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Should You Buy an EV? A calculator to figure it out

davidexmachina.com

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Re: Should You Buy an EV? A calculator to figure it out

#51
post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Where does getting an oil filter changed by a non dealer void the warranty? Oil/air filters and brakes are $50 and $500 at most. Everything else is pretty reliable for a couple hundred thousand miles assuming a decent brand car like Toyota or Honda. At US gas prices, I have yet to see an EV be shown to be a better value than a car/minivan/SUV/pickup truck, especially if driving 10k miles or less per year. The upfront…

It's not that any work voids the warranty, but for example I got extra 2 years warranty by servicing at the official dealer rather than somewhere else.

Re: Should You Buy an EV? A calculator to figure it out

#52
post #32
post #3

Should you buy an EV? 1. You live in a private house where you can charge the car? - Yes 2. You don't have a charger at home? - No Simple, really :) . I always wanted to buy an EV but that's a deal breaker criteria. Also the secondary problem - author makes assumption about electricity price, but it almost doesn't matter at all if you are changing at the commercial stations only. They will charge you for as much as t…

Not to pile on but I’ll second some of the other commenters who have said that not being able to charge at home isn’t that big of a deal. I live in a condo in a major US city and don’t have the option to charge at home. From a convenience perspective, it’s truly turned out to be a non-issue. We’re at the point where I live that there are enough chargers around that I simply plug in once or twice a week while I’m runn…

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)

Re: Should You Buy an EV? A calculator to figure it out

#53
post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When's the last time someone and 10 of their neighbors dried their hair for 12 straight hours, though? It's not the instantaneous power draw from a single plug that people are worried about but rather the aggregate draw.

Fair, it’s maybe more like adding another appliance per household (fridge/freezer).

More like a tumble dryer, running almost continuously. Fridges/freezers, even huge US-sized ones, don't use that much power. I measured the average consumption of my under-counter fridge at less than 10W.

Re: Should You Buy an EV? A calculator to figure it out

#54
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not to pile on but I’ll second some of the other commenters who have said that not being able to charge at home isn’t that big of a deal. I live in a condo in a major US city and don’t have the option to charge at home. From a convenience perspective, it’s truly turned out to be a non-issue. We’re at the point where I live that there are enough chargers around that I simply plug in once or twice a week while I’m runn…

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.

They already tried that where I live (northeastern Europe) since the government subsidized most of the installation cost.

Most of the businesses closed them last month after the market price of electricity for commercial users shot up by 10x.

There is zero chance of having enough solar on site to charge any meaningful number of cars simultaneously.

Re: Should You Buy an EV? A calculator to figure it out

#55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When's the last time someone and 10 of their neighbors dried their hair for 12 straight hours, though? It's not the instantaneous power draw from a single plug that people are worried about but rather the aggregate draw.

I think it’s perhaps mostly still within the margins that grids are built to tolerate. We’ll need to generate more electricity, but we might not need to rewrite all our streets. Also, it won’t be a step change, it will be gradual. NEW cars will be EVs by 2030 (or whenever), but most cars will still be old cars.

So granted not everywhere has enough sun or wind potential. But building out a ton of renewables compliments building out a ton of EV chargers and cars. Definitely worth upgrading infrastructure to handle. V2L makes it even more of a direct compliment.

There’s an important relationship between energy available per capita and “health” of civilization. So I saw we do it all.

Re: Should You Buy an EV? A calculator to figure it out

#56
post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fair, it’s maybe more like adding another appliance per household (fridge/freezer).

More like a tumble dryer, running almost continuously. Fridges/freezers, even huge US-sized ones, don't use that much power. I measured the average consumption of my under-counter fridge at less than 10W.

That’s an unfair comparison.

Re: Should You Buy an EV? A calculator to figure it out

#57
Mh, beside the issue of a spreadsheet itself [1] and the fact it's shared to the world [2] the real computation must be another: since crystal balls are out of service but luck is blind and bad luck sees very well... The right computation, witch happen to be pure logic NOT reducible to math, a thing soo many people forget is IMVHO "how likely is a diesel/gasoline shortage in the subsequent 1-8 years future?", "can I eventually charge LOCALLY on my own energy (p.v. typically) a BEV?", "can I sustain to buy a new BEV at current prices every 5-8-10 years?".

The answer to this three questions is not numeric, but it's the key. Having an EV to protect themselves against fuel shortage is meaningless if you can't charge it autonomously, being able to buy one but unable to sustain it's CapEx is a desperate action, that tend to have equally desperate consequences, otherwise if you are not living in a country who produce LOCALLY enough oil and have a population enough ready to fight if needed to get it an EV is not economically convenient, but it's a guarantee to being able to travel. The importance of such expensive guarantee it's very personal, depending on so many parameters that's more easy to estimate in person instead of trying summarize all of them for a generic solution.

Really of topic but IMVHO more HN-ish is the means the author choose to share: if in 2022 someone willing to do something AND SHARE IT to the community, a technically sound one, resort to such tech... Well... That means we are really in a sorry state. It's NOT a critic to the author, nor an indirect encouragement against sharing, is instead a sore consideration of the actual state of computing and widespread tech knowledge.

[1] spreadsheets should NOT EXISTS at all, they are a tentative from another era to provide a flexible calculator for tabular data to the masses and such tentative was and is a FAILURE: instead of simplify it complicate things and instead of empower users if force them toward very bad paradigms.

[2] witch prove the very limited scale of such collaborative model, perhaps to be confronted with the SCM model(s) AND the idea of sharing "active" documents (formatting + code) like org-mode files in Emacs or Jupyter notebooks etc where any user get the doc (so the logic) and instantiate it alone on in a small cohort witch is the sole example of live collaboration limited effectiveness behind the WOW effect.

Re: Should You Buy an EV? A calculator to figure it out

#58
post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

They already tried that where I live (northeastern Europe) since the government subsidized most of the installation cost. Most of the businesses closed them last month after the market price of electricity for commercial users shot up by 10x. There is zero chance of having enough solar on site to charge any meaningful number of cars simultaneously.

Edit to fix typos (sorry), and add google search;

search >'Shopping Centers/Malls installed solar PV's' @DDG https://html.duckduckgo.com/html/?q='Shopping Centers/Malls ...>

search >'Shopping Centers/Malls installed EV charger' @DDG https://html.duckduckgo.com/html/?q='Shopping Centers/Malls ...>

search >'Shopping Centers/Malls installed solar PV and EV charger' @google https://www.google.com/search?q='Shopping Centers/Malls inst...>

Re: Should You Buy an EV? A calculator to figure it out

#59
post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More like a tumble dryer, running almost continuously. Fridges/freezers, even huge US-sized ones, don't use that much power. I measured the average consumption of my under-counter fridge at less than 10W.

That’s an unfair comparison.

Why? Comparing the power consumption of an EV on charge to a fridge is a very unfair comparison.

If you drive 200 EV miles per week, you need 60kWh per week, or about 360W continuous.

At approx. 4.5kWh per cycle, that's 13 tumble dryer loads per week. Even that seems an unfair comparison - I'm not sure how many people run 2 loads per day every day.

I was hyperbolic in my original comment, but that's still several hours of tumble drying every day.

Re: Should You Buy an EV? A calculator to figure it out

#60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where does getting an oil filter changed by a non dealer void the warranty? Oil/air filters and brakes are $50 and $500 at most. Everything else is pretty reliable for a couple hundred thousand miles assuming a decent brand car like Toyota or Honda. At US gas prices, I have yet to see an EV be shown to be a better value than a car/minivan/SUV/pickup truck, especially if driving 10k miles or less per year. The upfront…

https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/ohim/onh00/bar8.htm 10K miles or less is a bit of an outlier.

I would not be able to discern 10k miles or less for a car is an outlier from those data points, it does not say anything about the underlying distribution.

Not to mention the whole female column is pretty much 10k and below, as well as men over 65.

This is a little bit better breakdown, but I could find miles driven by decile. I would assume it greatly differs by location and is greatly skewer by people who drive a lot.

https://www.thezebra.com/resources/driving/average-miles-dri...

Either way, the purpose of the miles driven per year in cost calculations is because after a certain amount of miles, the up front higher cost of electric is offset by lower per mile costs of driving electric. Assuming fuel costs stay the same, then people who drive less have less incentive to go electric.

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