Fueleconomy.gov has the Prius Prime

Tesla has a big advantage, the Gigafactory must answer the needs of Tesla, possibly tuning batteries for the application. Possibly tuning the car to the battery, they can play both sides.

 

time to take the rose colored glasses off folks. tesla is a great company. there are many great vehicles out there and getting better. what are we arguing about in this fuel economy.gov has the prius prime thread?

 

Just the Samonella flavored holiday ones.

 

I now have 170 average mpg. It seems as long as one drives in EV economy mode the mpg continue to add. Also by pulse and gliding I can add 2-4 mpgs from one major intersection to the other. So I'm storing mpgs for when hard times come. I.e.: possible times when I must use the engine. With P/G driving, instead of lagging all the traffic by very conservative driving I am now beating all of he traffic, my reward being very long glides. First to the stop light, first to take off again with nobody in front of me to interfere with my glide. The best of both worlds. Can anybody beat 170 mpg?

 

I think the real question with BEVs Tesla or whatever is: How good is the regeneration. Or is it only charge it and use it ?

 

That's not even a question, much less "the real question". They regenerate, same as all Evs and plug-ins.

The big questions are range, charging infrastructure, charging speed, cost and longevity.

 

I don't know if this is *always* true, but the BEVs that I am familiar with have better regen than PHEVs due to the larger battery and capacity to take a higher power. Some of this advantage is offset by the higher weight of the car.

If I remember correctly, Teslas can regen up to ~ 60 kW and the Prius family up to ~ 20 ish kW. I'm not sure about the Prime.

 

This 'raw' mpg reported by the car (total miles driven divided by gasoline gallons consumed) is in fact meaningless for any comparison without reporting the electric energy pumped into the car. It does say you are on high EV ratio.
Can it be beaten? of course, any Prime driver with very high EV ratio will get this kind of 'raw' number and better. BEVs are beating it everyday.

Look at post #60 here and you will see my EV ratio summary for my PiP for the last 3 years. It calculates to ~166 'raw' mpg with 64% EV.

 

Very late to join in, but the mention of the supercharger network makes me have to raise the fact that the network is no longer free for new buyers. The cost is about $0.16 per kwh of charge, although they don't really come out with that number directly, plus an additional surcharges for time on the charger and other items. It will actually be rather more expensive to drive a Tesla by counting just on the supercharger network than it used to be, and someone calculated a Prius gas price for a trip and a Tesla supercharger price and the Prius won the cost battle at current average gas prices.

Also BWM and Nissan have formed a partnership to expand fast dc charger access across the US which should improve the situation for other EVs. ALthough it won't help us any as we can't do fast charging.

 

New Teslas get 1000kWh of Supercharger use per year.

After that there is a fee, but because not all jurisdictions allow anybody else besides the utility company to charge for a kWh, disclosing the fees for all 50 states on the front page isn't done. Where possible, they'll charge by the kWh. Where not, there is a two tier parking fee. First tier is in effect while charging up to 80%. Second tier applies after that, and is half the first. The parking fees will be close to a kWh fee.

There are additional fees Tesla can apply to asshats unnecessarily blocking Superchargers; the ones using them as primary charging, and led to Tesla getting rid of the free for life charging.

 

Just a small correction, unless they changed it, it is 400kWh per year good for approximately 1000 miles. Even so, the supercharger network is becoming a slightly lessor selling point as other companies are stepping up their game at partnering to bring more chargers online.

 

Thanks for catching my number swap.

The Supercharger network is going to be a big advantage for Tesla in the foreseeable future. They have a big head start, and have been planning where to install chargers to support long distance travel from the beginning. Their slowest chargers are 90kW while all the currently available CHAdeMO and CCS ones are 50kW at most.

The other DC chargers are third party, except for ones at dealerships. Their fees on even level 2 chargers can be higher than what Tesla charges now. Installation hasn't been as centrally planned as with Tesla, and cost plus numbers of chargers will likely mean they will stick with slower chargers.

 

In general this is dead wrong.

The average Tesla driver charges at home for 90% of miles
Figure 15,000 miles per car per year overall, so 1,500 per year at Superchargers
The first 400 kWh per year at a SC are free
The Model 3 is anticipated to have highway fuel economy of over 4 miles per kWh, so over 1,600 miles free per year at SCs
The $2500 SuperCharger buy-in fee has been discontinued

What about those poor folks that spend their lives driving cross-country and back, you ask. What about them ?? Well, they are the exception and not my concern. But figure they pay electricity rates of about 4 cents a kWh more than at home. They end up paying more after $2500/0.04 = 62,000 SuperCharger miles before figuring the free annual budget.

And finally, you have the degenerates that degrade the SuperCharger network to save on home charging bills. Thankfully, it sucks to be them ... which was the point of instituting these fees in the first place.

 

Which part of what I said was wrong. I said counting just on the SuperCharger network wasn't going to be cheap anymore, there is a small fraction of people who do that, not always just to save on home charging but because home charging isn't feasible for them and they could get away with a 30 minute coffee break to charge their toy. This isn't the majority.

I also mentioned that on a long leg trip that with the new charging structure it was shown that a Prius could beat the Tesla for a coast to coast run. Is this normal? No. Is this what people do all the time, certainly not. But add the disadvantages of the Tesla for people who frequently take long leg drives and it isn't the car for everyone. Are EVs good cars, definitely. Do they fit into the box of a one car family? It really depends. For me no, the Tesla wouldn't fit my mold, it would have been too big a sacrifice as the only vehicle. That is why I went the middle road with the Prime. Get to 350 miles on a charge and perhaps we are getting closer, 500 miles and I am all in.

 

In the most fuel Inefficient SUV that Tesla manufactures. But guess what ? That car is in no way comparable to a Prius.

A Model 3 will get over 4 miles a kWh, so under 4 cents a mile on those long x-country drives or for apartments dwellers without home or work charging. So today about comparable cost per mile, and tomorrow fuel prices may go up but electricity is likely to stay the same.

 

This part

You cannot discuss fees without considering the free allowance every year and the savings of $2500 no longer charged for access.

 

True for a radius of say 150 miles, and not a competitor for the actual long-distance driving the SC network allows.

 

At the end of what you said, you essentially are agreeing with me but for the fact that you are saying it was never free. People assumed it was, even Tesla owners thought it was before they understood the fee. Tesla is essentially going to charge for usage rather than precharging owners who may not need it much a rate that would have covered about 50k miles in charge. As a bonus they are given everyone an annual $100 credit on the charger average.

Still for long haul trips that many families like to do from time to time, the reality is that if you used your credits for your normal daily usage, you could be paying more than a Prius user for that trip. Ignoring the fact that long trips may come with higher fees than other vehicles is just missing the point. The Tesla also comes with the added pain of time to charge per mile gained. I can add 500+ miles to my car in about 5 minutes, the Tesla can't approach that.

I will say this again, if I was planning to remain a two vehicle household, the Tesla would have been a great deal for me. I get power from my solar panels at about $0.08 per kwh (averaged over the prepaid 20 year lease), and I over produced enough to likely give me a good full year of charging off grid. One car, and trips to places where superchargers are very scarce meant it was a non-starter.

 

No. The free allowance covers the average Tesla SC usage, and now the $2500 access fee has been waived.

Clearly Tesla is taking in much less SC related money. Not zero though, and those modest monies are coming from corner cases who might end up paying Prius level fuel rates per mile today, and likely less in the future.