Featured Study Reveals Electric Vehicle Fueling Is Actually Equivalent to $17.33 per Gallon

Pollutant or not, it doesn't matter. The problem is like aging. Years are a resource, like carbon-based fuel. We have a limited quantity available. When gone, game over.

That's why we are not only trying to switch over to renewable fuel, we are also trying to make vehicles more efficient.

In other words, the problem still exists regardless of the label it is given.

 

My significant other often takes a mid-day segment and that provides a rest. On our periodic 15 hour drive to Chicago (from CT) we do a long segment (about 12 hours) to get to Indiana, stay overnight and then get to our destination early the next day for family/friends activities. The annual winter Florida trip is a bit longer (~20 hours). We stop in South Carolina after the first day and then get to our Gulf Coast destination in the early evening of the second day.

Our 2020 Prius has Dynamic cruise control and many safety features that also help reduce driver fatigue, but is not anywhere near a self driving vehicle.

We stop every few hours during these segments for a few minutes during the drive but I can only blame the Prius for some of the stops. The rest of them are due to my limited bladder capacity.

JeffD

 

Peak oil has been predicted for decades, but the verified reserves seem to always increase. The world will not run out of petroleum. The cost to get it will just increase to the point where renewables will finally be less expensive than petroleum as an energy source. The world will always need petroleum for all of it's non-energy uses.

JeffD

 

And that my friend is called a deflection. Maybe try and address the point?
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It becomes increasingly more expensive to extract from new found deposits and that petroleum is of lower quality, requiring more refining.

Spending so much on a fuel that contributes heavily to *SMOG* emissions doesn’t any sense.

Most importantly, it is a terrible legacy for our children, leaving them to solve the problem we created.

 

geee - being a retired EE - it's inexplicable you don't know? .... the answer is simple; geothermal, Natural Gas, coal, diesel, nuke, PV solar, tidal & wind.
& generation is in a state of flux - as more & more fossil plants get decommissioned.

Question;
Now that you've learned the above .... guess what's easier to filter out out fossil fuel pollution .... regulating/maintaining 1,000s of electrical generation plants that use fossil fuels? ........ or 10s of million of cars that use fossil fuels ..... take your time & think about it .

once that realization is understood -
you come to acknowledge WHY gassers need to be ever decreasing NOW .... rather than wait for more oil based wars to be waged.
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You choose to interpret my answers as showing a lack of knowledge. I think that you might find that I know a lot about many subjects, especially those associated with Electrical Engineering which I continue to teach at the undergraduate and graduate level.

You seem to have a religious zeal against the current use of fossil fuels and I tire of discussing it with you.

JeffD

 

That's fair. But total cars sales are to the overall market not just your personal preferences. Do you think most people would prefer to drive 1000 miles rather than fly? I went on a 3600 mile driving trip this past summer, but it was planned to have several stops along the way. If I was just going someplace 1000 miles away I'd fly.

Mike

 

Brand somebody with religious zeal. Great way to deflect answering the question (again) of which fuel source is easier to keep clean - cars or generation plants. Obstinence accepted & understood.
& it's always enjoyable watching credentialed folk bolstering viewpoints because of a degree/experience ..... until their unsustainable view is challenged.
Then the answer is, "i won't lower myself to answer"
too funny

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What is the topic of this thread anyways? So sorry I'm so lost in one way group think on electrification.
I've been using synthes for years now, how are they making the fuels you all use these days.

Oh yeah. Gov ment subsidies - gasoline vs pure electric. How much did that study cost? Was it worth it? Did you enjoy paying for it?
How would you rate this study on a scale of 1 to 10 ?

 

60% of my electric use comes from solar on my roof. 35% of my solar goes to the grid (total of 95% of my needs).
Of the power not coming from my roof it is mostly natural gas with some wind, even though I pay for wind. On the road charging is mainly solar and wind, or so my utility tells me.

Not quite sure where the authors get their crazy ideas. They seem to want to take cafe standards, which are meant to reduce oil use and pretend that selling fewer guzzlers is an ev tax. Somehow they are charging an incremental generation and distribution cost to EVs but EVs probably make this a negative (they will make electricity less expensive for other users as infrastructure is improved and costs subsidized by plug-in users). When you get rid of all the fake numbers their real cost if $5.70. I am unclear as a Texas resident how California subsidies make my electricity more expensive, or any of the other crap charges.

I can believe $5.70 but when you consider how many miles I travel on a gge of electricity that is quite a lot cheaper than if I bought an equivalent sports sedan.

 

The OP's article wants to convince you the reader that running Electric is tantamount to costs equal to $17/ gallon .... no it's, ands or buts.
Apparently whether or not you ever spent ¼ of a buck on electricity (which ev drivers CAN do - for the many solar roof homes that are already paid off ... & whose number continues to grow year after year).
Years ago I put together a chart that represents electricity cost per KW versus a similar amount of gasoline. Obviously the it would be impractical to create spreadsheets all the way up to $17 because it's so unrealistic. But since the list does go ¹l½ of the way up ($8.50/gallon) ... you can see for yourself from this ballpark equivalency chart the cost of electricity per kWh - versus equivalent cost for gas at $3.50/gallon. For the majority of drivers (which are in in Calif) this price is long gone - btw.



So - gas at $8.5/gallon would be tantamounr to 68¢/kwh. Double that so you can pay $17 a gallon and double 68¢ would be $1.36/kWh. We're Paying 10¢/ kwh in our area, our equivalent price per gas would roughly be;



Yep Gas would only cost us $1.37

Please text me when prices drop that low again - so I can switch back to a gasser & make the author of this nutty article happy

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MidAmerican Energy is already only 34% fossil fuel in 2022 and declining. For those with solar on their roof, that 70-30 or so mix is only a portion of the electricity they use not from their solar panels. For those that don't have solar on their room, it's still a much, much cleaner mix than a gas/petrol engine is burning. Of course, almost nobody here (Eastern IA) drives a PHEV or BEV, and low-MPG SUVs and giant trucks are the norm.

The gas engines here also are mostly burning 10% or more ethanol that is either producing more CO2 than regular gas (unless the industry can force use of state eminent domain to seize land for carbon capture pipelines (currently on hold because of backlash) to offset some of the disaster that is subsidized corn-based ethanol). And the ethanol production dumps a lot more crap into the environment than CO2.

And don't even try looking at "do you know where your gasoline comes from?" as the extraction, transportation, storage, refinement, and further transportation, storage, retail delivery of gasoline is much much worse than anything even less renewable electric utilities are producing. And just having & servicing an internal combustion engine causes all sorts of releases of hydrocarbons into the environment.

 

Probably a good time to cite a credible source: Homepage - U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA)

So when I am curious about Alabama's energy: U.S. Energy Information Administration - EIA - Independent Statistics and Analysis

More to the point, today I drove to Nashville to get an underbody part to repair some road debris damage that works like a flush mounted, parachute:

• 238.6 mi distance with above, higher drag, broken underbody panel
  • 55.8 mi to biology break
  • 47.8 mi to Tesla Service to pickup part
  • 15.3 mi late lunch
  • 119.7 mi return home
• $18.04 electric costs
  • $14.91 for 23.92 kWh, EVgo (not cheapest next to Whole Foods, lunch)
  • $3.13 for 26.1 kWh, home
• $0.0756/mi or $7.56/100 mi
  • $2.64/gal Nashville regular cheapest prices per GasBuddy
  • 6.83 gal ~= $18.04 trip electric cost / $2.64/gal
• 34.9 MPGe ~= 238.6 mi / 6.83 gal equivalent

On the road, fast DC charging is more expensive and EVgo charges one of the highest rates:

• $0.62/kWh ~= $14.91 / 23.92 kWh :: EVgo is costly
• $0.35/kWh ... typical SuperCharger costs, regional
• $0.12/kWh - residential retail rate

I could have spent less by using Tesla SuperChargers. But I recently added the CCS-1 capability to my 117,565 mi, 2019 Model 3 Std Rng, and wanted second test with another CCS-1 network. EVgo charging by minute with a maximum charge rate of 40 kW didn't moderate the excessive charging expense.

So going back to the title "$17.33 per Gallon." On this trip, freakonomics reveal:

• 1.04 gal ~= $18.04 / $17.33/gal
• 229.4 MPG_bs ~= 238.6 mi / 1.04 gal :: 'Wow, my old Tesla is very efficient!'

The truth is the original paper inserts what undergraduate engineering students called "an engineering factor:"


Like the 2007 "Dust to Dust" CNW report, you can always find someone who will use empirical-like language to claim nonsense.

Bob Wilson

 

On behalf of all living things on Earth who use photosynthesis I state that carbon dioxide is our food, so maybe not only a pollutant .

Also, it's not a very potent greenhouse gas either. The most potent ones, pound-for-pound, are halogenated (especially fluorinated) compounds, and the largest by far contributor is water vapor.

What is called a deflection? These statements are more or less correct and are relevant to the discussion

There is certainly a writing on the wall, but I am not certain what exactly it's saying. There is been too much noise and the progress has not been fast or natural enough. If you take the direct and indirect subsidies away, EV's will go extinct overnight (except Tesla and a handful niche models by others).

Just yesterday I completed a mega-long, 123 mile trip in a hypothetically 250-mi EUV; the temperature was just above freezing, and the terrain was mountainous. I came home with 54 mi of range left, which is when ICE cars would turn the Low Fuel warning icon on. It would take pretty much the rest of the work day to recharge at home.

The Sienna would have done this trip @ 34 mpg, using about 3.6 gallons of gas or 20% of the tank. After it there would have been enough gas left to get from VA to ME @40 mpg of normal highway driving.

 

this is a nice theoretically possible story. it reminds readers - not every one is meant to own EV's. By the same token not everyone is meant to drive an ICE either. Hypothetically - most readers should already know both scenarios - & yet here we are in the land of hypotheticals.


To further expound on the 120 mile EUV - hypo - (presuming 1-way?) when i get to the ½-way / turnaround point - maybe a little before or after - i plug into a 150kW dc station for just a few minutes (maybe 10-12 or so) because as soon as I get home I'm going to have to make another trip and I'll need another 20 to 40 miles?
Heck - maybe the destination where I'm at has DC charging also. Then I haven't lost any of that precious 10/12 minutes. Any of those hypotheticals are more realistic though, then the notion as soon as I complete a 240 mile journey - i will have to start another journey from home. That would simply be poor planning ... where I might have to take the other car. But again - that's why some people don't even have a gasser or an ev.
The moral of the hypotheticals;
Travel in transportation that works best for you ..... but don't believe a ridiculous $17/ gallon conversion gasoline FUD 'expert' - from the oil industry. Follow the money .
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Out for dinner with son and daughter-in-law last night, son disclosed that today they’ll be driving (from North Vancouver) to Langley, then down to the States for a little shopping at Trader Joes, gas up (no wonder…), then home.

We might pick up some fruit and vegetables, on our morning dog walk.

 

Are you claiming that ev’s won’t improve, and gasoline cars haven’t pretty much maxed out in efficiency?

 

You make me miss our old reliable 2004 Sienna. What a great vehicle and especially a great vacation vehicle.
The newer Sienna's cost too much for me to justify the purchase when we compared it to other vehicles for us. That doesn't diminsh what an outstanding vehicle it is.

We kept our 2004 Sienna for 16 years and put over 160,000 trouble free miles on it.

 

For aerorobic animals, it is a poison.
Below lethal levels, it reduces cognitive performance; makes people stupid.

You forgot methane. It and water vapor may be stronger warming gases than CO2, but they don't stick around nearly as long. The water vapor soon rains out, and the methane quickly breaks down into CO2. The CO2 itself will stick around for over century.

Some will dissolve into the ocean, acidifying it as it does so. Which is as bad, if not worse than global warming itself. Most of those photosynthesising things live there.

The halogenated compounds are in small quantities in the atmosphere, and that's due to them being well regulated. There are numerous reasons to not release them into the air.

Take away the direct and indirect subsidies to gasoline, and regular will be over $7 a gallon overnight.

While the grid is getting cleaner, and moving towards renewables, petroleum gets dirtier. The easy to drill and refine product is mostly gone. The known reserves expand, but it takes more energy to get it out of the ground. Which increases the cost and pollution involved.

 

I was lucky to get the Sienna before the inflation kicked in, and I hope maybe in the new few months we'll see the dealers' markups going down (they already are, in a small way).

Truthfully, I have never had or systematically driven a vehicle with this level of competence and utility. In fact, because the Sienna turned out to be so good we had overused it, clocking 61K miles in the first 18 months. And that's how I came to own the EUV, which I bought almost by an accident and with the purpose of relieving the Sienna from some of its duties that it would not clock more than 120K miles in 4 years.

EV's are improving, but nowhere near as fast as everyone had hoped back in 2016-2017 when the forthcoming Bolt and the "$35K Tesla" created a lot of expectations. As a comparison: the Comet started commercial service in 1952, and by 1958 the piston airliner went extinct as a species. At this kind of a pace we should be seeing ICE-only automobiles becoming a niche product for special applications.

The best ICE design, which IMO the Dynamic Force engines are, has probably maxed out its thermal efficiency. But how many ICE today have 41% thermal efficiency, and how many ICE-based powertrains are capable of Toyota's HSD's overall efficiency? And by further perfecting their hybrid systems I can see how Toyota could increase the overall efficiency of its fleet by another 10% with the existing technology

Perhaps there no need to flog the $17.00/e-gallon horse; everyone knows it's a fallacy, and those who don't or are unlikely to browse a Prius forum looking for enlightment.

In my post the only hypothetical figure was the officially declared 249 mi range of the EUV. To get that, one needs 70F ambient, HVAC off, stable 55 mph on a flat terrain and high quality road, on LRR tires and no precipitation or strong wind. In fact, it can probably be driven to 300-320 miles in perfect conditions. But in reality it's been 3.5 mi/kWh average for me since Nov 2022 and I have seen as low as 2.1 mi/kWh after driving in cold weather and at the interstate speed.

Some EV drivers are lucky enough to have working and accessible L3 chargers as their destination; others may have to travel to real places that may or may not have any chargers.