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 can i make a remote control car go faster?

warlooker

i brought a small remote control car about less than $20.00 hoping i can make it go faster.
how can i make it go faster i want to put a battery in so the motor can spin faster and oil my gears.
but is there any other way to do it.
thank you guys for helping.

Answer
For $20.00 you can't expect to get much more out of the car. It's not really built for speed at that price. Basically, this is a kids toy. There is a huge difference between remote control cars for kids and remote control cars for adults. The complexities of the cars have a very wide gap. Kids cars will run on just a few AA batteries. RC cars for adults feature full miniature engines. Lots of the popular motor kits run on fuel such as gasoline or nitro. Others run on large battery packs that are essentially beefed up versions of kids toys. These cars require just as much maintenance as a real car, since they have all of the same components (plus all of the radio transmitting gear!) to deal with.

So you may want to save up and get your moneys worth by opting for petrol, nitro or electric models. The fastest engine choice that you can find is a nitro engine. Nitromethane is an alternative to regular gasoline, and runs much better for RC cars. It is usually heavier, and therefore more cumbersome on the handling of the car. However, if you are going to be on a fairly straightforward and tame race course, it is a great choice and will provide a huge speed. The only down side is that nitro engines are known for wearing down faster, and breaking at a higher rate. If you use a nitro engine frequently, you can almost expect it to break after intense usage. It is a good idea to have an electric engine that you can swap it out with when the need arises.

The other parts of the car are equally important when you are aiming for absolute fastness. If you are you going all-out on a project, you should expect to spend quite a bit on components like wheels and axels. Usually you want to get wheels that are extremely firm and light. If you have the opportunity to go out to a hobby store and test out a few different components, you will be able to decide exactly what you want based on experiencing it first-hand. This is the best way to shop for anything, and the same goes for remote control cars. Since the parts are usually highly swappable, you can directly compare one with another by trying them in quick succession.

If you arenât a very technically inclined person, the thought of picking all of these parts might not sound very fun. However, you might not have to go through this process. It is possible to buy kits that include all top of the line parts, and are quite easy to assemble. With these you wonât get the high level of customization that you would get out of building a regular home-made car. Being able to choose all of the parts separately is a great benefit, although 90% of the time you can replace individual parts if you decide that you want to go for something that is of a higher quality or a little bit faster than what you had before.

All of these things really add up. If you have one part of a car that doesnât perform as well, the entire thing will be affected. Therefore you need to choose your parts carefully to have the best remote controlled car possible.

Do pure electric cars and plug-in cars have a transmission, automatic or standard? Can you buy an electric car?

Steve

with a stick shift?

Answer
"Electric cars" are not a factory produced standard machine. It is a class of vehicle power and there are many variations. Electric vehicles that use a standard electric motor can have that motor installed in a number of locations and this may in part dictate what kind of transmission if any is used.

An EV with wheel motors will have no other drive train components.

An EV with a motor installed in an axle may also have no other drive train components.

An EV with a motor installed between passenger seats will need a rear differential to (un) equalize wheel rotation and may have some gearing to change the motor speed to the drive shaft speed. It is possible to change the performance of the vehicle from power to economy modes with gearing changes but this is more efficiently done electronically so this is the method that is customarily used.

In a petrol vehicle the engine will only reach sufficient torque levels from about 3000 to 5000 RPM. In order to maintain those engine speeds a transmission is used. The electric motor can have full torque at 0 RPM and therefore a transmission may not be necessary and if the Tesla experience is of value it is more trouble than it is worth.

A major class of exceptions is conversion vehicles. These are vehicles that are converted from petrol engines to electric and often leave the transmission in place for the mechanical reverse gear. The clutch is removed as is generally not necessary for shifting. Operators often leave the vehicle in 2ed gear.

I once owned an MG midget with a switch on the dash for directional lights that would not cancel automatically. It was a lot of fun to drive. Similarly model T Fords where the dwell angle could be adjusted from the dash (the spark) would be fun to drive. But extra controls in traffic with kids screaming in the back may not be the choice of many vehicle consumers. We have to pick our vehicles according to what we want from them.

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