Washington, Nevada, and Oregon offered the most savings over 10 years — $18,055, $15,726, and $14,481, respectively. Interestingly, in 4th place was Alaska, with $13,933 in estimated savings. California, which accounts for 31% of US EV sales. California ranked 5th in this examination, providing an estimated $13,549 in savings over the course of the decade. How about the states with the lowest estimated savings, though? Those would be Connecticut, Alabama, and Nebraska. However, even there, you’re looking at average savings of $5,407, $6,132, and $6,331, respectively.
I await the complaints about the study.
I live in Texas, and my electricity cost is 10.8 cents per kWh. I’ve calculated that my Acura ZDX is getting the equivalent of about a 75mpg car, if I spent on gas what I spend on electricity and drove the same distance.
Things change a lot if you cannot charge at home. Most DC fast chargers I’ve found in Texas are low 40 cents and into the 60s. I spent 70 cents per kWh on an L2 charger at a hotel, which was robbery, but they get you for the convenience. (and it was a SLOW L2 charger at that!). Once you get into the low 40s the cost of gas versus electricity is a wash for me.
How has been your experience with tires? Articles from 2023 claim 20-30% faster wear.
Though tire manufacturers seems to be developing tire tires for EVs.
Only 5,500 miles on the car so no idea about tire wear. It is a heavy car, at 5,400 pounds, with a lot of torque. But I try to not to drive hard enough to engage the traction control and cause even minimal tire spin.
The stock tire is a Michelin that self-seals, chosen because there is no spare, not even a small one.
They didn’t release the actual study, just a press release with the results. So you can’t see the methodology.
But this is not a surprising finding - no one questions that the fuel costs of EV’s are lower than the fuel costs of ICE’s. Like many “green” technologies, you are generally paying more upfront for your initial investment in exchange for a string of operating savings down the road.
The devil’s in the details - how many miles driven, what’s the gas mileage of the comparison car, what’s the interest rate being used, etc. You can get very different outcomes depending on what values you use.
Yep. As the map shows, it’s close to free to drive an EV in WA State (though they’re now charging EVs a $75/yr fee to make up for the loss of state gasoline taxes. That’s close to double the $3 to $4 per month I’m paying for electricity.)
And if you can find someone bad at arithmetic to pay the first 4 years of depreciation on a Tesla (North of $40,000), the capital costs are minimal, too. I’d be hard pressed to find another $21,000 SUV with 4.2 sec, 0-60 acceleration.)
My wife uses our venerable Leaf as a commuter car and she’s able to charge at work for free. I can’t imagine the possibility of owning transportation this cheap ever again.
Have you needed a battery replacement yet, in your EV ownership life ? Just wondering how expensive, and how hard was it to get the work done ie did a local shop do it, or did you have to travel to a specialized shop to have the work done ?
( it sounds like you current EV is newer, so you may be a long ways out from having to deal with that )
Well, the Acura ZDX has been out for less than a year now… :D. So the battery is fine. I really don’t expect that to be a problem when it eventually, a long time from now, happens. Let’s face it, gas engines and transmissions aren’t exactly cheap to replace either.
" gas engines and transmissions aren’t exactly cheap to replace either."
no doubt about that, didn’t mean to imply that they were.
When I’m out and about, there are probably 5 shops I drive by, not counting dealerships, that would replace ICE and transmission. Have yet to see 1 shop that’s advertising replacement battery swap outs for EV’s. I know it’s pretty early in the lifecycle for most EVs on the road, so maybe a few shops will be opening up in the years to come, as the market grows. I live in a cold climate, EV’s are surely more numerous in the South and Southwest, or PNW, so there are probably more non dealer service shops to choose from in those spots. Competition is good for the consumer of EV’s.
My understanding is that, short of accident or failure, very, very, very few EVs will ever need a battery replacement. I think there is some dude around LA with 1 million miles … and still going.
Tesla dealer/service center is about 2 miles from me and there are 3 or 4 independent shops in town that work on Teslas.
Early model Teslas had battery problems, but everything manufactured after 2018 seems to be very reliable, to date only 2.5% of batteries have been replaced, with much of that in pre-2018 models.
Consensus seems to be that the battery should last 10-20 years and 300,000 miles, much like the longevity you’d see in the best of Toyota or Nissan vehicles.
In any event, I’m prepared to write-off my $21,000 investment and buy one of the high quality Chinese models once they become available.
My Hyundai came with a 10 year warranty on the battery. And everything else, now that I think about it. So no, I’m not particularly worried about it. They’re not putting a 10 year warranty on things they think are going to break on 10-year+1 day anniversary.
EV batteries are good enough that typically the rest of the car (interior, suspension, etc) fails before the batteries. I have a 2012 Leaf, which I bought in 2016 as it came off lease (Nissan had just upgraded the Leaf, so as lessors were turning them in the dealers were just dumping them). I brought it in for a recall about two years ago (defrost fan motor or something) and the dealer said it has 90% of the original battery capacity.
It gets about 70+ miles for full charge. The longest distance I routinely need it for is roundtrip to the airport, which is about 40 miles. My wife commutes with it to work, which is like 10 miles round trip. And we use it for short trips around town, like to the grocery store and such.
So the battery could degrade a lot and it would still work perfectly fine for my purposes. And it is a perfectly fine car too. Hatchback, lots of room, quiet, smooth to drive. I can’t imagine I’d replace it in the next five or ten years.
But the one thing that is almost always true is that if you graph it along a time axis, the savings continue to go up as long as the vehicle is in service. If there is a crash that totals it, then [obviously] the remainder of that graph is “zero”.
The same holds true for a heat pump hot water heater. If a new 80 gallon HWH costs $1500, and a new heat pump HWH costs $2500, then you pay an extra $1000 up front. Assuming no tax rebate, and only a savings of $25/mo of electricity (that was roughly my savings when I replaced a 50 gal regular HWH with my 80 gal heat pump HWH). Then you save 12 x $25 a year, or $300 a year. So it takes 3 1/3 years to break even. Since I have it for more than 10 years, I have enjoyed substantial savings so far (especially considering that I only paid $300 or so for it on closeout).
I didn’t look at the map in detail, but lately Colorado has been the state with the best overall EV ownership costs due to multiple tax credits and other inducements. I have heard of people leasing a new 2024 Nissan Leaf for $19 per month. REALLY, $19! And we own a Nissan Leaf and it is an excellent commuter/errand car.
That’s because the demand for engine/transmission replacements is MUCH higher than the demand for battery replacements. I think there are fewer than 100 independent shops in the entire USA that do EV HV battery replacement (however I can’t find any hard numbers about it anywhere, only found 7 of them when searching).
Read the 4 or 5 replies to my question, and dang, that is awesome ! I was under the impression that every EV would need the batteries replaced after 10-12 years, + or -. Your responses sound just like what people expect for ICE longevity, or even better. Glad to hear it !
Very (VERY) roughly, Lithium Ion rechargeable batteries tend to have a limited number of cycles. A cycle is a full charge from 0% to 100%. Typically they can last for 500 to 1000 cycles. This applies to your car and to your phone. So if the car has an 80kWh battery which can get you 320 miles, then 500 cycles (let’s say it’s a lower end type of battery that only gets 500 cycles) on that battery will get you about 160,000 miles. If you drive 12,000 miles a year, that is 13+ years. However, what usually happens in real life to such batteries is that there is an initial deterioration of about 10% over the first year or two, so instead of an effective 80kWh, you experience about 72kWh of energy after a while. Then it tends to plateau around there and slowly deteriorate over time. And most of the time, you get those 500 cycles at original minus 10% or so. But then you can get another few hundred, or even another 500+ cycles out of it at a lower capacity. So you might be able to drive 200,000 or 250,000 (and some are above 300,000 already!) on the original battery albeit with less range due to having less effective energy stored in the slowly deteriorating battery.
Now sometimes the battery has a few cells that are just plain bad, and they deteriorate more rapidly. If this happens too much, and the system that manages the battery charging can’t level the cells off properly anymore, then the battery goes bad and needs to be replaced (this is relatively rare, but it does happen). Then the old battery is sent to a recycling plant. I think they remove the bad cells and “discard” them, or more likely break them down and remove the valuable minerals from them for recycling. Then they take any remaining good cells (80%+) and recycle them into energy storage systems. Sometimes they (independent shops) will take a full battery pack, open it up, remove the bad cells, replace them with good cells, close up the battery pack, and reinstall it into the car. This isn’t always possible, but when it is possible, it is a lot less expensive than replacing the entire pack.
There’s a guy on my Facebook Marketplace, I think he’s in Georgia hawking used Leaf batteries. Says they’re good for about 50 miles or so. Has a dozen of them, wants $1000 each.
That would be a lot cheaper than some of the “home battery” generator solutions they’re flogging these days. Get a couple/few band string them together. Run the house for a couple days if you need to.
We may laugh. But the amount companies have been charging for home backup batteries are ridiculously high. Tesla, for example, charges over $12k for a powerwall that effectively gives you 12-13kWh. Meanwhile they will sell you a Cybertruck that has 122kWh for $80k or so that can plug into your house and power it for a few days if necessary. Or you could get a Ford F-150 lightning with 133kWh and do similar. Or a Silverado EV with 200kWh. People have joked around about buying one of these trucks with a large battery and simply parking it on the side of their house for battery backup purposes only.
