I own 1 Gas car (Subaru) at a 2nd home (Wyoming) that we have spent a total 1 month so far this year and it has cost me more in gas than owning and charging 2 EV’s (California) full-time.
Please tell me again the advantages of owning a gas car again?
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Does anyone know if an EA DC charger is being installed in Great Falls Montana soon? We’re from Canada and want to take a road trip through there next April. Right now the only level 3 charger in GF is a Tesla.
Did you calculate battery degradation?
The advantage of a gas car was and will be for the next couple of years: access to parts and access to gas stations. There’s a gas station every exit. There isn’t a fast charger every exit is there?
I drive an EV, but the reality of it is that road tripping sucks balls in an EV compared to an ICE. Sure, it’s gotten a lot better, but anyone saying that it’s on par with ICE is tripping. A lot of places just completely lack EV infrastructure.
Road-tripping experience in an EV varies greatly depending on location and EV. Having done several trips from NY to Florida, New England, and Midwest in my Tesla, there has been no ball sucking whatsoever.
lol exactly. All the EV folk complaining about charging and here I am wondering wtf they talking about. Then I realize they’re almost 100% non-Tesla EVs.
I know this sounds snobbish but it is true: Tesla Supercharging makes roadtrips a dream.
According to ABRP, I can’t leave my city with my 2012 24kwh Leaf. Even a 40kwh Leaf wouldn’t make it. Has to be the 60+ kwh Leaf to make it.
Charging infrastructure has a long way to go.
Don’t worry. Others tried leaving your city, and they had to stop when the surroundings became too pixelated. Your car is just better aligned for the simulation.
Hm. I wonder which movie that was. 13th floor, perhaps?
Seeing as your car is a technological dead end, it’s probably going to never change for a Chademo Leaf. You should look into adaptors, or realistically, a better car if you need to go between cities.
The Leaf was just a fun experiment that ended up completely changing my outlook on electric cars. I’ll use ICE for longer trips until I can save up enough to buy a newer EV.
The chademo port is dead. Nobody installs them anymore in Europe so leafs are mostly being relegated to intra city driving. CCS2 is everywhere though.
In the 160 miles between my city and the next city, there’s only 1 chademo location. But there’s also only 1 CCS and 2 Supercharger locations. And the 2 superchargers are pretty close to each other. There are 7 gas stations within 1/2 mile of the highway exit that the chargers are at.
They’re still installing them here in Norway. Not as many as the CCS chargers, but there’s at least one or two dual CHADEMO/CCS charger at every location going up. There’s nearly 100K Leafs alone here, and quite a few other EVs that also use CHADEMO.
My 2014 Berlingo has a 22.5KWh battery, and I have no problems getting around. It just takes a bit longer than with other cars if I want to drive far. Which really doesn’t happen all that often.
Cars with CHADEMO may be a small part of traffic, but they stop to charge more often than other EVs. That’s a fact that many suppliers seem to forget.
Having a Tesla with a CCS charger has been blowing my mind recently.
I drove through the mountains recently in Colorado. I was thinking of where to charge and pulled up plugshare and realized between the superchargers and one-off CCS chargers, I had a charger at every other exit for a 120 mile stretch. That’s actually more frequent than gas stations for that stretch.
The future is coming. Just less quickly if you have a CCS-only car.
Haha CO is getting better. Though if you’re going to the southern part of the state, there’s a pretty big black hole south of Salida with basically zero SC or CCS. It’s fine if you’re road tripping through it, but requires more intensive planning if you’re going in to hit up a trailhead.
The number of chargers makes no difference at all if you can reach one before you run out of juice. They can install one on every exit and all it means you will be passing many before you need one. But you still need to exit freeway, find a charger, charge for a long time and then get back on freeway. And you have to do it many more times than if you drive ICE with a range, lets say 500 miles. What matters is the range. If you have the range you don’t need many chargers. That is the right solution.
What’s with the clickbait title?
Anyway: A vehicle you use for 1 month every year, while it could be electric, do you want to just let it sit and depreciate? Something old that runs on fossil fuels is probably the better pick, for now.
poor people generally can’t afford an EV and charger, and may not have a place to charge it at home (apartment, rental, etc.). So an ICE is vastly superior in that case.
I concour, I live in an apartment and my car is a 2010 italian shitbox (which I love), but there is absolutely no way I could presently own an EV. I am lucky to be able to bike/use public transit for my commute though. I guess the tram is an EV too!
Poor people generally aren’t buying new vehicles if they’re making wise financial decisions. The used market is what needs to catch up, and I’ll say, it seems to be.
As seems a law of nature, there is nothing more expensive than being poor.
If you can charge at home, a used EV could easily have a lower cost of ownership.
Used Bolts/Leafs are in the $15k range. With the new tax credit, you will be able to save up to $4k which puts them in the $10k or less range. Factor in fuel and maintenance savings over an ICE and it’s like getting a car for a few thousand dollars.
I would be in favor of requiring landlords to install chargers if requested by their tenants. And I say this as a landlord.
I own a 24 Grand Highlander as a 22 M3P. The Tesla is a fine daily, but the Highlander is just a much nicer vehicle no matter the cost of gas. When Toyota makes a PHEV, I’d switch to that.
I don’t know how you like the suspension in the Grand Highlander. My sister in law has one and it bounces so much it makes me motion sick. I can’t wait to get back in my car every time I’m riding in that thing.
That is interesting. I went from a 2010 Prius to a 2015 Highlander to a 2024 Grand Highlander, never thought of them as bouncy. I used to drive from Florida to Vermont straight a few times a year.
I guess we all sense motion differently.
Toyota has the Prius Prime and RAV4 Prime PHEVs
Sorry should have mentioned Highlander. They have hybrid and hybrid plus right now. Hopefully a PHEV soon. I have a large family.
Only advantage is if you own one of the super long (600+) mile range hybrid ice vehicles. With those you can drive way out into the middle of nowhere desert, camp for days and then make it back out. That’s the only advantage I can think of.
Tesla or another EV?
If you have kids sleeping in the car you can’t stop. So range of 500 miles comes in handy. In NJ where you can get 20 degree weather + headwind can make your range drop by 50% or more.
Unreliable chargers, apartment complex without chargers, expensive vs ice car, easy to total & harder to find shops to work on it, insurance rates might be higher.
Lack of good 3 row SUV’s.
My sister stops all the time with her kids. They just get into the car when she says, and out when she says.
We have an Outlander PHEV.
As an experiment, we did a fast DC charge at a CHaDMO station, which was $15CAD for a 65 km charge.
After running the numbers, that’s twice as much as the same distance on gas.
It’s the home charging (and short trips) that makes the EV part work. As soon as you outdistance the electricity that came out of your house, gas is half as expensive.
Which is why I think the hybrid is the way to go if you ever have to go any real distance.
My experience has been that charging at public chargers is about 3x as much as gas per mile driven. But this gets eaten up by larger cars and brings the number down closer, and battery efficiency isn’t really there yet. But a BMW X is 2x value for me.
This is meaningless without knowing miles driven, cost per gallon and kwh.
Generally EV’s fuel costs are less than gas in CA but not an order of magnitude less.
E.g. a 30mpg car will cost 16c / mile in fuel in CA at $5/gallon. In Wyoming gas looks to be $3/gallon so 10c / mile. An EV getting 4 m/kwh will cost maybe 5-10c per mile depending on your plan in CA. It’s significantly better but not as much as implied by the OP.
Off peak times for me can get down to 2c a mile.
Please tell me again the advantages of owning a gas car again?
My healthy ID.4 is good for maybe 170-180 miles on the highway on a full charge. And there are damn near no chargers on a lot of my vacation routes. I bought it fully knowing it would be tethered to about 100 miles from home
I love my ID4 but lets not pretend EVs are completely perfect without fault
Two homes and three cars, Mr rich guy over here!! lol. DM me if you can ever spare $10k…
Sounds like you’re telling half the story. Do you have free charge stations that somebody else is covering the cost? If you don’t see why anyone would want a gasoline fueled car, should I point out you said you have one! Drive one of your EV’s up to Wyoming? I’m guessing that you take a jet plane back and forth… How many times? You blew way more exhaust then your EV ever saved.
This isn’t about exhaust, this is about savings. People fly because it saves more money than driving. People drive electric because it saves more money than driving ICE. These are his numbers. And this isn’t the first time we are hearing them from people that discover how expensive ICE cars are after switching.
1 much more expensive than sikmlar gas car (my seat arona is half the price of cheapest ev in my area) 2 depriciation too high - will anyone buy 7 y old ev? 3 uncertain amount of costs since its pretty new 4 not enough chargers - if new york has this problem, everybody has this problem
i spend about 150 for gas a month so its not worth risking it at this moment. I hope this does change in the future though
3 - 7 year EVs are hot on the market and great value as most have no moving parts meaning maintenance isn’t going to be an issue. No surprise cost of ownership experiences.
Well given my Harley FXLRST gets fifty miles to the gallon one would think it had a smidgen of a chance… but it likes premium so $3.60 now and my TM3 drinks electrons that set me back no more than 12c a kWh… and averages better than four miles per.
so putting six thousand miles on the Harley in a year would require me to put, what, nearly fifteen thousand on car to equal out the costs? Both are fun though.