No longer worth it to plug in Electric Cars or Plug-In Hybrids in Areas wit High Electricity Costs and Low Gasoline Costs

Thanks to high electricity prices and low gas prices it now costs less per mile to run our Prius Plug-In on gasoline than on electricity.

Miles per Gallon: 45 Price per Gallon: $3.00 Cost Per Gasoline Mile: 6.67¢ Miles per KWH: 4 Price per KWH: $0.324 (no joke!) Cost Per Electric Mile: 8.10¢

A Tesla is about 0.5 KWH/mile so at the same electricity cost it's far more expensive than a gasoline powered vehicle.

The problem is the high electricity cost in my area. In areas of the country where the electricity cost is half the price then it'd be break-even for the Tesla, and a savings on the Prius. We are not big electricity users since A/C is rarely needed here, and the water heater, furnace, and clothes dryer are natural gas. But we always end up in the top tier for electricity usage ($0.32445/KWH) which starts at 201% over baseline.

The tremendous advantage of a plug-in hybrid, or all-electric, in California, is the carpool lane access with a single person. And due to state and federal tax credits, and factory to buyer incentives, the Prius Plug-In was the same price as the gasoline-only model, and Plug-In came with navigation and several other features. The carpool lane access is really nice even though I don't really agree with the idea that single occupancy vehicles should ever get to use the carpool lane; OTOH, every additional vehicle in the carpool lane means less vehicles in the other lanes so there is some benefit to everyone.

Reply to
SMS
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Assuming all your information is correct, you should spread this observation further. Even with all the subsidies, the Prius costs are spread to the taxpayer who pays for it. Cost to everyone is more for transportation in these vehicles. Same goes for pollution advantage, it is spread elsewhere in the form of the battery production and electricity generated at polluting sites.

Reply to
Frank

Per SMS:

Dunno what the life of the Prius' battery is - or what it's replacement cost is.... but BatterLifeInMiles/ReplacementCost is certainly going to be a few more cents....

e.g. Pulling numbers out of the air:

80 mile range, 1,000 cycles = 80,000 mile life.

$5,000 replacement cost... 5000/80000 = six more cents per mile.

Maybe somebody can chime in with the real numbers....

Reply to
(PeteCresswell)

This is true for the moment, but what about the future? Why not set up a solar powered recharging station for your vehicle? Yes, there is the high expense of the solar panels but those panels can also help reduce the household power bill. Expences will constantly rise given time. Going solar now might save a true fortune in the future. BTW, there are small solar panels that can be stuck on the inside of the vehicle window, then plugged into a cigarette lighter to help charge a vehicle battery while parked for the day.

Reply to
Vandy Terre

do the math how many Watt hours can you get from a little solar panel in a typical day? or even a big solar panel for that matter? how many watt hours does it take to recharge a car?

Mark

Reply to
makolber

how much does a gas/diesel spend on maintenance (oil, anti-freeze, spark plugs, air filters, tune-ups, etc) over 80000 miles

Reply to
Malcom "Mal" Reynolds

The Prius Plug-In requires 3KWH to charge the battery. A fully charged battery provides 12-14 miles of driving. This is actually enough for the spousal-unit's daily commute so during the week this vehicle rarely used any gasoline.

Those little solar panels are not going to make a dent in 3KWH. Plus, the battery packs cars require a minimum of 120VAC to charge, there is no option to charge small packs of cells with a 12VDC charger. It would take 200 hours to charge the Prius Plug-In battery with a 15W charger, assuming no losses. The reality is that it would take about 300 hours.

Reply to
sms

Keep the car for 40,000 miles then sell it. Second owner buys it and puts an additional 40k miles.

Owner 1 additional 0 cents per mile. Owner 2 additional 12 cents per mile.

I'll wait another 10 years for the fuel cell.

Reply to
Ed Pawlowski

Diesel $2720 or so, and that's with M1 synthetic oil at 5K intervals and fuel filters every 10k.

Reply to
Pete C.

Far less than 5 grand. A dozen oil changes at $35 each. and a $20 air filter. No tune up or plug changes until 100,000 miles.

Reply to
Ed Pawlowski

My understanding is that a lingering problem with electric cars is that they use lithium ion battery packs, and those battery packs are really nothing more than 300 or so laptop li-ion batteries. So, you pay $40,000 to buy the car new, but the li-ion batteries don't last any longer than they would in a laptop computer. So, a few years down the road you're looking at buying a new battery pack for the car, or 300 battery packs at $50 per battery pack, or $15,000.

It's that problem with the battery packs for the cars only lasting a few years that still needs to be solved. I, for one, wouldn't want to drive an electric car if I had to pay two or three times as much more for batteries than I would have to pay for gasoline in a conventional car.

Does anyone know if this is correct or am I misinformed?

Reply to
nestork

Is that the recommendation for synthetic for your engine? I'd have thought much longer.

Reply to
Ed Pawlowski

The Ford (Navistar) 6.4 diesel and really all of the new generation of emissions controlled diesels have higher maintenance requirements than the old generations.

There was a real sea change in diesel technology that accompanied the emissions controls, mechanical injection pumps were replaced with high pressure common rail electronic injection, basic turbos were replaced with two stage turbos with servo controlled variable stator vanes, etc. All this change give significantly higher performance than the old generations, but needs more care.

I'm particularly anal about maintenance on my $60k truck ($15k engine alone) and I'm pretty happy with the results. I do oil analysis at every oil change and my reports are some of the best seen for a 6.4 per the various diesel forums. I'm not going to skimp on maintenance to save perhaps $200/yr in oil and risk a $15k engine as a result.

Reply to
Pete C.

The packs last more like 5+ years, but it's still an issue.

A greater issue is the time to charge vs. the time to fuel a liquid fueled vehicle. Fueling a liquid fueled vehicle for ~500 miles range takes about 10 min maximum, vs. 8 hours for 15 miles in an EV. There is no way EVs will go beyond niche and ego driven users without resolving that issue.

Fortunately that issue was solved long ago in electric warehouse forklifts where rather than have the forklift down for 6+ hours to recharge, they just swap battery packs with a freshly charged one and the forklift is off and running on the next shift while the previous battery pack recharges.

This is ultimately where EVs need to go and it will require standardized battery packs and robotic automation to change them at the "gas station". This way when your EV is low on charge you can pull into the station, park at the "pump" and a robotic system changes out your battery packs from underneath the vehicle and you're on your way with a full charge in a comparable time to a conventional gas station.

Beyond the standardization of battery packs and under vehicle access to them, this also requires you to own a battery pack in a common pool, something similar to the cylinder exchanges that are common for propane and industrial gasses. This also amortizes the cost of pack replacement and refurbishing into the pool the same as hydro testing and occasional cylinder replacement are absorbed into the pool for gas cylinders.

Those "fixes" will make EVs useable to a substantially larger percentage of the population. Combine that with some new nuke plants, tidal generation and other green electricity sources to provide "free" charging power at residences so you can top up overnight for the next days travel and we it can have a huge impact on overall emissions and oil use. As the batteries improve and longer ranges on a charge are available still more people will be able to utilize EVs.

Those changes are the only way an EV would be useful to me, much of my driving is short local trips where it makes little difference if I drove an EV or my diesel F350, it's still a negligible expense per trip. My longer trips are ~120 miles RT so without a quick pack replacement "gas station" and EV would be useless to me.

Reply to
Pete C.

The problem I see with that is the possibility of trading your brand new battery pack for a 4 year old one that has started to degrade. It's not quite like the Blue Rhino model where a bottle either holds propane or it doesn't. The battery swap might also follow the Blue Rhino plan in that what you get at some stations isn't fully charged.

The problems aren't insurmountable but I would see an initial reluctance.

Reply to
rbowman

That's my theory, oil is cheap. When I was driving, the company I worked for did a lot of oil analysis as the fleet was modernized to Detroit 60 engines. Their oil change schedule went from 12000 to 20000 miles. According to the shop foreman they weren't seeing any significant degradation at 20000 but in his words, "well, you've got to change oil sometime..."

When you're talking 10 gallons of Rotella and 2 filters per change, it adds up. The other side of the story is many of those Detroits made a million miles.

Reply to
rbowman

The Toyota manual recommends 5000 miles oil changes and not much else for the first 100000. 80000 would be 16 changes. At a little less than 4 quarts of oil and a $6 Swix filter, lets say $20, that does beat $5000 by a lot.

Reply to
rbowman

That risk is absorbed into the pool. They can easily have an embedded chip in the packs to track usage and run times so that weak packs are taken out of service and reconditioned / replaced. So you should virtually never have a case where you "fuel up" and the pack only gets you 5 miles before you need to swap again.

I own two argon cylinders that I swap in the Airgas pool. I never have to deal with hydro testing or the potential of the cylinder not passing hydro. I paid for the cylinder once and then just pay for the gas at each swap and factored into that gas cost is the costs of pool hydro testing and the expected amount of failed cylinders in the pool. No reason EV battery packs would be any different.

Reply to
Pete C.

It's obvious to me that using Li-Ion battery packs for electric vehicles will first require that we find a way to recycle the chemicals (like lithium) in Li-Ion battery packs. Otherwise the vast amounts of lithium that are going to be dumped in our landfill sites is going to cause other pollution issues. So, people that say electric cars are environmentally friendlier than gas guzzlers may not be considering the impact of dumping hundreds of pounds of lithium in the landfill site for every car on the road every 6 or 7 years.

Does anyone know whether we can recycle the lithium in Li-Ion battery packs now? What happens to dead Li-Ion battery packs from laptop computers? Do they just get dumped in a landfill site or do we recycle them? If they're not recycled, then that problem needs to be solved before we start producing Li-Ion battery packs each containing hundreds of pounds of lithium with no plan as to what to do with dead Li-Ion battery packs.

Reply to
nestork

Lithium salts are not real toxic and lithium is in great demand for batteries and would be recycled. I don't know about the other battery chemicals but they are probably more toxic.

Reply to
Frank

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