Should You Buy an EV? A calculator to figure it out (opens in new tab)

> From a cost perspective, it probably would be cheaper for me to charge at home, but it would be small and would take years to pay off the cost difference of having a charger installed. I spend so little on charging that I don’t really pay attention to it as an expense.

May I ask what you spend? I think here charging at home vs. at public chargers is a difference of up to 100% more expensive (~0.30 cents at home vs >0.50 at public chargers).

With the number of Shopping Centers/Malls installing solar PV's on their building roofs and car parks,

it is probably only a matter of time till they install EV charges to entice customers to their Centers.

If you don’t need fast charging at home (i.e. you’re fine leaving it plugged over night) the fixed costs for a home charger a very low.

Unless the commercial chargers you use are exceptionally cheap or even free charging might cost nearly as much as gas for a similar car and 4x more than at home (obviously depends on your local situation)

I was recently tasked with moving a chevy bolt what was parked on the street too long to save it from being impounded.

It had sat there for quite a long time and wasn't anywhere near full when it was parked. When I got it the battery was in the orange where it stops telling you how much range is left and just says find a charger. I belive this kicks in at the 15-20 miles remaining range.

I moved the car about 10 miles to a residential driveway that has a 120ac plug.

When I left, the car was indicating it would be fully charged in 60 hours.

That's two and a half days to do what a gas station can do in 5 minutes.

Bottom line is relying on 120 to keep your car charged up is a fantasy unless your car usage is so low you might as well have a bicycle instead of a car.

Even the least efficient EVs still get some charge at 120v. One of the worst offenders only gets 1 mile per kWh so that's roughly 1 mile every hour at home. Even if your inefficient EV is only plugged in for the roughly 8 hours you need to sleep, that's still 8 more miles of range when you wake up than you had before you went to bed. A lot of people like to discount that as "basically nothing", but a gas car isn't going to have 8 more miles it can drive when you wake up. It's a subtle seeming shift, but it's still a useful shift, because it adds up. 8 extra miles a night is still 56 miles a week you don't need to "fast charge", even with the most inefficient sort of EV and the least time at home.

Cars spend more time parked than in use by a great margin, even among those drivers that drive hundreds of miles every week. The US is at a disadvantage with our 120v standard and that a lot of people don't think 120v is "adequate" for EV charging ("it's only an additional mile per hour range in my inefficient EV Hummer!"), but we should normalize 120v charging because it should be easy and affordable to almost every household and a lot of shared parking. We've more than a century of experience installing "regular plugs" everywhere. We could start there and do a lot of good in the US to encourage charging everywhere a car is parked. We have to reduce the stigma that it "isn't good enough" because people can't think fourth dimensionally that 1 mile per hour is "adequate" because it is still more than the car would have had otherwise.

Dryer plugs are great, too, but we don't have as many free circuits in our fuse boxes and circuit breaker boxes as we'd all like to put extra dryer plugs in all our garages, because the US made the mistake of standardizing on 120v instead of 220/240v like most of the rest of the world. (Thanks, Edison.~) We can start with regular plugs, and need to destagmatize it/normalize it if we want cheap charging everywhere and less focus on "how do we install chargers" as if it's this deeply complicated bootstrap process. We have outlets everywhere, let's use them better. We install new outlets all the time for relatively pennies (the labor investments far dwarfs the supplies/capital investments), we can install them near every parking lot a lot cheaper than we can add 240v circuits to parking lots (or "fast chargers"). If we can start to think of it as "adequate" because it is still additive.

I'm currently in the eastern EU, and while there a lot of EVs on the roads, the infrastructure is not usable for my personal use there too. No chargers at homes or near homes, not even in the new apartment blocks. No chargers at work parkings.

Honestly, I wonder how can EU ban selling ICE cars even in 10 years, if the infrastructure in so much lagging behind.

One big difference is the density of the fuel.

You can fill a car with gas in under a minute.

While fast-charging (like Tesla's super charging) has growing deployment, that's still at least 15 minutes or so, which is a significant difference.

And, the density of that is just not there yet, so for the near future having charging at home makes daily driving much more convenient.

Why would that be a valid rebuttal? From turning into a gas station to exiting, completely filling a gas tank takes, at most, 5 minutes and gas stations are everywhere. How long does charging to be able to travel the same distance take?

I agree, but right now in the UK, aside from the odd token charging point in a supermarket car park, realiably accessible charging stations are few and far between, particulary outside major city centres.

Let's imagine I need a car for a daily commute. Or work. After a day ends, I need to get it to the charging station, which is away from the home. I leave the car there and take a bus to the home. There I do something not engaging too much, because in 1-3 hours I need to get out again, at night, get a bus to the charging station (longer waits late in the evening too), then get the car to home and then finally I can rest. It's totally not an option. Also taking a bus or tram twice a day additionally is not free, and kinda defeats the economy part of the EV car.

PS edit: lets add some concrete numbers - the nearest station to my current home (in the peripheral region of the big city, but not the outskirts) is 10 minutes walk away, 2 (two) 22kW type-2 stations. The seconds closest station is 10 (ten) 100kW stations and it is 33 minutes away by bus with a single transfer. So I would need to wait for bus 4 times just to get to the big station and back.

True, although there is also the advantage of convenience - all the time recovered from NOT having to go either fetch the materials and do teh maintainence yourself or bring the vehicle to the dealer/service station and wait. Count it as two hours each time, and it's easily 20 hours saved, more than half a work week that you are now free to do something else

And how does it compare in 2022?

Brakes get a lot less wear because you’re mainly relying on regenerative braking using the electric motors in reverse. If your driving style is gentle enough, it can bring the car to a complete stop in a reasonable distance. The mechanical brakes are then only engaged when the car is fully stopped already.

EV with KERS use brake pads much much less, my mechanic can confirm, he always complains how much less work he has to do on an electric car.

I drove down a hill 15 minutes and didn't use the breaks once.

The display then said 'recovered 9x%'.

It also feels less wasteful on the Autobahn as well because quick deceleration is also possible.

The adaptive Speedcontrol can handle like 99% of the cases were cars slow down or switch into your lane.

With the general speed limit in USA I think that should also be possible.makes driving much nicer

Electric vehicles don't use the brakes that much as they can slow the car down by switching the elctric motors from using electricity to accelerate to using the wheels to generate electricity thereby slowing the car down.

Case in point that whole situation "recently" where a woman got a Tesla with no brake pads installed on it.

Oil, filters and work on them is pricy at the official dealers (if you care about warranty). Also more failure points - turbines, injectors, gas pump, exhaust, gearbox, oiling system in general. Just a single gearbox or turbine failure can cost thousands. EVs are really cheaper in general, however you compare.

> How does this work?

Maintenance in the first 100-150k (I really want to say ~200 but that will depend largely on the treatment the vehicle gets in the first 100) is basically nothing other than short term wear items (pads and tires) and preventative maintenance (transmission fluid at 50k, air filter at 20k, stuff like that).

As EVs get long in the tooth they will exhibit all the same "stuff between the vehicle and the road is wearing out" problems that literally every other wheeled vehicle on this earth exhibits. It's not like equipping a car with an electric drive train makes all the steering and suspension parts (that account for the bulk of the late in life maintenance) magically cease to exist

I imagine the wear on the pads is reduced by the regenerative braking from the motors.

In an EV you don't actually use the brakes if you don't brake hard, engine does energy recovery instead.

My car gets over 50 mpg and that's from odometer and fuel volume, not from a spec sheet.

Diesel goes a bit further than petrol on a volume basis but not that much. Maybe it's just due to smaller US gallons and a cruisy commute.

A colleague of mine gets 65 mpg, fwiw, and it's not a hybrid.

Also the emissions thing wasn't about fuel economy, but about NOx emissions.

> Also, were diesel cars only getting those high mpg due to cheating the emissions limits? I never saw them in the US.

Because you guys like huge heavy cars full of unnecessary toys inside.

Lots of hybrid sedans, eg Prius, Corolla, Ioniq, Insight Granted I think the only non-hybrid ICE getting 39mpg or better is the Mitsubishi Mirage.

> Also, were diesel cars only getting those high mpg due to cheating the emissions limits? I never saw them in the US.

I don't believe so. Diesel is more efficient partially because diesel engines have been around longer (so have more improvements).

> Excel is almost surely the single largest no-code/low-code install and monthly-active-users base.

I'd argue even further that Excel is the most common flavor of LISP installed.

  =IF(A1 = 1, A2 * 3, MAX(A3, A4))

is remarkably similar to:

  (if (= A1 1) (* 3 A2) (max A3 A4))

The difference is mostly infix vs prefix and the naming of variables. Not only is Excel the single largest low code install, but its also a gateway to LISP if you introduce it to people correctly.

Many things are very widespread and are absolutely crap... Indeed MOST widespread and heavy used things happen to be crap.

Their failure is the fact that instead of simply they complicate life. And their users fails even to comprehend that since they do not know any other option. Oh, BTW the "no code/low code" is the biggest failure: users programming of classic system is the technical success, something simple enough that all users use without issue and still technically sound and effective. Dummy low-code/no-code modern environment who have already touched incredible horrific peaks like RENAMING a gene because excel convert it in a date prove only one thing: masochism is common and popular...

The other negative is that the Bolt's battery tech is now a generation (or at least a half-generation depending on how you figure dividing lines) behind compared to GM's massive investment into the multi-vehicle "Ultium" platform. That may matter for the expected service life of the Bolt (compare to GM's recent cut of service on the Spark EV, a half-generation of battery tech just prior to the Bolt; though to be fair there were a lot fewer Spark EVs on the road compared to Bolts).

I'm still confused why the recent model changes to the Bolt didn't include an "Ultium upgrade" other than to keep costs down and not associate the Bolt with the R&D depreciation of Ultium just yet. But given GM's larger commitment to the Ultium platform and number of vehicle models they are now building on it, that's one of my remaining pieces of hesitancy against current models of the Bolt and its already "legacy" platform. (Though the other big hesitancy was the "recent" recall and how that made Bolts impossible to find in dealerships for just long enough that it passed my "impulse buy" window the past couple of years.)

I hope GM realigns the Bolt to the present platform and/or starts adding smaller vehicles to the Ultium platform. (Smallest currently announced is the new Blazer which is still much larger than I want as a car.)

(I'm an "ancient" Volt owner and have been watching GM's EV projects with great interest as I'm at about the point where I'd like to replace the Volt with a proper EV, but so far GM's EV strategy still seems a bit hit-and-miss and like "next year's models" might be the ones to watch for. From my perspective, at least.)

My opinion is that emissions cause enough harm that we need to not donate our way out the problem. To me that's like letting your pets have unwanted offspring and just donating to a local shelter to make up for it.

Even my LEAF (which has one of the worst battery management systems in terms of having passive cooling only) is 7.5 years old and has around 85% of its original capacity.