight.

EV mode and great gas MPGs all in one package.

That would be ideal. I have a limited weight and space budget so keeping the gasoline engine limits how much battery I can stuff in, but the more I think about it, the more Linsight appeals to me. I don't think decoupling the electric motor is going to work out very well but I would certainly enjoy putting around with a constant assist and topping off at free charging stations.

Speaking of which, how easy is it to build a connector to allow the use of public EV charging stations?

J1772 is about $120 easy

Tires and wiper blades are on all vehicles. Costs that matter are the ones that don't offset because both EV's and ICE's have them.

So, the entire ignition system in an ICE is a MOVING PART? Good to know ...

By that same hair-splitting "logic", an ICE would have to include the billions of moving gasoline molecules, and in the billions in the exhaust gasses, too.

Yeah, let's screw the poor and middle class even more! Trust me, when it takes 3 weeks pay just to make rent you worry very much about wasting gas even if it's "too cheap". The average Joe Public can hardly afford full coverage insurance that would be required on an electirc car let alone the payments. Much more expensive then buying a beater and spending $500/year on gas and oil.

Historically I could have fallen into that category, but I rejected living that way, I could not increase my earnings, so I then searched diligently to locate the least expensive per month accommodations.

For many years I lived in a $240 per month all utilities included studio apartment (while others in my same boat were buying houses, not paying student loans or paying 4-8 times on rent because they "needed it")

I drove a 25 year old vehicle

I paid under a dollar a day for food.

I completely reject people who start describing specific types and locations of apartments as "needs"

They aren't, if you want to live somewhere you can't afford you either need
1. Roomate(s) with gainfull employment
2. To move
3. Parents
4. a more efficient lifestyle

don't like it, welcome to the real world hippie.
Its always a choice, make the right one and your life is easier.

Does not seem to be true of a lot of the poor and average Joes and Jills out there, since they seem to be buying used gas-guzzling pickups and SUVs at about the same rate that more prosperous folks buy new ones.

But Joe still takes out a loan to buy his used car, so has to pay for that full coverage.