Drive Sustainable!

Drive Sustainable!
Our club members drive all kinds of EVs (Teslas, BMWs, Jaguars, Leafs, Bolts, Fords, Audis, electric bikes...)

Wednesday, March 1, 2017

TCO - Is an EV cheaper to operate than an ICE?

It's acronym heaven owning an EV, isn't it? I just saw a video from C/Net stating that by 2040 a large percentage of cars (35%) will have a plug and the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) will be less than a gas car. I've been trying to prove that myself, but it's not looking good for EVs at the moment. Based upon $2 a gallon gas, 25mpg average mileage, I calculate a gas car costs (fuel only) $.08 a mile to operate. Based upon my Model S, 275 miles on 90 kW of energy at $.12 per kW, I get $.04 per mile to operate. This saves about $500 a year in gasoline costs based upon 12,000 miles driven per year. There is no way that little savings is going to offset any EV.

Has anyone else done a similar calculation?

Here's the C/Net video: https://youtu.be/apzabFqDPMo

Note that Tony Seba is predicting faster adoption of EVs: https://youtu.be/E7Jg1IJ68_g

-Wilson H.

1 comment:

  1. IIRC, Wiki has some TCO number for various hybrids, plug-in-hybrids, pure-plug-in, and ICE's.

    Note that TCO would be the fully amortized costs for a certain number of miles ... like 100k to 150k or more, and include trade-in value along with repairs, gas, oil, taxes?, insurance?, depreciation, etc.

    There are lots of assumptions, and there hasn't been that much history with electric cars to have all that much confidence in the numbers.

    Also, plug-in-ICE's are really complicated, and it's unclear how long they will last before maintenance problems make nearly unsaleable.

    Can GM (Gov Motors) really engineer and service a trouble free plug-in-ICE vehicle? There's a lot that can go wrong.

    My understanding is that $2.00 per gallon gas makes for really long pay-back years on pure plug-ins.

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