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Research Firm Claims Most cars still cost more to charge than to fill up with gas
(www.businessinsider.com)
this post was submitted on 02 Aug 2023
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Did you charge at home during the night, or during peak hours/at fast chargers?
How many tanks of gas would you have gone through in a comparable vehicle?
I charge a Lightning at home with an 80 amp charger and before that I had a gas f150. The increase to my energy bill was about $30-$40 a month and offset about $400 a month in gas.
That is a clear comparison, and sounds like a fantastic change as well!
But how much more does a lightning cost vs a gas truck? I bought a truck last year and badly wanted the lightning but it would have taken roughly 140000 miles before I broke even and the electric was saving me money. That was also using $5 a gallon for gas as a comparison which I only ever paid to at much for once. I’m all for electric and if you have the money and want one go for it but financially speaking it doesn’t make much sense right now unless you want a bolt or a leaf which are actually comparable in cost to a gas car. Everything else is so widely overpriced.
This is definitely hitting the nail on the head. Until the technology trickles down into the lower-end models, it's not anywhere near as much a cost savings when you have to buy way up in trim level to get electric as an option.
It's also worth noting that electric economy is notably worse in cold climates - your internal combustion car generates heat for ~free, the electric heater in your Tesla does draw a fair bit of current.
Here's my answer for this (with data!): For the month of July, I charged 440.0 kWh. I averaged 94% efficiency while charging, so the chargers actually used 469 kWh. There were 35 charges, for a total of 66 hours spent charging. My total electric cost is 15 cents per kWh (my plan doesn't have peak/off-peak). I did no charging at superchargers in July.
In that timeframe, I drove 1314 miles. 355kWh were used while driving, giving me an average efficiency of 3.7 miles per kWh. You'll note that I used 85 fewer kWh driving, that's because thosed 85 kWh were used to precondition my car, keep the AC running while I'm in the store or on a bike ride, etc. Super wasteful, but it's so cheap that I can't help myself).
So to break it down: 15 cents per kwh * 469kWh = $70 to charge, $12.75 of which was just used for climate control while not driving.
My last car was a 2016 Honda Accord Touring V6 which, in my area and with my driving style, averaged about 22mpg (lots of steep hills, 85mph driving, and stop and go traffic. I live 15 miles from town by interstate and town has lots of traffic).
According to AAA, the average cost of gas in PA is $3.87 (I know that price changes, but the math gets harder if I look up the price of gas each time I would have had to fill the tank so I'm just taking the current avg). 1314 miles / 22mpg = 59.7 gallons of gas * $3.87 = $231.
For extra fun math, looking at purely fuel costs, the Accord would cost 17.5 cents per mile to drive (not including the fact that I'd need an oil change every 4 months, transmission fluid every year and a half, etc).
My current car at current electric rates costs 5.3 cents per mile to drive.
Additionally, i'm planning on getting solar in a year or two, which should bring my cost down to effectively zero. AND, we can charge for free at my wife's work when she's in the office (as well as at the park I bike at), but she wasn't in the office at all in July; we both worked from home full time last month.
TL;DR: my Model 3 Long Range costs about a third as much per mile to drive as my similarly sized Honda Accord did before I sold it
Only ever overnight, and maybe 5 tanks tops.