On Feb 24, 5:52*am, "Existential Angst" wrote:
Awl --

After a recent thread on the Volt, I'm really tryna justify the purchase of
one, but bleeve, it's hard.
I figger my gas cost per year is $1600 or so, and payments for a Volt would
proly be $6,000 year.... *PLUS electricity costs.

Now, about those electricity costs.....

If you calculate the $ per mile of gas, you get something like this:
* *At $4/gal, with 30 mi/gal, it costs 13c/mi in fuel.

Now, how much does it cost to charge a battery?
* *Don't for a minute believe what your ripoff utility tells you about c per
kWhr.... *Do the math on your bill, divide the kWhr on the bill into what
you actually wrote on your check.

That isn't the correct way of doing the calculation. What
you want to find is the INCREMENTAL cost of charging a
car. That could be lower or higher than the rate with your
method. For example if you have a monthly fixed charge
of $25, you're paying that regardless of the car and it
should not be attributed to the car. And if you're
in an area where rates escalate if you exceed a certain
amount, then you're going to pay more for the car
charging than shown by your method.



*Around NYC, that seems to be about
25c/kWhr -- which is outrageous.

Could be. Here in NJ it's been around 15c to 17c.



So let's figger that Tesla's 85 kWhr battery takes, well, 85 kWhr to charge
it..... *that's about $20 in electricity.
If the Tesla gets 200 miles on that charge, that's 10c/mile.
If it only gets 100 miles, that's 20c/mile..... * *!!!!
Split the diff, that's 15c/mile.... * MORE than what I'm paying per mile in
gas!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

WTF??

The Tesla is a performance car that does 0 to 60 in like
4 secs.



You get similar numbers for the Leaf, and Volt.

Now, it gets worse:
* *There's the ever-present thermodynamic kick-in-the-ass.
* It will NEVER take only 85 kWhrs to charge an 85 kWhr battery -- it will
take proly 20% more.

So even if the Tesla DOES get 200 mi per charge (and jb's article suggests
that it does nothttp://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/10/automobiles/stalled-on-the-ev-highw...
)

factor in the charging inefficiency, and you are just about EQUAL in $ per
mi cost of a 30 mpg vehicle.

Anything less than 200 mi per charge, and the Tesla loses, and poss. loses
badly.

So at NYC electric rates, an electric car, not counting ANY other factors,
is actually MORE expensive than gas, at $4/gal.

YET, you see these huge "equivalent" mpg numbers for electrics, typically
around 100 mpg, implying a $ per mile cost of less than 1/3 the cost of a 30
mpg vehicle..
But my calcs show that an electric will be *at least* as expensive as gas,
and likely considerably more than gas, as a fuel.... *What gives??

I don't know. But rather than winging the calcs, there must be
some actual real world test results available online. One key
factor is that you're assuming the battery fully discharges on each
cycle. They don't. How much is left IDK.



Holy ****.... *there goes my Volt....

Now factor in the high initial cost of electrics, inevitable battery
deterioration AND replacement cost, and wow, simply not viable. Unless I
made a mistake somewhere.

Now, some may bleat, Oh OH, MY electric rates are 5c/kWhr.... *and I would
repeat, do the net division on your bill to see what it REALLY is. *At a
TRUE 5c/kWhr, yeah, it makes sense, you could divide all the above electric
costs by FIVE.
But I don't think anyone is really paying 5c, and quite a few places, like
CA, pay MORE than NYS utility rates.

AND, if your small car gets 40 mpg, that's even tougher competition for
electrics.

Idears?? *Opinions?
--
EA

I think your math may be off a bit, but I think the conclusion
is probably valid. That's why the govt is subsidizing these things
with big tax credits. They were picking up about 12K of the cost
of the Volts, don't know what the deal is now. And from what I
saw, even with that, the car still wasn't as good as a conventional
car.

BTW, do you know that if you ever let the Tesla battery go
completely dead, it's bricked? That it cost like 30 -40K to
replace it? That's a nice feature. Even better, you would
think that would be in big print in the owners manual. It's
buried somewhere in there, but not made obvious. The car
can self drain the battery in about a month from a FULL charge.
So, what happens if you drive to the airport, arrive with the
battery low and leave on a week long trip?

It does have a phone home system where it alerts Tesla
that it's about to go kaput. And they then try to contact
you. LAst resort, when they could not find the owner,
they have even used the GPS to find the car and dispatch
their own Tesla service folks to plug it in. Despite that,
some have been bricked. A homeowner put one in a
garage for a couple months and thought it was plugged
in. Something happened with the cord getting disconnected.
Battery bricked and it isn't covered under warranty.

Another nice feature for pioneers.... But they seem to be
hippies that are focused on the idea that the car is zero
emission, conveniently forgetting that in most cases that
power is still coming from coal, nukes, etc.