Comment by Grombobulous
21 hours ago
Does this also factor in operating costs of the vehicle? Especially considering gasoline at $4-7/gallon?
Then there’s also the potential scenario of “buyer prefers an EV anyway.”
In my case I’m currently driving a ~10 year old conventional gasoline vehicle that I purchased new, and I plan to keep driving it for roughly another 7-10 years. Given the current automotive product lineups out there I can’t think of a scenario where my next car will involve gasoline regardless of my desire for a backup power source at home.
> Does this also factor in operating costs of the vehicle? Especially considering gasoline at $4-7/gallon?
Depends on the vehicle of course. But for me at least, my 5-speed Civic for $2500 is way cheaper over its expected lifespan than a $7000 Nissan Leaf (and the Civic is way more flexible, since it can actually go more than 100km every 6 hours in the winter). At $1.50/L and 6L/100km, I can drive about 50,000km before I spend more on gasoline than the price difference between the two. The actual breakeven math (assuming 21kWh/100km) is closer to about 65,000km when factoring in electricity at ~$0.12/kWh. Oil changes are negligible (I do my own maintenance and oil changes), and a used Leaf is going to have just as many problems (if not more) with "the rest of the car" as a gas car (suspension, steering, brakes, tires, electrics, interior components, not to mention battery pack services).
If you buy a nicer EV than the break even point goes even further out. At least where I am, the EV equivalent of any gasoline car has a breakeven point of at least 50k km driven, usually more.
> Then there’s also the potential scenario of “buyer prefers an EV anyway.”
Entirely fair, but I'd still buy a generator and an EV. Because coupling your house power to your car just seems like a bad idea (to rely on it, at least; if you live somewhere that you never need to rely on off-grid power, then who really cares). For instance, my house has a sump pump that must run every ~hour or my basement will flood, and during storms that gets down to about 20 minutes. If my area doesn't have power, then I can't charge an EV anywhere nearby, and if I'm powering the house off the EV, how am I going to recharge it without my basement flooding?
I think you’re a huge outlier here. The median person is not doing their own maintenance and oil changes. $2,500 Civic that runs reliably is a meaningless data point. I might as well say I found 128GB of DDR5 RAM at an estate sale for $20.
50km-75km break-even is not a whole lot of kilometers.
You can compare a used first gen leaf’s poor range but in a short amount of time from now the bulk of the used EV market is going to be Teslas and Ioniq 5s that charge fast, are equipped with heat pumps, and get plenty of range.
Not everyone has a sump pump that needs to run every hour. Not everyone even has a basement. If we keep throwing out qualifiers we end up with a scenario that is not relevant to many people.
> 5-speed Civic for $2500
Good grief, what year is that Civic from? LOL. I just bought a 10 year old Corolla for my kid and it was 12 grand. Civics aren't much cheaper.