Seems like bullshit to me. Recognizing the logical fallacy here, it’s still worth pointing out the firm has a history of working with major auto manufacturers, and is headquartered near Detroit. Their CEO, Patrick L. Anderson, also served under a Republican governor in multiple roles and is a contributor to numerous conservative research institutes.
Yeah, this is bullshit. I charge my car at home by leaving it plugged in overnight. Costs me literally a few bucks a month to keep it charged. I don’t even notice it on my electricity bill.
If I were charging at fee-based charging stations all the time, the story would be different, but who the hell does that?!?
We were looking at getting an EV without being able to charge it at home. Charging it at public chargers here in the UK would’ve cost about the same as petrol. But having to rely on the public charging infrastructure in its current state made us decide against it, at least for now.
Out of curiosity, why couldn’t you charge it at home? Most electric cars can have their chargers plugged into a standard wall outlet. It’s slower, but it works fine.
I’d love to have one too but I live in the city now instead of the suburbs. My car is parked on a concrete pad in the alley behind my house, a good 80 feet from any electricity. I could probably charge at work though by just parking in the warehouse and plugging in to one of the many extension cords we have around.
I mean, if your employer doesn’t mind, that could be a hell of a cost-effective way to keep it topped up.
I’m the VP so I’d better be able to get away with it lol
Yeah, I’m gonna guess you won’t get in trouble for it then.
A bit difficult to do if where your living you aren’t able to run the charging cable from the inside of your house to the outside.
Ah. Yeah, if you don’t have any external outlets, that would make an electric car less practical.
Same as what others said. We basically don’t have a driveway. The UK government is pushing for public chargers to become more reliable and easier to use though. This reinforced our fears that the current infrastructure may be unreliable but at the same time really gives hope that it will be good enough for us in the very near future. Our employer’s office also doesn’t currently offer charging, which some of our friends get, which is really nice for people in my situation.
If you are plugging into an outlet in your garage (level 1) you are only charging up 3 - 5 miles per hour. Putting in a 240v 40 amp (level 2) will get you 20 - 25 miles per hour i.e. a complete recharge for current batteries in 12 hours.
I made a similar decision. The only garages available to me are unpowered, not cheap, and not even super close to my apartment door. If I felt I could get my landlord to build the infrastructure for parking lot charging and penalize ice vehicles for parking in charging spaces I probably would’ve gone electric
This is such a major issue. I genuinely wonder if we apartment and non-garage having individuals are going to be just shit out of luck for a long time. People normally don’t care about us at all.
Yeah I figure that’ll be the case. Like I mentioned it to my gentrification happy landlord and apparently they’d never even considered it
People who live in apartments. Or generally places where they can’t just plug in at home.
It seems inconsistent with other studies and the article only states results, not assumptions. Most importantly: where?
I don’t see how working with major manufacturers or being near Detroit makes it likely that this group wants to push an ICE narrative. Ford and GM have some of the most advanced electric vehicle systems in the world and are shipping more EV units than competitors.
The whole article and the report, nowhere is it explained how they get their numbers. What fuel prices or electricity prices have they used, what mileage for the cars. It’s kind of crucial info, and not really difficult to calculate either.
Yeah because the article is absolute bullshit. The bias was immediately evident.
Then why’d you post it? 😅
Because I saw the article on my newsfeed and clicked to see what it was about. I risked the impression I editorialized the headline by adding the “Research firm claims” but thought it might help readers here make up their own mind.
I think it’s good to read and criticise the materials that “opponents” read.
The report gives a quick summary of what they include, but not any details or math.
The cost of underlying energy (gas, diesel, electric)
State excise taxes charged for road maintenance
The cost to operate a pump or charger
The cost to drive to a fueling station (deadhead miles)Elsewhere it says it assumes 12k miles in a year and is focused on the midwest and Michigan in particular. As it so happens, Michigan charges for registration based on the car value. EVs cost more than ICE vehicles in the same market segment most of the time. This would fall under excise taxes that they include.
I wouldn’t be surprised if they also tacked on the cost to install a L2 charger once as “cost to operate a pump or charger” — intentionally ignoring that it’s a one-time fee to support EVs at a home. With those two data points they could easily add >$1000 to the cost to “charge” an EV for one year if that is what they wanted to do.
The people making the report clearly picked criteria that sounds reasonable but also intentionally misleads people. Not a surprise.
I could give an easy estimate for the costs with napkin math. A quick gooble search says that a long-range EV might require up to 100 kWh of power to charge (high estimate) and where I live the electricity cost is about $0.11/kWh. That’s $11 for a “fill up” of a long-range EV.
A tank of gas that could get me 300 miles is closer to $40.
$11 < $40.
Research firm is bullshitting. It costs like $1-$2 for me to fill up my car with electricity at home.
Agreed. I have spent $8 in the past month, and I have a 60 mile round trip commute to the office 2 days a week.
Where i live its literally 5 times cheaper. I call bullshit.
This is pretty similar to the numbers I ran myself. Public charging costs about the same as gas, and home electricity (particularly if in a cheap area) is where the savings come from. This was using US numbers, which has some of the cheapest gas in the world.
Does not include the cost of environmental impact of burning fossil fuels… Which we are all starting to pay.
From August 2022 to August 2023 I’ve spent $220 dollars TOTAL on keeping my EV charged…
I got blasted with a $700 electric bill this month, and we didn’t really do anything new or different. So this doesn’t surprise me really.
If electricity is going to cost this much, I guess the only way electric gets “cheaper” than gas is by hiking gas prices until its cheaper to charge. Consumers are never going to win though.
What was your bill the month before? How much more or less did you run the AC this month? Did you take any road trips?
You can make your own electricity at home if you have the room, by installing solar panels.
IMO everyone should invest in off-grid solar if you can manage it. I have electricity on tap no matter what the power company or their wires are doing.
Or if gas is actually cheaper than electricity, just install a trailer hitch and a hitch cargo carrier, then mount an inverter generator on your cargo carrier and charge the EV on the go with gas.
Are you somewhere that is a lot hotter than normal and working the AC? Did your kwh rates change?
There should be something that lets you know why it is higher if you didn’t really really do anything different.
If you have a Rivian R1T or GMC Hummer, the cost to charge at home isn’t much different; it’s about $17.70 per 100 miles.
Assuming the manufacturers claims are accurate (which is a big assumtion I know) that R1T, at the current US average electricity price of $16.14 per kWh, is $7.26/100mi.
The R1T description says the lowest battery size is 105 kWh with a range of 230 miles. This would give a “miles per kilowatt-hour” of 2.19 miles / kWh. Using the national average electricity price of $0.170 per kWh, the cost per mile is ($0.170/kWh) / (2.19 miles/kWh) = $0.0776/mile.
Using a Honda Ridgeline for gas equivalence, it has a combined 22 miles per gallon rating. With a national gasoline price average of $3.803 per gallon, the cost per mile is ($3.803/gallon) / (22 miles/gallon) = $0.172/mile.
So by these calculations the electric option is a little less than half the price of a gasoline equivalent. Perhaps charging the R1T in public with a premium, such as with superchargers, the cost per kWh may go up, but that’s a disingenuous comparison so I agree with you that the article is making some big assumptions.
This is absolutely stupid. The only way you’re spending more on EV charging is if you get the most expensive at-home charger with the most expensive professional installation, and then never use it because you only charge at the most expensive level-3 chargers. I almost exclusively charge my Bolt for free, but even when I pay for the electricity it’s the cost equivalent of getting 120-150 mpg. The level-3 chargers like Electrify America come out to be in the same ballpark as gas in terms of cost per mile, maybe even a little more… But you’d have to use them to ridiculous excess for the overall cost of driving to even approach ICE vehicles.
Notes: Costs are calculated for vehicles driving 12,000 purposeful miles per year. Uses energy prices, gas taxes, and EV registration fees in the Midwest or State of Michigan. Representative models within segments were selected on the basis of sales volume and to include a variety of manufacturers. Entry, mid, and luxury segments are defined based on typical purchase price. …
As in the first edition, AEG calculated all four categories of costs involved in fueling both EVs and ICE vehicles across benchmark use cases that reflect real-world driving conditions for U.S. households. The costs included:
- The cost of the underlying energy (gasoline or diesel fuel, or electricity)
- State excise taxes charged on fuel and EVs for road maintenance
- The cost of operating a pump or charger
- The cost of driving to and from fueling stations (deadhead miles)
This seems like the Anderson Economic Group is playing with statistics to make gas cars seem more attractive.
- the cost of energy in Michigan is above the national average.
- EV registration costs in Michigan are among the highest in the country
- 80% of EV owners will charge their cars at home, making including costs driving to and from public outlets and the higher rate charged there yield (intentionally?) misleading results.
- There is a marked loss of performance and an increase of energy-per-mile when using EVs in cold climates, like the kind Michigan has
If you look at this map of savings with EVs vs. gas cars, you’ll find that most states have much larger savings with electric vehicles over gas vehicles, and there’s still savings when driving in Michigan by their accounting!
Michigan is the most expensive state to run an electric vehicle with an average annual cost of $5,076
TL;DR: Disregard this study.
So if I was to be really generous, this study shows, at best, that it’s cheaper to own a ICE car if your living in an apartment without charging capabilities in Michigan?
I’m not reading further down the line to see but did anyone notice the pic used in this post to show someone not understanding where their fuel door is? Back out and back in correctly and pump gas like a normal human being.
That’s a Costco, they specificially tell you to use any lane and the hose is long enough to reach. That person is just following directions. The stations are built with one way traffic flow and get very busy, it’s not practical to queue for a particular side of the car.
Ah! Today I learned that happens. Thanks for letting me know.
MOST cars have the fuel door on the left, Costco tends to have more cars queue in the lanes that match up with the left hand fuel door so regardless of what side your fuel door is on grab the lanes with the pump on the right of your car and you’ll get through a bit faster since you can pull it around.
If we are talking just filling up - I went from $200/month with gasoline to $15-20/ month with my ev and charging at home. Obviously YMMV
Cost to fill up is not cost of ownership.
Given that oil changes don’t cost that much, electric cars almost universally cost significantly more than the same ICE car, and insurance rates are tied heavily to the value of the car, ICE/Hybrids still have a pretty good advantage on non-fillup costs. If/When electric cars cost the same as an ICE car to buy, that math with change considerably.
Yes, of course, oil changes are the only additional cost of an ICE engine /s
What kind of maniac intentionally only charges at public charging stations? That would be the only way I could see to make filling up an EV cost more. Maybe on-street parking apartment dwellers who also can’t charge at work would fit that description.
