Tag Archives: electric-cars

Electric vehicles make no economic sense – do the math

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Electric vehicles are probably the vehicle of the future, but they are not the vehicle of the present. Let’s look at the numbers.

An EV uses about six cents of electricity to go a mile. That’s if you charge it at home with inexpensive residential electricity rates. It’s more if you use a charging station, and it’s more if it’s a large vehicle like a Rivian. And by the way, be prepared to leave it plugged in for several hours to get it charged.

Gasoline-powered cars use about thirteen cents of gasoline to go a mile, assuming gas is something over $3/gallon and you get something like 25 mpg.

So, the difference between the EV fueling cost and the gasoline fueling cost, on a per mile basis, will be 13 cents minus 6 cents = 7 cents. And so, the per-mile fuel cost of an EV is about half that of a gas-powered car.

So far, so good.

But the price of an EV is typically about $10,000 more than the same model in a gas car. It’s more like $15-20k for luxury brands like Porsche, but for our hypothetical let’s be generous to the EVs and use the $10,000 figure.

The number of miles required to recoup the $10,000 difference in purchase price is 10,000 dollars divided by 0.07 dollars per mile, which equals 142,000 miles.  

That $10,000 premium you pay for an EV will buy a lot of gas.

That’s bad enough, but it gets worse. Assume it takes about ten years to drive those 142,000 miles. That means there’s a cost-of-money factor to consider. Your $10,000 differential in purchase price was paid up-front, while your recoupment of it takes ten years.

To make the recoupment calculation fair, you have to compare apples to apples. The question becomes, what’s the present-day value of $10,000 paid over ten years?  

If you assume interest rates of, say, four percent (though historically you do much better than that in the stock market), then the $10,000 recoupment over ten years has a present-day value of only about $8,200. To get that figure up to the $10,000 premium that was paid up-front for the EV, you have to go out almost 13 years.

(This cost-of-money point is also typically not considered when people tout the economics of home solar panels, which cost a lot up-front while the recoupment takes many years, but that’s a different column.)

And it gets even worse. Gas cars have better resale values than EVs. That’s partly because the most expensive component of EVs – their batteries – wear out. I don’t mean they discharge and need charging, though they of course do that, too, every day. I mean the rechargeable batteries wear out and have to be replaced.

But I said out the outset that EVs are the vehicles of the future. Why’s that?

It’s because they’re much simpler mechanically. They have no transmission, they have no emissions components, the drive train is simple, they don’t generate the dirt and grime of an internal combustion engine, maintenance is less, and, most of all, batteries will continue to improve by becoming less expensive, lighter in weight, and more durable. (All that said, there are no battery breakthroughs on the immediate horizon.)

But for now, electric vehicles make no economic sense. Don’t let that stop you from buying one to signal your virtue, but it won’t signal any financial sense.

Liberals lost their “cool”

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Tesla electric cars were cool a few years ago. They signaled all the virtue of a Toyota Prius, but without the ugly body shape and C-O-E-X-I-S-T bumper sticker. And they were a lot faster.

Electric vehicle devotees – you probably know some – hailed the immigrant behind Tesla as an engineering genius and good green guy. His immigration to the United States was not illegal, but even that wasn’t held against him. He was the liberals’ favorite African-American since the Hawaiian dude.

That’s all so 2023.

Tesla cars haven’t changed much. They’re still electric, still look better than a Prius, still come without the bumper sticker, still get you 0 to 60 mph in the bat of an eye, and still get you 0 to $7,500 with a lightning-fast tax credit paid for by conservative schmucks driving F150s.  

But people didn’t buy Tesla’s for the car, or even the tax credit. They bought them for the cool. Liberals thought or at least believed that they could be cool by saving the planet, while being cool while showing people they were cool, while being cool.

How cool is that?

Ah, but their do-cool lacked due-diligence. Turns out, their darling EV immigrant from Africa is a Republican.

Egad!

And this Republican African-American (call him Uncle Elon) failed to mention his Republicanism when they bought the car.

Liberal buyers just assumed he was one of them. After all, only one of them would sell an overpriced car that might take hours to fill-er-up at electricity filling stations that are spaced wider apart than the car’s range – all for the sake of coolness.

But it turned out that this brilliant entrepreneurial scientist wasn’t one of them at all. Sure, he’d sold them exactly what he promised – a car deemed cool by the enviros – but he himself wasn’t enviro-certified.

By failing to inform his buyers at the point-of-sale that he was not a liberal, Uncle Elon had tricked them.

Liberals were then faced with a choice. Should they save the planet by driving an enviro-car made by a hated Republican, or save their coolness by ditching the car and nurturing their hate for the Republican?

Of course, they chose to save their coolness and nurture their hate. Liberals won’t let the damned planet stand in the way of their coolness and hate.

When it comes to their hate, they won’t even let the law stand in the way. They’re now vandalizing Tesla cars and torching Tesla dealerships.

To my way of thinking, that’s not cool.

There’s a broader point to be made. This Tesla trashing is a microcosm of something bigger. Liberals in general aren’t cool anymore.

Their peak coolness was with that Hawaiian dude. He was destined to stop the rise of the oceans (and he apparently did – they’re barely rising), save the planet, and “fundamentally transform” an America in need of it.

It went downhill from there. Joe Biden is remembered as a lazy, senile, corrupt doofus, stuffing his face with an ice cream cone. He was much worse than that, policy-wise, but you can get away with a lot of bad policy as a Democrat so long as you stay cool (see, Hawaiian dude). Joe didn’t.

Then, the Democrats hopped aboard the tranny train. At first, it seemed kinda cool. It reminded them of scenes they pretended to have participated in, like Woodstock and Selma.

But then the tranny thing got out of hand. There were pre-K tranny story hours, trannies in the girls’ bathrooms, and trannies beating and even crippling girls in sports.

Not cool. Trannies fell out of fashion.

Then, liberals decided to help poor, oppressed Latin Americans yearning to breathe free. All 664 million of them. Their help was in the form of abolishing the southern border to the United States, inviting them in, and giving them drivers licenses and welfare. A good many were criminals – even gang members.  

Not cool. Illegal immigrants fell out of fashion.

So, what do you do?

Well, if you’re a liberal, you figure you can recapture your coolness with a few new props. Ditch the Tesla (tell the insurance company it was stolen) and buy a Ford F150. Get one with monster tires and a big chrome grill, and be sure to tailgate the Tesla in front of you.

And if you’re a conservative, well, you don’t want to be caught dead in a F150. Trade it in for a Tesla. You can get a good deal right now. When the monster pickup behind you tailgates and flashes his lights at you, be sure to tap the brakes and give him the one-finger salute.

And the first one now will later be last, for the times, they are a-changin’

— Robert Zimmerman