My bike is cheaper than a single monthly car payment and it's powered by cheesecake.
There's going to be some fuzzy math hidden behind that article, I'd only expect a 9x difference when comparing lemons with melons, new small electric cars vs older non-hybrid SUVs for example. It wouldn't surprise me one bit if they also ignored less favourable conditions like highway driving or colder temperatures. How they came by their numbers is mostly opaque, but I suspect that this source is pretty biased.
I do believe that if you need a new car and if you can charge at home, that EVs should now be a no brainer for most people. I just don't believe this article.
I own an EV (in Ireland). I would not say by any stretch I save that much as running a petrol car. It's probably in the order of a third perhaps and that's with a nighttime electricity plan where a kWh might cost 20c which works out about €4 at 15kWh/100km. A petrol car doing 6L/100km would cost about €12 at the moment. If somebody was using public fast chargers they would see very little savings.
There are other expenses like motor taxes, wear & tear (tyres, brakes), servicing, oil changes etc. which might affect the cost. The UK also has a really dumb excise on EVs where they get whalloped with 3p per mile of extra tax. So 100km (62.5miles) is £1.87 of tax to add onto the charge bill. Luckily Ireland doesn't get it but most other expenses are comparable.
why is it dumb to tax EVs for mileage? aren't ICs taxed similarly through fuel tax?
roads gotta be paid for somehow, and it's fair to tax actual usage
It wouldn't be dumb if ICE vehicles were also taxed the same way but they're not. There would be nothing to stop the UK government abolishing fuel tax and slapping 6p a mile or whatever on ICE vehicles
It wouldn’t be dumb if ICE vehicles were also taxed the same way but they’re not.
Petroleum is taxed per liter. A car goes X km per liter. So the current petroleum tax is effectively per km, or close enough.
The mileage tax on average will make average petrol cars pay double what EVs will be paying in road taxes ( and it's not even happening until 2028).
Jokes on you, i charge myne primarily with home solar, so its free.
I often get paid for charging mine. They paid me 30p on Sunday.
How?
(No need to go into too much detail as I'm not in the UK; I'm just curious)
I assume that electricity price sometimes goes negative when excess is produced, resulting in some providers paying you for using electricity at that time.
🤔 Interesting. I never even considered what happens if excess energy is produced
It's precisely that. The winds blows and the sun shines, then suddenly the power company would rather pay their customers to use more power than pay the generators penalty fees to turn off.
Progress of EV's will be complete eventually but those oil company barons and tycoons sure made it stretch out and cost a lot more.
I'm waiting for battery technology to improve in terms of power density and for infrastructure to improve in terms of power delivery.
My situation is admittedly unique, I want a low slung comfortable hatchback, I street park, and I need a car that can do 6 hours of road in a single day with no prior planning.
Since I don't have a house, I can't charge at home for peanuts. I instead have to go fight for one of the two 7.5kW stations in my neighborhood and move my car as soon as it's done charging or get a ticket.
There's also only one 350kW station on my way to and from work, and last time I tried it with an IONIQ 5, it took 35 minutes to charge and it was in the middle of buttfuck nowhere at a closed Ford dealership. Work has chargers, but you have to share the output with everyone else so I only gained like 3%.
To top it all off, battery technology seems to be preventing good long range EV hatchbacks from taking off. I tried the IONIQ 6, and it felt like I was sitting on the floor, but elevated. Bizarre.
I expect they will keep trying to hold back EVs and compete forever, so never let your guard down. There will always be someone, somewhere, wanting to pump oil and feed it to a combustion engine for money. They'll say it's their culture, for Jesus, for their family, to feed baby koalas, to revive a poor dead rat, or whatever it takes to burn some form of petroleum, change climate, and try to buy a yacht or an island.
They can burn their wallet if they like, I'll enjoy cheaper alternatives.
It goes all the way to people like Putin and MBS, who don't use wallets.
And there are so many people "triggered" by it
I had a coworker go on an insane rant about his hatred of EVs after somebody mentioned Teslas. I wound him up even more by saying I'm fine with EVs just not ones built by Nazis.
lol nice, snowflakes triggered
Well done.
🤔 I've never even thought about researching the people who built any vehicle I've ever purchased. Where do you start?
tyfys
By "nine times cheaper," they mean the fuel for the EV can cost as little as 1/9th as much as the fuel for a gasoline / petrol car.
That's great, as far as it goes, but depreciation per mile is usually a bigger cost than fuel. Other costs like registration taxes, insurance, and maintenance shouldn't be expected to follow this 1/9th pattern either, of course. You're not going to switch to an EV and find your total expense drops to 1/9th.
It feels to me like they're telling an incomplete story on purpose.
A large portion of depreciation and insurance is fixed, not based on actually driving. And maintenance is lower with EVs as well.
Still though, you are right, 1/9 is specific to fuel, and it's deceiving. If it.were truly 1/9 we wouldn't be having this conversation because all vehicles would be EVs.
Sounds like big oil propaganda you're spouting. These are the kinds of talking points I hear from right-wing media.
The truth is EV technology has advanced quite a bit in recent years, and the batteries don't deprecate as quickly as the anti-solar crowd still claims.
And as someone else already pointed out, EV maintenance is cheaper because there are less parts.
And road tax for EVs is bullshit, but the reason for it is that combustion vehicles already pay it because it's factored into the price of gas. Or maybe that's not the same in the UK?
Also, the headline doesn't claim that the total expense drops to ⅑^th^, it says the cost to drive it does. That's a very different claim from the one you're pretending they tried to make.
It's ironic that Trump's oil war is driving decarbonisation by pushing up oil prices. But I guess him and his friends are making lots of money on US oil.
Meanwhile here in California we have inflated electricity prices so much that fueling costs are almost equal. EVs edge out gas cars a little, but not by that much.
Source? Almost equal? With fuel consumption on american cars that would have to he like 10usd kilowat.
Edit: seems like 2-3x cheaper still
Damn if that's the case, solar installations there should pay itself a lot faster huh?
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
