Used cars, sure, but you're often either paying for someone else's problem or losing out on modern safety features.
For new cars, especially with the tax credit (which most americans qualify for), EVs are cheaper. That's not even factoring in maintenance costs over 5 years nor savings from charging at home (of course not everyone can charge at home).
The point is EVs cost more (sticker price) than gas cars and have less utility.
I'd consider an EV for my daily commute if I could buy a new one for $10K. I think that's a reasonable price for a small car that has maybe a 100 mile range.
But automakers are offering $50K cars and above that don't fully replace gas cars. No thanks.
The sticker price is just the "obvious" price you see when it comes to owning a vehicle. But everything else still matters, routine maintenance and gas alike. Ignoring it only sets yourself up for being surprised when those bills come due.
> I'd consider an EV for my daily commute if I could buy a new one for $10K.
I'd consider an ICE vehicle if I could buy a new one for $10K. Have a suggestion?
There's a steady supply of used vehicles which you can expect another 100K-200K miles out of (i.e. the lifespan of a set of EV batteries). My two vehicles are both 8+ years with more than 100K miles (one approaching 200K) and neither requires significant maintenance outside the standard replacement of fluids and filters each year - the total amount I spend on them is less than a single car payment on a Model 3 or Mach-E, perhaps three payments if you count gas.
12,000 miles / 25mpg * $5/gallon = $2400
Maintenance is, at a very high estimate, $1000 per year, and that's paying a shop for everything - far less if I did it myself
Payments on a 5 year loan at 6% for a $40K EV (such as the Tesla 3) is $773/month or 9276/yr
On my local Craigslist I can find my vehicle, one year older but significantly lower mileage (85K) for $18000. I can find my vehicle but with more miles (222K) for $4000 (admittedly that sounds low and I have suspicions) or my vehicle with slightly higher mileage (115K) but in a higher trim for $11K.
You'll forgive me for continuing to drive my car or for buying an exact replacement rather than rushing to buy an EV.
We are still pretty close to this even with inflation, cheapest is around $16k sticker from a quick search. I remember not too long ago Hyundai was giving cars for sub 10k new.
My in-laws bought two new—yes, new—ICE cars (some Chevy model, I think) for under $10k, total, not each, 12ish years ago. Car prices have gone totally bananas since then. I hate whatever’s happening with that.
People who like to stand out buy big cars. Big cars make people in small cars feel unsafe. So people replace their small cars with big cars. So, people in big cars buy bigger cars.....and so on.
So now every car has to have more 'safety'. Maybe if the car hitting me wasn't 5000lbs, at chest level and didn't accelerate like a bullet..... I wouldn't need more 'safety'. So now every one has bigger, "safer" and more expensive cars....... all while American road deaths keep growing with no limits in sight.
One day I will see a Ford-150 bed used for pickup truck tasks. Today is not that day.
No, it's the fact Cash for Clunkers ruined the used car economy. I've always driven used cars. A 2007 VW Jetta. A 2008 Mazda Protege, a 2002 Oldsmobile (until 2018). From 2018 to 2023 a 2007 Toyota Prius. 2023 a 2013 RAV4.
I looked at EVERY used car in a 100 mile radius on every platform you can think of and the 2013 RAV4 with 105,000 miles at 15k hit the dealer lot the night before I purchased (they had multiple calls for that vehicle while I was filling out paperwork). Its because all the old people sold off there late 90's and 2000's cars that there STILL are no used cars anymore that aren't absolute junk (155k mileage plus junk selling for 15k - 20k). This lets dealerships sell new cars & trucks for way, way too much. If Cash for Clunkers never happened, used cars would be the competition for new cars like the Toyota Camry which are uncomfortable, basic vehicles but which set the pricing floor for the other manufacturers vehicle lines. No competition so set it at a high price point marketing it as new even though the rest of it is junk and then you can charge a premium on oyher vehicle options. (Hate the Canry but I love Toyota vehicles don't get me wrong).
All us poor people who just want a to work and back vehicle & who would buy off craigslist from private sellers don't have a market anymore and have to go dealerships. Pickups are overpriced I'll agree, and are faux status symbols, but the used market itself reaked havoc on trucks too.
The cheapest Chevy from 2010 I can find is the 2010 Aveo LS at $11,965. My only guess is that it was some 2010 model that had been sitting for 10+ months and they needed to get them off the lot.
Even with this, a new Aveo for $12k in 2010 would now be ~$17k with inflation. New cars today seem to be around $17k and that includes the Versa and the Mirage. Of course wages haven't risen with inflation but that's another can of worms.
To be fair, I don’t think they’d have gotten a single one for $5k or less, and only got that price by buying the pair, and I think the new model years were about to arrive or just had. But they were new cars!
So because she ignored both the beep and the reserve light turning on you spend quite a bit extra up front. More than once!
I'm willing to bet she isn't that dumb.
I will admit that I ran a car out of gas once in the last 40 years: driving to Flagstaff AZ in a Prius there aren't many gas stations and I ignored the reserve light and the beep because I thought I could make it. Nope! 5 miles short. Maybe the 3000' grade I had to climb just before had some influence. However... never again. OTOH, that Prius that ran out of gas traveled several thousand miles over the years at over 90mph across the West, getting ~40mpg which works out to ~400 mile range. That right there is the entire argument, done.
To be fair, the car she had at the time did not beep on low gas.
That said, most of the utility comes from not having to spend time stopping by a gas station to fill up. Just park in the garage and spend about 10 seconds plugging in the car, and it's filled up in the morning ready to go.
The flip side of this point is for non-trivial distances the people in the ICE vehicles with 400+ mile ranges mostly invariant to speed only now begin to realize how amazingly convenient it is to only have to stop for < 10 minutes every 5-6 hours or so.
Do people who think the only use of a vehicle is the home-work-supplies circuit? Don't you ever take a weekend off and go out of town? You really want to deal with the whole rental car scenario when you're supposed to be off? Or, oh well, I'm just gonna commit to spending a good chunk of my time on this vacation sitting around twiddling my thumbs at a charging station. I got an acquaintance who drove a decaying Tesla with <200 mile range from Atlanta to NYC and back and then bragged to me "it wasn't that bad". Yeah, I was polite.
Lotsa magical thinking going on here. And I haven't even pointed out that in vast swathes of the country the rental car option isn't even remotely convenient.
Honestly, it just depends. Atlanta to NYC would be a 2 day for me. Even in the gas car, I'd only do ~650-700 before a stop.
In an EV, that's ~11 hours on day 1, charge up at the hotel, and do one 15 minute stop on day 2. Before I had an EV, I'd do the same thing, just with ~10 hours on day 1 and my stop on day 2 might be at a different place.
But this is traveling for leisure with family. It might be different if I were really desperate to get there fast. I'd never rent a gas car to save the couple of hours, but also arrive much more tired.
>"Used cars, sure, but you're often either paying for someone else's problem or losing out on modern safety features."
Even though I can afford it I've never bought new car. Call me lucky but I did not feel like I was paying for somebody else's problems either. All my cars worked fine for me. Some maintenance and repairs but nothing major / expensive. For example used Grand Caravan I paid $5K for on the auction cost me another $1K to put in proper order and then served me faithfully 10 years. Only got rid of it because the rust had taken the best of it.
Yeah, I made a spreadsheet about this, and (at California gas prices) my Tesla breaks even with most ICE cars surprisingly quickly (just gas costs, add in maintenance and it’s even better)
I've been considering an EV, but this got me to look at the break even point for how much I actually drive (5,000 mi / year), my gas mileage (30 mpg), my offpeak power costs ($0.20 / kWh), and typical gas prices here ($4.50 / gal). It would take me about 20 years to save $25,000, which is about the difference between my current car and a Tesla. That said, I probably shouldn't consider a Tesla, since it occasionally snows pretty hard here in Northern Nevada and the Tesla's snow handling is not the best.
I’d be curious to see your numbers.
Based on my electrical costs of about $0.35/kwh and 87 gas holding steady below $5 for nearly a year, 1000 miles driven in my real-world 45 mpg Camry hybrid costs about $110 while the same in Tesla Model Y costs about $95.
Tesla however is $10k to $15k more.
The only maintenance my Camry will need for the next decade or so that does not exist in Tesla is regular fluid changes which amortize to about $200 per year
Ps in SF Bay Area and don’t qualify for tax incentives
I agree. In the SF Bay Area, especially in PG&E’s regions where average KWh is $0.40, a hybrid makes more economical sense and it isn’t even close.
The math is skewed even further once you add the extra $500 you pay for CA annual registration for an EV vs. Hybrid (personal experience, Mach-E vs. Accord Hybrid).
Definitely it's massively less compelling in areas with extremely high electricity costs. That's pretty much as expensive as electricity gets in North America, isn't it? I think it's significantly more compelling basically anywhere else. E.g. in Ontario where I live, if you're set up appropriately and charge between 11pm and 7am it's $0.028/kWh (CAD), i.e. less than 3 cents per kWh, or roughly 1/35th the price you're paying.
If I've done my math right, that's works out to be less than 2$ USD per 1000km? A difference of 108$/1000km is 1728$/year for the statistically average-driving Ontarian. Adds up pretty fast!
SF Bay Area is an outlier for electricity pricing, average US rate is less than half that according to: https://www.bls.gov/regions/midwest/data/averageenergyprices...
and off-peak rates are typically less than average where time of use metering is in effect (my off-peak rate is less than 1/3 of your rate). My family's EV costs about 1/4 to 1/3 as much per mile to fuel as our ICE (and I typically drive the EV with more spirit). For me, over 100k miles, I expect to save about $10k in fuel costs. I agree that the savings isn't as substantial to you because of your extremely high electric rates, but for many, a standard model 3 or y will offer lower TCO than a camry.
All of California is an outlier, but here we are with 10% of the US population.
I live in Ventura County and the cheapest my electricity gets is around 33 cents per kwh. During peak it's a whopping 60 cents per kwh.
I also assume that chart includes baseline credits and averages out the tiers - your first kwh is cheaper than your 600th kwh. Any brand new EV charging will be charged at your top rates and be more expensive than what those averages represents pretty much everywhere in the US.
> I live in Ventura County and the cheapest my electricity gets is around 33 cents per kwh
If you have an EV (or some other devices), you can qualify for the TOU-D-PRIME plan which gets you $0.23/kWh[1]; at this rate, for my car usage patterns, the Tesla Model 3 is a clear win over any car more than $25k or so. If you have solar, you can drive the prices even further down (I offset basically all of my 2022 bill, but 2023 was cloudier and rainier than typical and so I'm doing worse this year).
Wow that blows. I'm on TOU-D-5-8PM because I work from home, and in a place that can have warm summer nights.
I stop work at 5pm so I can power down my computer before electricity gets expensive.
And 8pm works great for us because in summer it can be 70 degrees overnight, and the kids start going to bed at 8pm so I can cool down the house a bit without paying crazy prices for that.
I do a lot of thermostat trickery in the summer. During the day we set it to 76, from 4-5pm set it down to 72 (to avoid running in the expensive hours), then we raise it to 78 from 5-8pm, then we set it down to 74 at 8pm.
The formula is pretty straightforward, the sheet itself is a bit of a mess. Take the price you pay for each car; take your number of miles driven a year; use the mpg and kWh/mi to calculate the operational cost of each for a year (I think I used a conservative value of like 180 kWh/mi for my 3). Then multiply by the number of years owned and add the purchase price.
Let me guess: you are low-balling your Tesla maintenance costs, because you haven't yet had an issue. Well, guess what, when you do, dealing with it will be expensive.
RepairPal says the average annual cost to maintain a Model 3 is twice that of a Honda Civic.
I’m not counting maintenance for either vehicle, though: and, over the expected ownership time, I save enough with electricity for the Tesla to pay for a $16k battery pack replacement (and, over the four years I’ve owned the tesla, I’ve probably spent like $2000 on Tesla maintenance and $6k on maintaining the Odyssey, so I think I’ll save enough on regular maintenance to break even when I have to replace the battery)
The thing about EVs is that they are new so I'm not sure how to calculate maintenance cost reliably. I'm thinking about after 8-10 years. Some ICEs can reliably run "forever" if well maintained, like some Toyota ones.
They’re not _that_ new anymore: the original Model S was sold in 2012. So, while they’re still young compared to ICE cars, we still have at least a decade of data on them.
I do agree, though, that there’s some novelty risk but (a) my numbers only include gas (and I’m not factoring my solar savings in at all because I ran the numbers before I installed solar) and (b) I’m spending quite a bit every year to maintain my Odyssey and basically $0 to maintain my Model 3 (only exception is I’ve changed the tires once, but I’ve gone through a couple sets of van tires in the same time period for a similar total expenditure). I think that I’d come out ahead even if I had to replace the battery (or sold the car when this is needed). Also, the depreciation on my Tesla over the last four years is much more in my favor than the van’s depreciation in the same time.
Although, there’s a question of under warranty vs. out of warranty replacement here: replacing the battery under warranty doesn’t really add to the TCO; also, I assume the battery packs across the Tesla models are similar enough that newer cars incorporate the learnings from older models.
For new cars, especially with the tax credit (which most americans qualify for), EVs are cheaper. That's not even factoring in maintenance costs over 5 years nor savings from charging at home (of course not everyone can charge at home).