Quote:
Originally Posted by acottawa
Someone would have to be a pretty hard core driver to get savings like that out of saving a few dollars/100km on fuel and oil changes and spark plugs (I guess a timing belt eventually). Such a power user would probably not like the capacity decline in the battery and battery replacement would negate a lot of those savings.
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Maintenance and servicing is a much bigger expense than many people think.
Giving an approximate lifespan of 150,000km (cars typically run for a lot more than that, but let's be conservative), that's $3,000 worth of charging on an EV and $15,000 worth of gas on an ICE.. so a difference of $12k and we haven't even thought of other items yet.
As for battery degradation, that's not nearly as much of a concern as the ICE lobby would have you think. People with 4 year old Nissan Leafs with a ton of mileage who have reported nearly no loss of battery capacity. The lifespan of a battery pack is very long, often comparable to the car itself.
Urbanists should actually be worried about EVs for this reason; they have the potential to considerably reduce the cost of driving. In the new EV age that is coming, once you have a car, it will cost very little to use it. So anyone who has to get a car for
anything is going to have very little motive to ever choose transit instead. This could it make it a lot harder to grow non-auto modes.
As for power users... EVs are actually very powerful cars and they have incredible performance when it comes to torque & acceleration. Even the most basic EV is comparable to a luxury sports car in this regard... the internal combustion engine is actually an incredibly inefficient machine. Gearheads will love EVs.