"Joseph S. Barrera III" <joe@barrera.org> writes:
> "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. . . .
> 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). . . .
>
> 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.
OK, so that's a $20,000 investment that saves you 4.2 cents per mile.
If you need a 10% ROI, you need to save $2000 per year on it, which is
47,393 miles per year, or about 911 miles per week. You'd have to
drive a lot to justify the difference, but there are people who drive
their cars more than that.
27 mpg at $2 per gallon is 7.4 cents per mile, so it's not too off for
city driving. But if you're driving 900 miles per week, it'd almost
have to be mostly highway, so that's only 5.2 cents per mile with the
Saturn --- so you have to drive 75100 miles per year to get a 10% ROI
on your investment, or 1444 miles per week.
And this is before we add in depreciation.
So it looks definitely uneconomic.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Fri Apr 27 2001 - 23:14:38 PDT