Compared to gas cars: Kia K4 hatchback is $26k with a lot more creature-comforts. Gets 34mpg, so if $6/gal gas is here to stay that's $0.17 per mile of fuel costs. My EV gets almost exactly 4miles/kW average and I pay $0.21 per kW so that's about $0.05 per mile.
So $0.12 per mile saved in fuel costs implies about 80k miles for break-even.
This excludes costs of servicing, which should be higher on the gas car.
[edit typo'd an extra 0 it's 80k miles for break-even]
[edit2]
After looking up my energy bill I pay $0.27 so it's between 10 and 11 cents per mile saved. Break-even is still under 100k miles.
That's based on the manufacturer's "lets not upset our dealers" maintenance schedule and is completely unnecessary. In reality you can probably bring your EV to the dealer once every 4 years or so. On that schedule you should:
- check the brake fluid for water
- change the cabin air filter
- change the gearbox oil
- check/change the battery coolant
If you're going in more frequent than that you're getting a very expensive windshield wiper replacement.
The real kicker is going to be repair costs. An EV has about 10% of the moving parts of an ICE car, so in theory repairs should be much less frequent. But if the ICE is a Toyota and the EV is a Tesla, YMMV.
You'll probably have to replace the battery at around 250,000 miles but at that point the car is worth pretty much scrap value anyways.
FWIW, my 10+ year spreadsheet of the maintenance costs on my last ICE lined up pretty well with that - about 1/3 of the costs were ICE-specific issues, 2/3 were for parts that would have been common to an EV.
> In reality you can probably bring your EV to the dealer once every 4 years or so.
Not really, I need twice-yearly seasonal tire changes/rotations.
How much of that 2/3 was brakes? In 100,000 miles on our ICE we replaced brakes twice and they likely need replacing soon again. On our EV at 100,000 miles they look like they'll last another 100,000.
Brakes were ~8.5% of the total, or ~17% of the 2/3. Some combination of being light on brake use (manual + efficient driving) and the road salt used here means I replaced the brakes from corrosion before they wore down from use.
I could budget for yearly service (rather than the never-service-until-required plan I went with) that would presumably lengthen the lives of my brakes as far as corrosion is concerned, but at current shop rates that would cost more than what my brake replacements cost.
>Not really, I need twice-yearly seasonal tire changes/rotations.
Are you somewhere where you actually need dedicated winter tires or have you just convinced yourself that rocking all weathers all year isn't feasible?
That feels like a bit of a trick question - as big as I am on dedicated winter tires, I think a lot of people are sleeping on modern all weathers.
So, living in Alberta, and spending significant time in the AB/BC rockies in the winter, I still think all weathers would be feasible, but I'm more comfortable with dedicated winters. (For that matter, when I'm buying winters, I'm always borderline on whether I should get studded or not.) (And as a parallel effect, with dedicated winters I can also run higher performance all-season tires during the summer.)
And if I ran all-weathers with my driving patterns, I'd still want to be rotating them yearly, so that would cut my dealer visits by half, but definitely not to once every 4 years.
And tying back to my last ICE vehicle - for the first 4 years of its life it would have been okay without a dealer visit if you took tires/oil changes out of the equation, but not for any 4-year period after that. There are just too many random little things that break down in cars over time. (e.g. after 12 years or so the cruise control buttons were getting really mushy - I replaced them myself for the cost of the $65 part, but YMMV on whether you feel a service visit is warranted when removing your steering wheel air bag.)
Op is in a salt state (road salt, snowy winters). Dedicated snow tires are much better than all seasons to the degree I will take a 2wd Civic (with lsd) on snow tires over 4wd 4Runner on all seasons.
Also rotating tires every 10-20k miles is good because most cars run higher camber in the rear (inner shoulder wear) than front and the fronts wear the outside shoulder more because of turning. Swapping them extends tire life by spreading the wear.
Not sure if I'm out of touch, but this looks like such a minor difference in cost that I'd expect people to not even take cost into consideration while making the EV vs gas decision.
Factors like the (perceived) environment friendliness, comfort and (in)convenience are likely to be much more important.
California (and many other states) also charges you an additional annual EV registration fee of $121 in lieu of gas taxes. There was some noise earlier this year about a federal EV tax too.
$0.21 was from memory, so I pulled up my bill and it was actually low:
Southern California Edison on the time-of-use plan, charging during "Super off peak." Note that nowhere on the bill do they show one number for how much you pay per kWh. These numbers will change next month as we go from "Winter" to "Summer"
Delivery charges: $0.17664
CCA Cost responsibility surcharge: $0.02007
Nonbypassable charges: $0.00644 + $0.00591
Fixed recovery charge: $0.00619
Generation charge: $0.05958
Unless I typoed something again (oops 800k) that works out to $0.27 for the cheapest I can pay in winter. I compared last fall and this was by far the cheapest plan offered to me for overnight charging.
Varies widely by state and other factors. I'm at around $0.18 for 1kWh when you look at the overall bill including generation, supply, and all other fees.
(My car averages 3.3 miles / kWh, so ~$0.055 / mile assuming 100% charge efficiency... I'm using a 120V outlet so it's probably 75-80% charge efficiency, pushing the cost to ~$0.068 / mile.)
So $0.12 per mile saved in fuel costs implies about 80k miles for break-even.
This excludes costs of servicing, which should be higher on the gas car.
[edit typo'd an extra 0 it's 80k miles for break-even]
[edit2]
After looking up my energy bill I pay $0.27 so it's between 10 and 11 cents per mile saved. Break-even is still under 100k miles.