Free EV's?

[aerohead]

Originally Posted by jjackstone

Ok, this is kind of tongue in cheek so don't start bashing right off the top. I had been thinking about this off and on for around ten years. What if you were required to use your vehicle for work? Say pizza delivery. Normally you can write off either mileage or maintenance on your taxes at the end of the year which ever is greater. The mileage deduction is to help offset the amount of gasoline you needed to buy.

So let's say you bought a used Nissan Leaf for $5000. And that you had the capability of charging the Leaf essentially for free. Solar on your rooftop at home, charge at work between deliveries or however you were able to do it as long as it wasn't an additional cost coming out of your pocket. Then let's say you drove about 10,000 miles a year doing the deliveries.

Doing a little math with a couple assumptions.
Average mpg for a gas vehicle = 25 mpg.
Average gas cost of say $3.00/gallon.
You can change the variables any way you want but these are the ones I'm going use.

So 10,000 miles at 25 mpg uses about 400 gallons times 3 is $1200 dollars in a year. For 2019 the deduction will be 58c/mile or $5800. In the past I have found that my own deductions usually lowered my actual taxes by about a third. So say we saved about $1900 on taxes for the year. And I know that a lot will depend on actual income and how many deductions someone can take. So the net gain in this example is about $700. $1900 tax savings - $1200 gas cost. This doesn't include the maintenance needed to drive a gas vehicle for 10,000 miles.

For the Leaf, we get the same tax deduction with the added benefit of no fuel cost and "probably" much less maintenance cost. Now you're getting paid the full $1900 a year with no fuel costs. Assuming you keep the job for three years you just got a FREE EV.

I realize this is a specialized example, but just throwing it out there as a method of getting a very low cost EV. Have fun playing with the numbers.
JJ

According to the EIA,the actual mileage of American passenger cars and light trucks is 17.09 mpg,due to gridlock,idling,un-synchronized traffic lights,etc.. So the numbers may be skew the EV numbers even further into the black ink.

[jjackstone]

Originally Posted by aerohead

According to the EIA,the actual mileage of American passenger cars and light trucks is 17.09 mpg,due to gridlock,idling,un-synchronized traffic lights,etc.. So the numbers may be skew the EV numbers even further into the black ink.

True, but I gave the higher mpg rating because, at least in my area, I see a large number of smaller Honda and Toyota vehicles used for delivery. However even with a more fuel efficient small car the large number of jackrabbit starts needed to deliver on time may offset what would otherwise be pretty good fuel economy.
JJ