kragen@pobox.com writes:
> Are you saying they cost more per mile than gasoline vehicles?
Hmm, I thought they would now, with our higher electric costs, but
that's not clear. But in general, my bias against buying an electric
car now is that the cost of electric cars is so high that you'll never
recoup the cost. E.g. let's use the numbers from the GM EV1 faq:
http://www.gmev.com/specs/specs.htm:
"Assuming your electricity costs 10 cents per kilowatt hour, and with
a 100-mile trip, energy cost for the lead-acid EV1 is 2.6 cents per
mile. Therefore, a 100-mile trip in the EV1 would cost $2.60. In
comparison, a gasoline-powered vehicle that gets 22 miles per gallon
has an energy cost of 6.82 cents per mile (assuming gasoline costs
$1.50 per gallon). For a 100-mile trip in the gasoline-powered
vehicle, the energy cost would be $6.82. Using this example, the
gasoline-powered vehicle has an energy cost that is nearly three times
higher than the EV1."
Okay, so lifetime costs, assuming 100K miles:
electric: $2600
gas: $6822
So you've saved $4222 on fuel by buying an electric car. But given
that (sticking with the EV1) you've spent $34,000 on a car that is
in most every way inferior to a $14,000 Saturn SL1 (which by the way
gets considerably better mpg than the 22 used above; the automatic
gets 27 city, 38 highway). I'm using the Saturn just to stick with GM
in this example.
- Joe
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Fri Apr 27 2001 - 23:14:02 PDT