If you get all the subsidies, you're looking at less than $2,500 per year. I think that most people will save $500+ on gas and oil changes and PG&E rates, so for the three years, let's say that you pay $6,000 all in.
Essentially any new car will lose $6,000 in value over three years. You could lower your TCO by buying used, for sure, but if you care about worn finishes, little QOL things like bluetooth audio and reasonably good climate control, and lower risk of inconvenient maintenance, then I think the Leaf is pretty amazingly good.
IF you can deal with a 90 mile range. That's the big killer. But as a second car or for some people, it's kind of amazing.
I think that's only true from 11pm-7AM, which obviously is good if you're charging an EV, but it compensates by raising your daytime rates, which isn't a good deal for most people with more traditional domestic electric workloads.
So I wouldn't exactly interpret this as a straightforward "lower your rates". Or am I missing something?
A few years back SCE had a EV-TOU plan that was peak hours only from 10am-6pm, and it was very easy to save money on that plan.
Right now with our relatively limited driving, it appears E6 is better for me, but I’m sure if you drive enough, the 50% discount at night is worth it.
The leaf is for sale in Belgium at €32-38K.
Which is why the relevant comparison point is how much a car you actually buy would drop in price.
But what about my life in wide open spaces...
I agree with this. Electric cars are still affordable only to the affluent. Even a Nissan Leaf costs over $30k.
> I drive 5-10 thousands miles a year, and at $2/gallon gas, I'm looking at a total expense of 4-500 dollars per year.
This, however, seems really optimistic. 10k miles for $500 in gas assumes $2/gallon and 40 mpg, which is the EPA rating for highway miles in a Civic. Most people are driving >10k miles/year. Most people don't spend 100% of their miles on open highway at optimal speed, nor do most people drive a new car with max efficiency. And most people don't have $2/gallon gas even in the US (the average is closer to $2.50 currently).
Driving 12-15k/year, getting 25mpg, paying $2.50/gallon, you'd be looking at $1200-$1500/year for gas. That's still not enough to offset the difference in an electric car unless you assume long ownership and no major costs to, say, replace the battery pack at 5 years.
I just now ran a Carfax report and found no fewer than 7 electric Ford Focus cars within 50 miles of my zipcode for less than $15k used. Two of them are less than $10k. Not sure what "affluent" means to you.
I can buy a 2013 electric Focus for $13k. I can buy a 2012 BMW 328i for $14k. Are BMWs also affordable now?
A 5 year old base 3-series has always been affordable, unless you include maintenance and the price/availability of parts.
Not sure about that Focus, but electric cars have vastly fewer moving parts which should help quite a bit.
I know people that spent that much just replacing a BMW's transmission. Yea, not free but everything else should be cheap so maintenance costs are likely to be far less over the next 5 - 10 years.
Edit: I do wonder how many of these "cheap" electric cars will ever have a replacement battery pack. When your car value drops below $5000, are you really going to spend $3000 (guesstimate including labor) to replace the battery?
Anyway, this might change if they are more common, but for now used electrics seem to have a significant price premium suggesting people think replacing older battery packs is probably a good long term deal.
Maybe. Depends on how you interpret the numbers. The electric Focus seems to command a premium of ~20% over the SE for a comparable used car near me, but the MSRP is >50% over the SE new. So you could see that as used buyers believing that the electric is worth 20% more than the comparable used IC, or you could see that as buyers believing that the a value of an electric drops much more rapidly than the value of an IC. Maybe after a couple more years these lines cross and the IC commands a premium. I honestly don't know.
If a new x kwh battery pack cost 10k then but a new xkwh battery pack is only 4k new today then predicted deprecation calculations should arguably be based on the 4k price not the 10k initial price unless you expect such dramatic price drops to continue.
In any case, I think the current used prices would be vastly lower if people expected the kind of range and lifetime limitations you get from not replacing the batteries.
It has a 70k warranty on all major systems and 2 years of road side assistance. Which reminds me I can remove that from my insurance coverage and save about $15 a month.
I was spending over $1000 a year maintaining my old car so for the same or less expense I now have what I consider a much nicer car and modern features. It's also a lot more fun to drive.
Nissan didn't (and still might not) have active cooling in their batteries and was seeing high failure rates in states like Arizona. Because of this, Nissan ended up extending battery warranties to 8 years / 100,000 miles. Basically if there is anything wrong with the battery or it's capacity drops below 9 bars (starts at 12), then Nissan will replace it.
Combined state and federal deductions on EVs were up to 50% of the purchase or lease price of a Leaf and could be deducted over several years. This combined with annual fuel savings when gas was $4 a gallon meant people could drive a new car for little more than the cost of insurance since Nissan was including free charging at qualified stations for 2 years. So a lot of Leafs were bought or leased and being dumped on the market now that all the incentives are drying up.
Gas has been ~$2 where I live for a very long time, and you're right, I'm closer to 5 than 10k miles, and much of it is city.
I don't travel much though. :-)
I assure you that even at nearly $8/gallon over here, an electric vehicle still didn't make much sense when we were buying a new car last year. Even the cheapest Leaf was so much more expensive than a well specced VW Polo that it made no sense to go electric, we did the calculation and the difference in price would not be returned in the savings over the time we are likely to keep the car for.
A Prius is 46 combined, the Civic is only 32 combined (as per fuelly). The base Civic uses 50% more fuel than a Prius, I'd hardly consider that "nominal", that's the difference between a 6.2L V8 powered Corvette (22 combined on fuelly) and a Civic.
Another way to look at it is, $2/gallon gas in a Prius is $3/gallon in a Civic.
Not everyone's concern is solely cost, of course. Some of us are happy to pay a little more for a car that eliminates our families largest contribution to global warming. Yes, new Tesla's and other EVs are not cheaper than ICE vehicles today. The Model S has only been available for 5 years. You can't expect EVs to beat ICE vehicles with over 100 years of engineering from minute 1. Give it some time.
Even elderly drivers that I know in rural areas in the US have a difficult time staying in 5K-10K miles per year.
Someone living in a rural or suburban area in the US has a 30 mile round trip for just about anything. Even 3 trips a week would put you above 5K miles. And you won't be getting 40mpg on those roads.
So, either you really don't do much (possible) at which point delivery probably suffices as you have minimal needs.
Or, you don't have to drive very far, which would tend to place you in a dense suburb or urban setting.
Or, you could, of course, simply be one of the lucky people who live in a rural/sparse suburban setting that just happens to have everything you need within a walk or very short drive. Those places do exist--the number of people who have the opportunity to live in them is very small, however.
To illustrate, I recently spec'd out a honda civic, with the base model costing $19k USD, and looking at even hybrids like the chevy volt and prius, I'm basically paying a premium of $4k to $15k for what amounts to a nominal gain in mileage. It just doesn't make sense when the civic is cheaper and more fun to drive (huge consideration when you spend more than 10 minutes commuting every day.) Drop the honda to a fit, and the straight IC is even more of a hands-down winner.
Mileage standards are probably the most effective tool at reducing automobile emissions, and I wish more people costed that out and understood the economic impact, especially on poor people, before coming to any debate on the subject.
Edit: I realize this is more of an american perspective on an article about a european problem. I wish I could bike safely where I live, but the infrastructure costs would probably be tremendous given how spread out everything is here.