341–350 of 650 posts
Can someone living in an apartment with no charging point at their space get an electric car?
I feel like the prices on electric vehicles are starting to become their biggest hurdle (instead of range, availability, or charging which are solved enough). If you're from California or New York, I'm sure $40K starting for this or a Model Y seems complexly within your means, but there's a large chunk of the US (by population AND land) where People love to spam $40K US "average" while entirely ignoring that the aver…
Rare earths are only used in NiMH batteries. Some hybrids have those, but probably not this vehicle.
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Isn't this short term thinking? That is the upfront cost. What about the total lifetime cost of the vehicle?
If anything the lifetime cost of electric deters me. Usually they come with 10 year warranties for the power side of the car, but I kept my last car for 20 years. If I buy electric I assume I essentially need to buy a new car or pay for an expensive overhaul after a decade. So the math is more along the lines of 20k for a gas car that will last for 20 years, or 40k for an electric car that will probably last 10 years…
Electric vehicles outperform ICE powered vehicles on every metric, including price. Electricity is getting cheaper and cleaner over time, and so are batteries. In 10 years today's $10k battery pack might be twice as potent and half the price. I would stick with VW or other manufacturers, as Tesla is being cheap about battery chemistry for long term performance.
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Yea, I had a ID.4 pre-ordered but canceled it after I realized how absurd the price is. I bought a utility e-bike instead and that was probably one of the best decisions I’ve ever made. I barely use my car anymore and biking is way more fun and greener than any car.
Regular bikes have the benefit that they improve your health, it's not exhaustive once you get a better stamina. E-bikes are a bad product I think in todays society
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Isn't this short term thinking? That is the upfront cost. What about the total lifetime cost of the vehicle?
If anything the lifetime cost of electric deters me. Usually they come with 10 year warranties for the power side of the car, but I kept my last car for 20 years. If I buy electric I assume I essentially need to buy a new car or pay for an expensive overhaul after a decade. So the math is more along the lines of 20k for a gas car that will last for 20 years, or 40k for an electric car that will probably last 10 years…
You didn't calculate TCO for the ICE maintenance costs and you need to: EV have significantly smaller maintenance so the component of high cost in a retained old petrol engine or diesel motor, is strongly in favour of the EV. I had two clutches and a gearbox replaced across the 17 year retention of my Mazda 6 on top of the expensive six monthly motor service.
Not downvoting you, but noting, you skewed the cost exposure risks i believe, quite badly.
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Actually the market for new sub-$20k vehicles is quite small. Most people with budget concerns buy used. The median new passenger vehicle is something like a $40k minivan or pickup. So these EVs really aren't very far off the mark financially.
Are those EVs that are going to become decent sub $20k buys at say 5 years old even in existence yet? Even if they are there aren’t enough of them being sold new yet. I seems to me probably another 5 years to get enough volume in solid lower end EVs that are bought in quantity and have a decent lifespan. Then another 5 years for them to filter down to the used market with decent prices. I bought a 2017 Golf last year…
You can get a ~2016 Leaf for around $10k though.
Is this why volkswagen.com is down? There was an unexpected error (type=Internal Server Error, status=500). Redis command timed out; nested exception is io.lettuce.core.RedisCommandTimeoutException: Command timed out after 1 minute(s)
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VW is pretty far behind Tesla in battery technology.[0] Still, this seems like a good car for a large number of drivers. The VW charging network is building out rapidly (I've noticed that VW's chargers are largely in the same locations as Tesla's superchargers. Wonder why?) The Tesla Model Y Long Range is rated at 326 miles and in my experience that's accurate and completely practical. As to your criterion of "500ish…
It is extremely common to fill up any ICE and get nearly 500 miles. It's almost like they sized the tanks to that standard.
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You left out the very important and difference making cost of gasoline. Which over 10 years of driving would more than make up the difference in cost.
That may depend on where you live, and what your electricity consumption already is. In CA, for example, with our tiered billing and PG&E's award-winning business practices, it's pretty easy for an electric car to rack up quite an energy bill. If you were already using electricity up to the top of your tier, the add for the car will be at $$$ rate. So they also have non-tiered plans for electric car owners but those…
Note that the CA utilities are working to try to keep milking you even if you have solar. The most loathsome part of it is that the utilities are trying to charge you $10/month/kilowatt-peak for the array you own, even if they push zero energy onto the grid. From my perspective, that's ridiculous rent-seeking. Personally I'm working towards getting off the grid entirely.
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I see power cables running out to a car parked in front of a house fairly regularly.
In inner Sydney suburbs with terrace houses, the 2sigma distance to your street parked car might be 100 metres. You can't run an extension cord that far