How much does an electric car cost?

mobleez

How much does the average electric car cost?
How much does it cost to charge one?
Does it cost any extra to run and keep?
If anyone knows just how much a car costs to own (buying and keeping) that would be brill.
Thanks

Answer
How much does the average electric car cost?
There are limited options for buying an electric car from a major manufacturer at the moment (Jan 2013). Tesla Model S $50,000 and up, Nissan Leaf $34,000, Mitsubishi imeiv $29,000, Smart ED $25,000, and a couple others I forget about.

How much does it cost to charge one?
Since they're tiny, the smart car or the imev will consume about 250 watt hours per mile. So take your local utility rate to figure out the fuel cost. Example: 10¢ per 1000 watt hours (Kwh) means 10¢ will take you about 4 miles. 10¢ ÷ 4 miles = 0.025 (2¢) per mile. The larger tesla or the leaf will consume about 300whpm.

Does it cost any extra to run and keep?
No. Electric cars don't need belts, spark plugs, oil filters (or oil anyway), engine coolant, radiators, and a host of other maintenance hassles. The lithium batteries will need to be replaced every 10 years (ballpark).

If anyone knows just how much a car costs to own (buying and keeping) that would be brill.
An electric car costs about 1/7 that of a gas car for fuel (electricity vs gasoline) Also, an electric car costs â that of a gas car for upkeep and maintenance, even after battery replacement is considered. I'm not sure what you mean by "brill".

Did you hear Chevy has a new electric car called the spark?

Burning Pe

Answer
Americans are still somewhat clueless when it comes to electric cars, but Chevy's strategy is to sell the all-electric Spark heavily into Europe and Asia.
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The car will debut in 2013.
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GM has to go down this road. First of all, adding all electric cars to it's lineup improves it's average fuel economy, needed in order to meet future mandated fuel-efficiency standards.
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Secondly, if American companies don't make electric vehicles, Asian and European car companies will steal the entire market.
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Japanese carmaker Nissan just demonstrated 10-minute recharging for their Leaf electric car. Over the next few years, the range of the car will increase, and the cost of the vehicle will slowly come down. 5-minute recharge has also been demonstrated, for electric buses.
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Walgreen drugs recently announced they are installing EV fast-chargers for the Leaf at their stores. Other retailers are considering this, too. (Meijer, Best Buy, CostCo.)
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Put these things together, and you can see why US carmakers have to compete. Gas cars could be obsolete in 10 years. If anything, the Detroit automakers are not responding fast enough to this threat.
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PS. - to the poster pointing out that some electricity is made with dirty energy, the same amount of dirty energy is used to refine gasoline - about 6 KWH of energy for each gallon refined. So both kinds of cars use the same amounts of "upstream" energy. But the gas car burns large amounts of dirty "downstream" energy, while the EV doesn't burn any. This is why EVs are so much cleaner, and much more energy efficient (and much cheaper to fuel.)

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How much does it cost to charge a electric car?

Tommy Padi

Answer
There are several factors that combine to give you the cost of charging your electric car. 1. How much you drive. 2. The cost of the electricity. 3. The efficiency of the vehicle. 4. The ability of the driver. 5. The type of driving. However the EPA combines these numbers to give you information on the sticker of every new electric car to estimate what you might expect to pay for electricity for a year and how this compares with driving a petrol vehicle. They also give you some idea of the vehicle efficiency stated in terms of kWh consumed for 100 miles. (Divide by 100 to get kWh / mile.)1

1. How much you drive can vary a great deal from one person to another. The US average is about 12500 miles or about 34.25 miles per day. With any vehicle the more you drive the more it will cost. On the EPA site they appear to be using 15000 miles for the annual cost. You can personalize this on the site. (see #3 below)

2. The cost of electricity will vary not only in its price but how it is determined. Price will vary with the location. Some utilities ask for higher prices than others. Some customers may be paying commercial rates while others pay residential rates. Some may be charging their vehicle at off peak times with as much as a 50% rate reduction.

Some may charge their vehicles at a public charging station which usually adds a premium to utility pricing. Some may charge at a store or work for "free." Battery leasing is becoming more popular and while the cost of owning the vehicle will be lower the cost of operating the vehicle will increase when you add in the lease for the batteries. Similarly home solar panels might reduce the cost of electricity to zero but the cost of the solar panels could be amortized over the number of miles driven for a similar number. What we often do is use an average of utility prices in doing calculations. Were more exact information is not known the US average is now: 11.61 cents per kWh. http://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.cfm?t=epmt_5_6_a

3. Vehicle efficiency is given by the EPA stickers Here is a representative sample: http://www.fueleconomy.gov/feg/PowerSearch.do?action=alts&year1=2012&year2=2013&vfuel=Electric&srchtyp=newAfv EPA cost estimates per year for most electric vehicles is in the $500 to $600 range which is 1/2 to 1/6 other petrol vehicles.

4. Drivers vary in their ability to drive efficiently. Some of us have a lead foot and use "jack rabbit starts" while others refine their ability to save money. Most users of electric vehicles say that the vehicle instrumentation favors a re education towards economy. But using the torque of an electric motor can be just too much fun to resist. The EPA tries to give us an average in their estimates. Some have refined their driving ability using hypermiling techniques and enormously increase their fuel economy: http://ecomodder.com/forum/EM-hypermiling-driving-tips-ecodriving.php

5. Just like the driving distance, how hard the vehicle must work will affect the range. In any vehicle going uphill 20 miles will cost more than doing the same distance downhill. For all vehicles fuel economy drops with a lot of starts and stops. But the electric car has a secret weapon. It uses the stopping to recharge some energy into the battery. This gives the overall appearance of a higher efficiency when traveling in cities. EPA numbers reflect this odd result for electric vehicles.

There are things we can do to make the driving less economical, changing the aerodynamics with a convertible top down or windows open, heat and air conditioning are all examples. In general especially hot or cold weather may effect an EV fuel economy.

What is all comes down to is about 2 to 6 cents per mile for fuel and slightly more if you are amortizing the cost of batteries or other equipment.


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ideas for electric cars and increasing range?

Daniel

Ok so ive seen some of these electric cars and have seen some things that make me think, huh what if they did this. Here is a list.

1. I've noticed a lot of electric cars there front ends are rather dull and have no intake into the engine. What if we took car design like those we see today and their radiator grills and instead of putting in a radiator put in a wind turbine to power the batteries. This would increase drag, but would the increase in drag really damage the increased electricity output from the wind turbine and even the increase in drag it should be very little since the air has to leave too and if enough research is done could the drag actually be very minute. I could see if a car was going freeway speeds wind would be entering the wind turbine at 65 mph + and even though the generator is much smaller than the giant winds used to power homes, wouldn't this overall increase the range?

2. Solar panels. Only one car I know of has solar panels and that is the fisker karma. Solar panels are getting quite cheap so couldn't they shape them into the roof line and even possibly the hood and other body panels.

3. alternators or some sort of generator on the axle. I read somewhere else that this wouldn't actually work and would consume more energy as the battery efficiency and alternator efficiency is not quite there yet, but if the efficency were to increase could that be more beneficial.

Im not complaining, but i know i dnt have the power or resources or know how to do these things and test them and they are just ideas. If any one who reads this does have the resources to have these tested and create more efficent electric vehicle. please feel free. tell me what you think of these ideas.

Answer
It is good that you consider options, however some understanding of the work that has been done before will allow you to work on the edge of what is known rather than simply "reinventing the wheel."

In the study of physics there are long established rules that predict how our world operates. One of those is known as the law of conservation of energy. Briefly it says that energy cannot be created or destroyed (only conserved.) For this reason we can never get more energy out of a vehicle than we put into it. Any additional energy would have to come from a different source.

Another way of looking at the problem is to notice that the energy to make a car move must overcome various forms of resistance. The tendency for a car to stay put is one called inertia. Gravity, rolling resistance, wind resistance, and internal mechanical resistance are others. We can recover some of the energy put into making the car move. But tapping into the inertia of a vehicle will slow it down. The practical application is regenerative braking. The same may be said for trying to capture the air moving around a moving car from inside the vehicle. Neither of these approaches will give more range than could be calculated from the energy put into the vehicle. We can only hope to make the vehicle more efficient. But as the electric car is already about 90% efficient there is not a great deal of room for improvement.

So we need to gather more energy for more range. Better batteries that hold more will do this but at some increase in weight. Solar panels will add only a very little because calculations and some experimentation has shown that most commercial vehicles could only add about 2 to 3 miles of travel for each hour that they sit in the sun. The solar panels are too inefficient, the sun's energy too diffuse and the area of a vehicle too limited. Only by designing super efficient, single seater, aerodynamic vehicles like solar racers can we get the sun to power a vehicle, but this is not the typical family vehicle. ( see the American Solar Challenge and the Australian World Solar Challenge )

Another alternative is to transmit power to the vehicle. This has been done with overhead wires, but more recently the power has been transmitted through the roadway. (Korean http://www.businessinsider.com/south-korean-roads-power-electric-cars-2013-8 )

Another solution like solar vehicle is to create energy on the vehicle using a hybrid engine, a fuel cell or perhaps someday an atomic battery: http://www.technologyreview.com/news/404293/the-atomic-battery/

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