For some electric vehicle owners, recharging now more costly than filling up

Re:For some electric vehicle owners, recharging now more cos... by Johnny555 on Monday February 13, 2023 @11:10PM (#34785172)

I wish there was more emphasis on EV efficiency, many manufacturers make the MPGe hard to find on their websites just like mpg is often hard to find for ICE cars. And I wish they’d publish miles/kWh alongside MPGe (I know it’s a simple conversion but I have to look up the constant each time I do the conversion) to make it easier estimate operating costs.

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Re:For some electric vehicle owners, recharging now more cos... by rektide on Tuesday February 14, 2023 @02:16AM (#34786432)

I think MPGe should absolute be far better promotes. Strong agreement.

But, at the same time, I think the much better efficiency also cloaks a very real issue about what energy costs, which seems like a huge problem. It just seems inexcusable that energy from the pump, likely at best drilled for, piped, shipped, refined, piped again, trucked to stations, and then pumped to your car should be way cheaper than local renewables.

But often, gas is way cheaper per unit of energy, and that seems wrong. According to https://gasprices.aaa.com/ the average gas price in the US is $3.416/gallon. The EPA declares that a gallon of gas is equal to 33.7 kWh. So gas is available right now at 0.10136$/kWh equivalent.

I can't be too outraged, because turning gas to electricity has a very significant loss, where-as what you get from an electric charger may well end up being 90%+ efficient in converting to motive power; that's those MPGe's kicking in. But it still feels maddeningly wild. Why is such an inefficient & far-off, refinement-intensive & crude source of power so much cheaper (for so many) than the power-grid, which has such higher generation efficiency even with fuels, and has such altogether mild distribution losses? How can we scale up renewables faster, in a way that brings prices down? And gas prices have remained absurdly mild for so long.

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Re:For some electric vehicle owners, recharging now more cos... by bryanlarsen on Tuesday February 14, 2023 @07:15AM (#34788276)

It's likely that the two most important metrics for an EV for most consumers are cost and range. The easiest way to keep price down and range up is efficiency. So efficiency is a key consideration for manufacturers to succeed.

It's not a coincidence that Hyundai and Tesla are the Western mass producers with both the highest margins and the highest eficiencies.

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