Let’s be clear, no one buys a $100,000 car
solely to save on the cost of fuel. In
my case, it was the fifth of five reasons I cited here when I
bought my Tesla. But I wanted to figure
out how much electricity my Tesla was using and if that was a measurable
savings on the gas I would have been paying for to run my old car.
Where I live in Canada electricity costs have been rising
steadily for the last few years, and that will continue. The incremental (or highest) cost I pay is
$0.124 per KWh. That was the easy
part. Figuring out how many Kilowatt
Hours of electricity my cars uses was a little tougher. I checked a number of Tesla forums (there are
way too many of them) and found other owners were trying to figure out the same
thing. Everyone, it seemed, was coming
at the problem from a different angle but eventually I figured out an equation
that gave me an answer. I don’t keep a
log of how many KWh of electricity I use every time I drive the car and if I
started doing that it wouldn’t help me with the first 18 months I have owned
the car so I needed my own approach.
Happily, Tesla’s capture plenty of data on energy
consumption including the average Watt Hours per Kilometer driven over the last
10km, 25km or 50km. With that number (an
average of approximately 200 Watt Hours of electricity per km) at $0.124 per Kilowatt
Hour over the 26,000Km the car has logged since purchase works out to:
I tend to own cars for long periods of time (10 yrs is not
unusual and to that end I still own the car I bought in 2001) so that will work
out to around $25,000 over the 10 yrs I expect to own my Tesla which is much
more than I expected.
Now, if you are considering buying an electric vehicle (and
“EV”) a few other options exist that are considerably cheaper than a Tesla
Model S or X. The highly anticipated
Tesla Model 3 is rumoured to be in Beta production currently with a few cars
expected to roll off the assembly line later this year. And at a starting price of US$35,000 (around
$50,000 in Canada) it will fit many more car-buying budgets. The Chevy Bolt is getting rave reviews, even
from an existing Tesla
Model S driver and is priced the same as the Model 3. However, since the Bolt is available in some
US states today and the Model 3 is still a news release rather than a reality
most consumers are left to choose amongst the Prius Highbrid or one of the
existing EVs like the Nissan Leaf or the Honda Insight. The Nissan Leaf is the clear leader in that
category and despite its limited range I see many of them on the road (as well
as parked at local EV Charging stations).
Until recently I hadn’t thought of the economics of owning
an EV, and even when I looked at it in detail before buying my Tesla I found it
was more about the savings in maintenance that really made the difference in my
decision (partly because the alternative to a Tesla Model S for me was a used
Porsche 911 – not exactly comparable cars but that was all part of my decision
making process). The other day I met a
young man who works several jobs and just bought a new Nissan Leaf. One of those jobs was as a Pizza delivery guy
(I did this job in my youth as a direct means to pay for the gas, insurance and
maintenance on my first used cars). This
guy told me he previously drove a used Chevy Geo (a 3-cylinder sub-compact car
from the 90’s that any objective observer would describe as a crappy car) and
where this was primarily (but not entirely) used for his job delivering pizza
it cost him $400/month in gas to run.
Plus maintenance. He proudly
pointed out that the all-in lease cost on his new Nissan Leaf was
$400/month. And his gas costs were now
zero (with essentially no maintenance).
Now, electricity is not free as I calculated above, but this guy lives in an apartment so has to park his car at the grocery store across the street where they have a couple of spots with an EV charger. In my province the monopoly provider of electricity cost is the only entity permitted to do that so others can charge for parking but not for the electricity. In this case, where the parking is free so is are the electrons. And the simple matter of smoothing over relations with the night manager who say this same car parked every night was expertly managed with a couple of large pizzas. Not a bad little story especially when he added that in addition to the $5,000 incentive he got from the government to buy an EV he also got $6,000 from another government program designed to provide an incentive to get old cars off the road. He paid $500 for his old piece of crap and got $6,000 to take it off the road…
Now, electricity is not free as I calculated above, but this guy lives in an apartment so has to park his car at the grocery store across the street where they have a couple of spots with an EV charger. In my province the monopoly provider of electricity cost is the only entity permitted to do that so others can charge for parking but not for the electricity. In this case, where the parking is free so is are the electrons. And the simple matter of smoothing over relations with the night manager who say this same car parked every night was expertly managed with a couple of large pizzas. Not a bad little story especially when he added that in addition to the $5,000 incentive he got from the government to buy an EV he also got $6,000 from another government program designed to provide an incentive to get old cars off the road. He paid $500 for his old piece of crap and got $6,000 to take it off the road…
What both the Model 3 and the Bolt have that sets them apart
from any other affordable EV available today is a substantially larger battery
pack. That helps with “range anxiety”
and makes feasible longer trips or linking together several short trips that
don’t revolve around chargers. The
chargers themselves are getting better as well, such as the growing presence of
CHAdeMO chargers that can
fill an EV with 120km of range in less than half an hour. One of the main problems I can see with the
proliferation of smaller “economy” EVs is how to charge them. I have a garage and installed a 220V
connection to charge my Tesla but I grew up in a house with no garage where we
parked on the street out front. Houses
without garages where the occupants park on the street and apartments or condos
make up a large proportion of the living situations for much of Tesla’s Model 3
market or most people in the market for smaller “economy” EVs. To charge an EV parked on the street in front
of a house would mean running a long extension cord out across the lawn which
is totally impractical. And many apartment
buildings only install one or two EV charging stations in their garages so even
if you can charge your car you still have to move it to your regular parking
space after an allotted amount of time.
The charging issues are a small hurdle to EV ownership and
likely less of a concern for the drivers as long as the benefits of owning that
type of car outweigh the costs by a significant enough margin. With 400,000 Tesla Model 3s on pre-order, the
reduced cost of fuel and maintenance appear to be outweighing the hassle
factor. At least in theory…
