Will you go back to ICE?
Discussion
I've currently got an ICE bike, but both our cars are EV's. I really like them. I like how they drive, some of the techy bits they do... and the cost to run.
But no matter how much I like home charging, the drive, the tech... if ICE cars were significantly cheaper to run, I'd change back.
But no matter how much I like home charging, the drive, the tech... if ICE cars were significantly cheaper to run, I'd change back.
phil4 said:
I've currently got an ICE bike, but both our cars are EV's. I really like them. I like how they drive, some of the techy bits they do... and the cost to run.
But no matter how much I like home charging, the drive, the tech... if ICE cars were significantly cheaper to run, I'd change back.
Each to their own, but if our EV cost the same to run as the ICE equivalent (and at the minute the comparison is 6ppm v 27ppm) I'd still stick with the EV. A couple of public charging stops per year don't come close to overriding all of the benefits for me in a daily use vehicle. But no matter how much I like home charging, the drive, the tech... if ICE cars were significantly cheaper to run, I'd change back.
Evanivitch said:
LukeBrown66 said:
Lol and the instant impact from owning a Tesla is to go out and buy a 911,
Now we see why these types of cars will NEVER be available for at least 15 years to the poor.
the real world is never going to be occupied by these things, we will however be on electric buses, trains etc as we will be blackmailed, taxed and priced out of ordinary cars
Now we see why these types of cars will NEVER be available for at least 15 years to the poor.
the real world is never going to be occupied by these things, we will however be on electric buses, trains etc as we will be blackmailed, taxed and priced out of ordinary cars
On a short 30 mile Sunday morning cycle I saw dozens of electric cars. It's mid Glamorgan, there are no local emissions controls on car ownership, it's a reasonably wealthy county but only by Welsh standards.
There are MGs starting in mid-20k and cheaper models on the way. There were early Leafs around £8k until the second hand market exploded. Battery EV sales are now approaching 20% of all new car registrations. In 2-5 years the second hand market will be full of them.
But you wouldn't want to own one unless you only use it to go to down the road. Most seem to have lost 3 or 4 bars on the SOH monitor (first bar is 15% loss, apparently, each bar after that is 6.25% loss), so their already paltry range is well down.
I've been looking because it's pretty much the only thing that might "work" for me if purely looking at economics at the moment. I need to be able to do, minimum 70 miles a day. I can charge at either end, but charging is limited. Additionally charging is done based on time, so LEAFs without the optional 6.6 kW charger is probably going to cost me just as much as fuel (£1/hr for 3 hours, then £3/hr after that). I'd need to find a LEAF with 6.6kW charger and enough battery life left to be sure of being able to do the round trip without charging in all weathers (worst case).
Anything else with decent range is getting on for £20k and higher. My Mazda currently does about 45mpg (petrol as well) and is worth about £5k. Swapping to a cheap LEAF would therefore be the most purely economical thing to do. Anything else requires £10-15k upfront to buy and would therefore take far too long a time to even come back to where I started.
I wrote a long rambling post, but essentially I did some sums in excel and it just doesn't make any financial sense to swap a perfectly good, working ICE vehicle, that does 45mpg and is bought, paid for and money forgotten about, for an EV in order to save on fuel. A cheap LEAF for 10k, would take 4 years to break even and start saving on fuel, provided prices stay the same (1.50/l, 25p/kWh). If they double, then it takes half the time. A decent EV with decent range is more like 20k, so would take significantly longer.
That changes if for some reason the car has to be changed (big bill or write off) so you're having to buy a new car anyway or have committed mentally to buying a new car.
Also probably wouldn't apply if you're already on a PCP/Lease and are used to £300 - £400 a month on a car payment. If you're doing that, might as well be paying for an EV as long as it fits your use case.
Otispunkmeyer said:
I wrote a long rambling post, but essentially I did some sums in excel and it just doesn't make any financial sense to swap a perfectly good, working ICE vehicle, that does 45mpg and is bought, paid for and money forgotten about, for an EV in order to save on fuel. A cheap LEAF for 10k, would take 4 years to break even and start saving on fuel, provided prices stay the same (1.50/l, 25p/kWh). If they double, then it takes half the time. A decent EV with decent range is more like 20k, so would take significantly longer.
That changes if for some reason the car has to be changed (big bill or write off) so you're having to buy a new car anyway or have committed mentally to buying a new car.
Also probably wouldn't apply if you're already on a PCP/Lease and are used to £300 - £400 a month on a car payment. If you're doing that, might as well be paying for an EV as long as it fits your use case.
I did the same...only I figured a cheap £5k LEAF (I was looking to see what the cheapest I could get one for rather than actually one I'd buy) would take 10 years to pay for itself *IF* electricity was free! That changes if for some reason the car has to be changed (big bill or write off) so you're having to buy a new car anyway or have committed mentally to buying a new car.
Also probably wouldn't apply if you're already on a PCP/Lease and are used to £300 - £400 a month on a car payment. If you're doing that, might as well be paying for an EV as long as it fits your use case.
Again, it may well change if the current car needs to be changed but with a paid off car and no intention of replacing it the financial sums just don't work.
When you take the purchase price into account an EV is massively more expensive if you're not doing enough mileage.
It would help of course if there was something I *wanted* as it would be far easier to then justify (man maths etc).
I refuse to get an SUV, the nearest thing would be something I'd like would be the Peugeot 508 SW (Hybrid)...but it's not meant to be that good to drive.
Fastdruid said:
I did the same...only I figured a cheap £5k LEAF (I was looking to see what the cheapest I could get one for rather than actually one I'd buy) would take 10 years to pay for itself *IF* electricity was free!
Can you explain these maths to me?I truly don't understand what you are saying.
ZesPak said:
Fastdruid said:
I did the same...only I figured a cheap £5k LEAF (I was looking to see what the cheapest I could get one for rather than actually one I'd buy) would take 10 years to pay for itself *IF* electricity was free!
Can you explain these maths to me?I truly don't understand what you are saying.
The way I am looking at it (and remember this ignores all other EV benefits aside from running cost).
Current car: Mazda 3, 2.0 Petrol, Manual, 15k miles per year. With a bit of sensible driving on my 35mi commute to work, it will average 45 MPG at least (currently its doing 50). A tank of fuel will last me a work week and day.
At this moment in time the car is bought and paid for. It's worth about £5k. In fact it was paid for in full about 6 years ago. So for me that money is gone, its written off, it doesn't factor in my life or my savings going forward. But buying an EV now and shelling out 5, 10, 15K would make a noticeable dent to me.
So at £1.50 a litre, my yearly driving (mostly work) is costing about £2300. If it was £2.00/L it would be about £3000. Ignoring insurance because I need a car and will be paying it anyway. This car only costs me fuel, oil&filter change (<£100 which i do myself) and £30 tax. Tyres again, would have a car anyway and so would be buying a set nearly yearly anyway so discount them.
I could get an EV to reduce my running cost in terms of fuel. But the outlay, even for a cheap EV (I found a 10k LEAF 24kWh with 11 bars left) basically needs 4 years of driving to break even before I start saving money on running cost. Assuming fuel/leccy price doesn't change. If fuel goes to £2.00 everywhere then it's more like 2.3 years (assuming 23p/kWh which is my current tariff).
I could switch Octopus which gives 7.5p/kWh. But that is only for 4hrs a night (so I'd need to buy a faster wall charger) and their day rate is 30p/kWh. So I'd need to balance the house consumption in order to benefit. But even still, at 1.50 a litre, still looking at 2.5 years before that cheap LEAF starts to save you money.*** and unless I could charge about 30 kWh in those 4 hours it doesn't help much as I'd have to charge at work which is £££ (because time based! which hurts slow charging cars like the LEAF)
Given a perfectly serviceable ICE that is all paid for and owes me nothing. Moving to an EV purely to save on fuel costs doesn't quite work for me.
If you're buying a new car anyway (maybe you want a new one, maybe a big bill means its time or maybe the old car is written off) then it definitely makes sense to look at EVs assuming you're not going to spend £2k on a bangernomics project and are going to spend a decent wedge on something fairly new.
If you're on the PCP/Lease train then again, come contract time, if you can get into an EV for the same monthlies and it works for your use, EV. Do it.
- * I suppose another way to look at it is, if you trade in the car for 5K and spend another 5K to get the cheap LEAF, you could look at that like you've spent the next 2.5 years fuel money upfront. And if the the price of fuel continues to rise, that figure gets smaller as you've kinda "locked" in that fuel price.
Edited by Otispunkmeyer on Thursday 10th March 15:50
ZesPak said:
Fastdruid said:
I did the same...only I figured a cheap £5k LEAF (I was looking to see what the cheapest I could get one for rather than actually one I'd buy) would take 10 years to pay for itself *IF* electricity was free!
Can you explain these maths to me?I truly don't understand what you are saying.
I only did 6k last year but half of that would be utterly unsuitable for an even a brand new LEAF (either too far, towing or with family, dog, luggage *AND* too far) so would either need to keep the existing car or hire something. If I assume that we'd want 2 weeks and hiring something like a Galaxy we're looking at £2k for two weeks away (not even considering other things). That makes it more cost effective to keep the current car.
So the LEAF would be a second car and only replacing *some* of the journeys.
Primarily it would be replacing the school run. Although also some other smaller journeys (taking son to guitar lesson, daughter to ballet, that kind of thing).
School run adds up to ~1000 miles a year. Current car is averaging 20mpg on the school run, 1000 miles at 20mpg is 50 gallons or 227 litres which is (at the price I paid on Tuesday) £331. No tax on the LEAF of course but yearly we have MOT of course which is £35 and a service which I've assumed is £100. Ignoring tyres, repairs and insurance.
Assume paying £5k for one (although currently the cheapest is £6k on autotrader atm) and electricity is free. Payback time is...26 years.
But hey, lets assume we use it more. Double the mileage to 2k, payback time is 10 years.
If I assume it can be used for everything except long journeys etc then at very best case using it 3.2k/year then payback is 7 years.
That isn't really likely though as have two children plus a big dog so hardly practical for days out etc as can't really fit anything else in the boot of a LEAF if the dog is in there! Hence why I've assumed 2k/year.
If we put in actual electricity costs it makes it far worse (and for the record 17p/kW isn't even what we're paying at the moment and is a generous rate).
If we consider doing 1000 miles a year with electricity costs at 3.5miles per kW and 17p/kW then the payback time is 37 years.
If we consider doing 2000 miles a year with electricity costs at 3.5miles per kW and 17p/kW then the payback time is 12 years.
If we consider doing 3000 miles a year with electricity costs at 3.5miles per kW and 17p/kW then the payback time is 8 years.
If we consider doing 4000 miles a year with electricity costs at 3.5miles per kW and 17p/kW then the payback time is 6 years.
If we consider doing 5000 miles a year with electricity costs at 3.5miles per kW and 17p/kW then the payback time is 5 years.
If we consider doing 6000 miles a year with electricity costs at 3.5miles per kW and 17p/kW then the payback time is 4 years.
The real issue there being that an old LEAF right now is already a 9 year old car. If you're talking about a payback of 12 years then it's going to be iffy if it will make it (through rust or other failures, I'm not even talking about the fear of battery degradation).
That said, OTOH if I could pick up a LEAF that had a shagged battery that would only do ~10 miles range for ~£500 I'd snap it up.
Edited by Fastdruid on Thursday 10th March 16:11
If a leaf costs you £5k, and your IC car you compare it to did about 45mpg, that's about 15p per mile.
Depending on electricity cost, the Leaf could be anywhere from 2 to 10p per mile.
If you're saving the minimum 5p/mile the Leaf would take 100,000 miles to pay for itself in crude fuel only man-maths
Dial in depreciation of the IC car by mileage and you might slash that to 30k miles.
If you can charge it from solar or get cheap electricity, payback in 15k miles is possible.
Dump the IC car and lose the fixed costs, the sums are different again.
Everyone will slice and dice the numbers differently.
IMHO, I'd want to write down the value of the Leaf's battery fairly quickly, can't see one making 200k miles!
Next year there will be more and better e-bangers on the market, so the residual value of the Leaf might be questionable.
Or demand might be up, who knows?
Mate of mine has done the Leaf thing, he pencils in a budget for hiring a proper car if he ever wants one.
He's happy, it suits him to know that additional 20 mile journeys cost him very little.
YMMV as they say.
Depending on electricity cost, the Leaf could be anywhere from 2 to 10p per mile.
If you're saving the minimum 5p/mile the Leaf would take 100,000 miles to pay for itself in crude fuel only man-maths
Dial in depreciation of the IC car by mileage and you might slash that to 30k miles.
If you can charge it from solar or get cheap electricity, payback in 15k miles is possible.
Dump the IC car and lose the fixed costs, the sums are different again.
Everyone will slice and dice the numbers differently.
IMHO, I'd want to write down the value of the Leaf's battery fairly quickly, can't see one making 200k miles!
Next year there will be more and better e-bangers on the market, so the residual value of the Leaf might be questionable.
Or demand might be up, who knows?
Mate of mine has done the Leaf thing, he pencils in a budget for hiring a proper car if he ever wants one.
He's happy, it suits him to know that additional 20 mile journeys cost him very little.
YMMV as they say.
Gassing Station | EV and Alternative Fuels | Top of Page | What's New | My Stuff