America’s Cars Are Getting Faster and More Efficient

Re:America’s Cars Are Getting Faster and More Efficient by ebbv on Thursday May 18, 2017 @07:31PM (#14371910)

You'd be surprised at how much the maintenance savings are. They could easily make up the difference in price of the car. Especially when you count the $7500 tax refund for getting an EV. It's not just oil changes but everything else having to do with an ICE you get to skip out on. Plus brake changes are far more rare due to so much regenerative breaking.

Lastly I would add that you can't directly compare the cars on price in that way because the Bolt (and Nissan Leaf) are also much nicer cars than the base $23k Prius with many features the Prius doesn't have.

EDIT: oh and one more thing; I don't know about Utah but most energy companies in the US have different rates for electricity during the day or at night (off peak) and you can easily set your EV to charge overnight, saving even more money.

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Re:America’s Cars Are Getting Faster and More Efficient by davexunit on Thursday May 18, 2017 @08:20PM (#14372144)

>I don't know about Utah but most energy companies in the US have different rates for electricity during the day or at night (off peak) and you can easily set your EV to charge overnight, saving even more money.

Thanks for mentioning this. It is significantly cheaper to charge at night if your energy company drops the price during off-peak hours. That $8 or $9 drops to like $3 or $4 here in MA with National Grid service. I did some really rough math and figured that it would cost about half as much to charge a Chevy Bolt from 0 to 100% than it would be to fill my current car, a 2014 Jetta, with gasoline. My greenhouse gas emissions will go down by over 50% judging from an estimate I got based on how MA currently generates energy.

That said, I put a deposit down on a Bolt Premier but am not sure if I will be buying it because it is damn expensive, even after tax rebates and such.

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