Thank you all for the price breakdowns for electricity for your cars. It’s one question I can’t seem to get people to answer! And it’s one reason I think I would like a plug in hybrid. We have solar, so it will help with the costs of charging.
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We have plug in hybrids and an all electric Chevy Bolt. The Bolt is by far my favorite of the 5(!) vehicles we have between the 4 drivers in our family. It’s super easy with virtually no maintenance.
The other cars we have are a Chevy Volt plug in hybrid (my husband’s — he likes it for around town a lot but takes the Bolt to visit his mom 2 hrs away), 2 Ford C-Max Energis (multiple problems but they are usually fixable — just had to replace cylinders and spark plugs in one, that kind of maintenance is never needed for the Bolt), and a piece of crap old 2005 Honda Odyssey van which holds an incredible amount of stuff (more than my friend’s Toyota Tacoma pick up) but tried to kill my husband by engaging the ABS brakes while he was going down the highway with his foot on the gas, not the brake.
The EV is so EZ in comparison to the other cars plus I never stop at gas stations unless I’m on a road trip and I need to pee or charge the car. I wake up every morning and it’s ready to go 200 miles cause it’s been plugged in overnight in the garage. It’s not the newest or the snazziest EV out there but it’s a great car and can haul a surprising amount of stuff. Roomy inside for passengers too. If we were looking to buy a new car now we’d be looking at the Hyundai Ioniq or Kia EV6 most likely since they charge way faster. I do have a soft spot for the VW ID Buzz but I prefer driving smaller cars. We don’t like Elon Musk so no Teslas for us.
You can look up your electricity rates. Where we live in NC an EV is way cheaper to run than a gas vehicle. We use off peak rates under a Time if Use plan and it’s $0.093 per off peak kWh. If we ever plug in on peak it’s $0.273 per kWh so still cheaper than gas. We have a level 2 charger in our garage (runs on 220/240 same as your stove or dryer) and it gives us about 25 miles of charge in an hour. We just plug it in at night like you do your phone and wake up to it fully charged (like your phone), so we’re never sitting around waiting for it to charge.
In my LCOL area ours is On-peak $ 0.1652 kWh and off-peak $0.1131 kWh plus a $15.80 per month fee for the privilege of being a customer!
And for power that constantly goes out. We’ve lost it twice in the last month.
Edit - I see that yours is the cheap kind. 0.42 is awfully expensive! Hopefully they get better service than us lol. We lost power again for 8 hours yesterday so I’m a bit perturbed.
Our price per kWh seems expensive!!! We used to use the niteflex special rate with our electric co-op for EV’s which gives us 400kWh for free, but I don’t put all that many miles on my car, and even though I still have the car set to charge at night (our home charger charges at 48mph with our dedicated 50 amp line to the tesla charger, while some other level 2 home chargers average 32-38 mph so will take longer, though not sure how that affects kWhs). Anyway, I usually plug it in when it’s down to about 30%, and charge it up to about 84%, which takes about 3 hrs or so to charge. When covid hit and we weren’t going anywhere, and we were home during the day and wanted to run the a/c more, the peak rate for usage from 1-9 pm was significantly higher (can’t recall what it was then, but at present the flex flat rate is 8 cents per kWh and peak is 13.5) so I changed back from the ev rate to the standard rate, and my customer service rate jumped up to $25/mo for nothing! Wasn’t happy about that. I just looked again and see that if I chose to go back to the ev flex rate, my customer service charge will go up again by about another $5/mo. I could do the math again, but last time I did, it really didn’t pay for us to use the ev flex rate since I don’t put a lot of miles on my car. We also ran the dishwasher at night to get the free kWh, but rarely ran the washer or dryer between midnight and 6 am!! Hope this helps.
Thanks for the cost info. This varies so much from state to state. But I have long been saying…having an EV isn’t like free gas. It does cost something to charge the thing. It’s one reason I’m looking at a hybrid…or a plug in hybrid.
One of my s’s bought the Kia EV6. They actually liked the Ioniq (I think it was the Ioniq 6?) better but the salesman was horrible and they got tired of dealing with him and didnt want to start all over with another dealership so bought the Kia. They are happy with it.
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This. 
Its so nice not to stop at gas stations. Its a luxury, but its a pleasure. I do occasionally forget to plug my car in, but its never been a problem, and if I needed to plug it in during the day, no worry. On road trips there is a bit of planning involved to go to a supercharger, but only once was the one we had to go to a bit out of the way (though the navigation takes you right to it). Was not a big deal in the grand scheme of things. The only thing on that particular trip (to the FL panhandle with lots of back roads) was that the car sat for 3 days, it was down to about 10% and the battery was “cold” (and I didn’t think about setting it to precondition), so it took a long time to charge up to head home.
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Hope this is not a case of “fake it until…”
Until it is actually for sale; it’s just marketing
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I won’t be buying one anytime soon. Cars replaced horses because it was a superior product. CDs replaced cassette tapes, and Spotify replaced CDs because they were superior products. Electric cars are an inferior product. They cost more, and can’t drive as far, and they take forever to charge. Fast charging will reduce your battery life, making them impractical for road trips. No one wants to build infrastructure to charge EVs because there’s not enough of them on the road.
It depends on how much it costs. 600-700 miles is good, but I have my doubts that this car is going to be affordable enough to be anything but a niche market. So far EVs have proven that over and over.
Which EVs have you actually driven? Taken on road trips?
I would say EVs are demonstrably superior by almost every metric (which of course contributes to higher purchase cost, though meaningfully lower lifetime operating costs, meaningfully lower lifetime environmental costs).
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Totally agree. Been driving EV for the past 9 years if I did my math right. We are planning to look at another EV this week if things work out, too.
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Except range, speed of “refueling” and ubiquity of “refueling” stations, which are important metrics to most people.
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They really aren’t that important to most EV owners because we plug in our EVs at night like you do your phone and wake up to a full charge. I go to a public charging station about once every 6 months. It is not equivalent to a gas station.
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But it’s very important to non-EV owners.
We have an EV and an ICEV. The EV is great for getting around town. We just plug it in at our house every 3 or 4 days. We have taken it on several long distance trips, and for our EV, we can go 300 miles without any stress. Not an issue if your route is primarily interstates. A 20-30 min break after 4 hours of driving is actually probably a good safety move. However, if we are going to the mountains or other place off the beaten track, we stick with the ICEV. We’ll likely always have 1 ICEV (or maybe a hybrid) in the garage until there are more stations and battery life and recharge time are improved, but you can’t beat EV’s for regular driving.
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Range: 9x% of all car trips taken in the US are comfortably under 50 miles. Therefore, range isn’t an issue. And “range” for many ICE vehicles isn’t all that much higher than that of EVs, practically speaking. If you say “but what about road trips” then range is also “an issue” for ICE vehicles. You have to refuel either way.
Refueling (charging) time: the vast majority of EV owners charge at home overnight and wake up with a full charge. Therefore, charge time isn’t an issue except for road trips. Common practice is to re-charge the % of charge that charges the fastest (usually 20% - 70%) which for the most common EVs on the road takes something in the area of 15-20 minutes. Hardly a long period of time as compared to the 5-7 minutes spent filling with gas. If that’s a problem to you, then it is a you problem. Oh, and if you drive something like a Tahoe with a 25gal fuel tank, that fill up is going to take 10+ minutes. Even closer to an EV charge session.
Ubiquity of charging stations: having owned and toured with both Tesla and non-Tesla EVs, this is a non-issue. Tesla’s SC network is so robust that you literally don’t even have to think about it or plan. If you enter a distant enough distination into the GPS it will map it for you. For a non-Tesla, using ABRP or Plugshare to make sure the route will have operational chargers where you need them takes 5 - 10 minutes depending on the length of the road trip. So, a non issue. And a task which will become increasingly moot over time.
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Because they don’t understand how EVs work in the real world.
We take our EV to the mountains all the time. We have a plug-in hybrid, but are looking at selling it and getting another EV. The EV does great in the mountains and has fantastic regeneration coming back down.
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