Electricity is roughly half the price of petrol or diesel, and about the same price as propane.
I spend about as much on fuel for my elderly 20,000-mile-per-year Range Rover as half a monthly payment for a new EV, and because it's dual-fuel it's actually cleaner than an electric vehicle.
Average new car in the US costs more than 40k so it’s not a 3x price premium.
They aren’t cheap but that’s about what car companies are selling not the technology. People view 350 mile ranges as a luxury feature but they don’t require that much extra battery over a 250 mile range.
Average new car in brazil is 12~15k and that includes a ton of taxes, EVs are often 6~10x price premium as they're also heavily taxed. They're also used 30+ years which would mean like 6 battery replacements, the batteries alone would likely cost more than a whole car plus it's lifetime fuel in Brazil unless it's a heavily used vehicle like a shift-rented uber.
I suspect the battery manufacturing would also be far worse than the lifetime of alcohol for the environment, but that depends a lot on how each is made.
Batteries are lasting much longer as the pack sizes increase and chemistry improves. Unless you’re planning on driving 1 million miles you shouldn’t need to replace the battery on a long range EV.
Meanwhile paying for 30 years of gas adds up, especially when fuel economy decreases with age.
The energy used to recharge batteries right now is being mostly produced using traditional means of power production, mostly fossil.
So in the end we are only shifting costs, not really saving.
Another important point not being discussed is that used vehicles are dirty cheap (easily under 1k) and can still run with very little engine maintenance with the only cost being fuel.
With the energy crisis we are living, I'm not sure EV are going to cost so much less than ICE to operate.
If you need to change tires or get into an accident and the car needs repairs, it doesn't matter if it's an EV or an ICE,
You still have to pay for it and probably the EV cannot be repaired by a gas station mechanic.
The same gas station worker might lose business due to EVs becoming more popular and that's not gonna be cheap economically and socially.
Before it's gonna be cheaper, we need to completely overhaul the way transport economics works.
I don't have the slightest idea of how long it is gonna take, but it's not gonna be tomorrow.
Environmentally a great deal of CO2 comes from to extracting crude oil, transport, refine, and distribute gasoline. Roughly 1kg of CO2 per gallon of gas is released just in the refining process while 8.9kg comes from actually burning the fuel.
Next out of global electricity production 16% is hydro, 10.3% nuclear, 5.3% is wind, and solar is 2.5%. And wind and solar numbers are rapidly trending upwards. The 23% from Natural gas is also vastly cleaner both from extremely efficient turbines and because of inherent advantages to the fuel.
It’s only the 36.7% that from coal where the numbers come close while still slightly favoring EV’s per mile.
Completely agree on all the points, we burn oil in ICE engines simply because it's ready for direct use, but what if we switched to natural gas fueled cars?
ICE engines can easily be adapted to use it, the infrastructure for gas pumps is already in place, I do not own a car but when I need one I use my mother's car that runs on methane gas.
Of course EV fueled by 100% green energy is the future we all hope for, but I wouldn't discard the economic advantage, especially in less developed countries, of cheap cars that run on greener fuel.
There are also many countries like China or Germany that are heavily reliant on coal for energy production right now, because it makes it easier to adapt the output to the demand, maybe a more mixed approach instead of "EV or die" could lead to a faster transition curve toward less CO2 intensive vehicles and one that is economically more feasible on a global scale.
I also doubt Brazil will be full of Tesla anytime soon.
>It’s only the 36.7% that from coal where the numbers come close
The problem is, when you add that demand to your power grid, is that increasing the supply of hydro, nuclear, wind, or solar? In practice, the extra demand from EVs only increases the correlated amount of coal used as that is where the excess of potential electricity generation is, for now.
I don’t know about other countries but for US and China coal is significantly underrepresented in new power plant construction relative to it’s share of total production.
Cheaper upfront, the problem is how much ethanol and gasoline costs. It’s the same reason people put solar on their roof, sure it costs more on day 1 but for most people lowering the electric bill more than compensates.
TCO is not so relevant if you don't have the upfront money.
Reason why not many people buy new houses with lower TCO, they prefer to spend a bit more every month to heat/cool them, because they can squeeze the money out of their monthly budget, than spend 3x upfront.
Solar panels are also heavily subsidized almost everywhere.
Unless you’re paying cash for a house or car it’s the monthly payment that’s important more than the upfront cost.
I don’t know what the Brazil mortgage market is like, but having a mortgage that’s larger and a keeping your other bills much smaller should be a net win without spending more out of pocket.
Speaking of my country, if you ask for a mortgage you usually have to put at least 20% of the total upfront and the bank can deny it for lack of guarantees or it's too large for your pockets.
So on average people prefer to spend less than spend more and amortizing the difference in the future.
For that reason there's been a quite successful program of State incentives in .y country to install solar panels or increase energy efficiency of buildings so that it would cost people zero or close to zero to upgrade .
Otherwise people would have wait for the prices to drop a lot more than they are right now.
