The Money Part of Plug in Technology...

It will never pay for itself. Particularly if you consider the opportunity cost of spending that 10,300 now. Make 10% (aggressive but easy math) you could make $1000 a year if you invest that money. After taxes, that's close to how much you pay on gas.

A hymotion is cool but a money loser.

 

On strict finances the hymotion pack does not make sense.
Neither does power windows, a sunroof, moonroof, JBL speakers, navigation, or leather seats.

If you are looking decrease our dependance on foreign oil, or expect gas to become scarce in the next 3-6 years, it makes a lot of sense.
But strictly on a financial basis, you are better off walking

 

My projected savings at 100,000 miles over a 25MPG car is about $7000. And thats using my combined data. I have not even had a year with my Hymotion yet so I expect that $7000 to grow when I get a few more years with the plug-in.

 

Wouldn't a more meaningful measure be saving compared to a 50 MPG car (such as a prius)? Why 25MPG?

 

Because if I was going to buy a regular car it would most likely be about 25MPG. The average MPG of the cars out on the road is about 21MPG. So I like to tell people these numbers are compared to a 25MPG car. Another way to look at it is what is the savings from your last car?

 

Assuming 2.50/gal for one year is OK, but for 12 years???? Back when I got the 2001, the same naysayer calculations were the rage. They were way off on gas prices, so the "payback" they proved wasn't there...... was there.

The Hymotion option should be based on more than a spreadsheet. A big factor would be how many vehicles you (or your family) uses. If one car of many is just to be a short range, daily commuter, then it may be a viable option. If this is your one vehicle that makes many, many long trips, then this is not such a good tradeoff.

 

Nope, you're not missing a thing as the others have mentioned.

Personally, I think $10k is better spent on a PV system.

You live in SoCal, 1BOG.org is a group that puts together group buys for solar systems and they have one active right now for LA County.

For example, I live in San Diego County and they have just announced that they have secured two contractors to install systems at $6.09/watt.

So let's say you install a typical 3kW system, that will cost $18,270, but once you factor in the Federal Tax Credit (30%, $5,481) and the State Tax Credit (varies depending on the utility, but SDGE is currently $1.90/watt. $5,700) and all of a sudden that system will only cost you $7,089 - that's less than half the cost!

Looks like Encino (LA County) is currently active with a cost of $7.08/watt which I think is still a below typical retail price where I've seen quotes of $8-10/watt installed.

Your typical system will pay itself off in 8-12 years if you're not a heavy user - if you're someone who frequently goes into the expensive usage tiers it can pay off much faster - I've seen cases where a system will pay itself off in 6 years when the person uses a lot of electricity and they only build a system to avoid the high cost usage levels. For someone like that, it really should be a no-brainer.

You can use this Solar Power Calculator to get an idea of how big of a system you need.

 

Here's my attempt at a calculation (with lots of simplifying assumptions to make the math easy):

The assumptions:

1) Your commute is long enough to fully delplete your battery going one way.
2) You can charge back up at work.
3) Your battery takes a full 5 kWh to charge up.
4) In EV mode, you have a range of 20 miles.
5) Before you got the battery, you were getting 40 mpg.
6) Electricity (at work and at home) costs 10 cents/kWh.
7) The price of gas will have an average price of $5/gal over the next several years.

Two full charges means you use 10 kWh per day.

Since 5 kWh takes you 20 miles (in EV mode), you are getting 4 mi/kWh. You don't have to drive in EV mode all the time. This calculation just means that (for every kWh of battery energy used) you are going 4 miles further than you used to be able to go on gasoline alone.

If 5 kWh takes you 20 miles, 10 kWh will take you 40 miles. If you were getting 40 mi/gal before you had the Hymotion system installed, this means that 10 kWh is taking you as far as 1 gallon used to take you. So, you are saving one gallon of gas each day.

If electricity is 10 cents/kWh, you will pay $1 for 10 kWh.

If the price of gas is $5/gal, you are saving $4 each day.

If your new Hymotion system cost you $10000, it will take you 2500 days to recover your money. 2500 days, divided by 365 days/year, is about 6.85 years to pay for your system with the money you save.

Granted, my assumptions are rather generous, especially the one about gas prices staying at $5/gal for several years.

The bottom line is that you might be saving the planet (or some miniscule fraction of it), but you're not saving your wallet ...unless gas prices really do go way up and stay there.

It could happen.

Arthur

 

Well that is a complete lie.

If you really are interested in reducing our dependence on foreign oil, give the 10K directly to fund a MS or PhD scholarship doing research into battery technology.

Putting in an EV to reduce dependence on oil, what a load of BS! It's to show off to your friends - it's the green movement solution to the 'small penis syndrome' just like buying a hummer is to rappers. Garbage.

 

I own one.

Consistent with what was stated earlier, your carbon avoided per dollar invested is a lot better with rooftop PV than with the Hymotion battery. My calculation based on Virginia Power's generation mix is that my electrical miles generate about 70% as much C02 as my gas-powered miles. I estimated at some point that I'm paying about 85 cents per pound of C02 avoided with the Hymotion system, versus what would work out to be about 8 cents/lb if I did rooftop solar.

But, it does work as advertised, and it definitely reduces your use of oil for transportation.

My wife now consistently gets >99.9 mpg. So, if your driving pattern is a good match for the vehicle (e.g., lots of short-ish lower speed trips), it does a good job of substituting grid electricity for gasoline.

Pay for itself? Nah. At $2.50/gallon, with the electric rates I pay, I'd have to do 400,000 electric miles, undiscounted. That would be close to 800,000 total miles (combined gas and electric).

But it is highly leveraged with respect to the price of gasoline. At $5/gallon, it would only take 127,000 electric miles -- unlikely, but not impossible. At $8/gallon, it would pay for itself in less than 70,000 electrically-powered miles. All of that assumes that the price of electricity doesn't rise in tandem with the price of oil. Again, possible, but not too plausible.

 

Well, that's a little harsh. Besides, my penis is REALLY BIG!! So, that can't possibly be why I bought a Hymotion system.

The reality is that reducing carbon emissions and our dependence of foreign oil are going to require several critical changes in our lifestyle, the way we use energy, and the way we generate energy.

You are right that hybrid cars (or even purely electric cars) are far from being the whole answer.

We need to start working to eliminate some of the urban sprawl that we have created. That will reduce the number of miles of travel required to tranport people and goods to and from the sprawled out suburbs.

At the same time, we have to change our transportation habits so that MOST of our travel is done by public transportation. The failing auto companies should not only be making plug-in and electric cars, they should be retooling their factories to make train cars.

Plug-in hybrids and electric cars ARE the logical replacement for gasoline-powered cars, but they have their limitations. They are more expensive to manufacture, and the fully-electric cars either have a limited range OR a very expensive (and very heavy) battery. Plug-in hybrids still use lots of gas, especially on long trips.

Again, the real solution is improving our public transportation system and then providing people with incentives to change their lifestyle and start using public tranportation much more. In that kind of world, plug-in and electric cars would be an excellent way to fill in the gaps in people's tranportation needs. Through rentals and car-sharing programs, people could have access to extremely efficient cars to make any trips that were impossible (or extremely inconvenient) even with a greatly improved public transportation system.

In another post, someone said that electric cars produce almost as much carbon emissions as gasoline cars. Their assumption is this: If 70% of our electricity generation is from fossil fuels, then electric cars produce 70% as much carbon as cars powered by fossil fuels.

This argument ignores the factor of efficiency. Whenever you convert energy from one form to another, you lose some percentage.

When internal-combustion engines convert the energy stored in gasoline into the energy of your car's motion, they do so very inefficiently. Generating electricity from coal in a power plant is a much more efficient process. Using an electric motor to convert electric energy into the energy of your car's motion is an even MORE efficient process.

So, even if electric power is generated from fossil fuels, electric cars produce WAY less carbon emissions than gasoline cars, because the overall process is efficient enough to use way less coal per mile than the gas that other cars use per mile.

In addition to reducing urban sprawl, improving public tranport, changing our tranport habits (using public transport more and sharing cars), and more efficient electric cars and plug-in hybrids, we should also be trying to generate more of our electricity from renewable energy sources.

We should make a goal of building no new fossil fuel power plants. New power capacity and the replacement of old plants should be done with regional wind farms and solar panels on individual buildings. The more of this we do, the more cost effective it will become.

When we factor in the cost of resurrecting a planet that has succumbed to runaway global warming, all renewable energy starts looking very cheap.

My little effort is to be a plug-in hybrid pioneer AND put solar panels on my house (not because of personal physical inadequacies but because I want to be part of the solution, not part of the problem).

I could also donate money to the development of battery technology or other renewable energy technologies, but funding those efforts with tax dollars is probably a better idea. They are too important (and urgent) to be left to the whim of philanthropists. After all, that's what governments are for.

Arthur

 

Tax credit for converting

I am considering a conversion to qualify for the tax credit. This is an article cut on the current credit.

The new tax credits for plug-in vehicles will range from between $2,500 to $7,500, with factors such as battery capacity determining how much owners would receive. Cars like the Chevrolet Volt, due in late 2010, would be eligible for the maximum credit of $7,500. The total cost of the program over the next ten years is estimated at $2.8 billion - a significant sum of money, but a drop in the bucket next to the $700 billion bill it's a part of, or the money received so far by Chrysler and GM.

To meet the tax incentive's standards, a plug-in vehicle must have a battery with a minimum capacity of 4kWh, though an additional $200 of tax credit is added for every kilowatt-hour thereafter, which is how the Volt gets to the maximum $7,500 limit with its 16kWh battery..

Can you add enough Lithium to get the max credit to make it worth wild? Comments!

 

I'll point out, however futile doing so may be, that folks
like Theforce and Chogan are among the few people who actually
know *how* to drive a PHEV system as adapted to the Prius for best
benefit. Most of the people [google, various power companies
that make the gesture, etc] who are piloting these things are still
getting high-fifties effective MPG, which you can do on the stock
system without spending any more money. The benefits from using
the Prius as the platform for this depend heavily on an intimiate
understanding of how the systems play together [or don't] and
how to best utilize the benefits of each.
.
_H*

 

Hobbit,

With all due respect, it doesn't matter how efficiently you drive your Hymotion-converted Prius. You can drive as many gasoline miles as you want. The thing that determines how much money you are saving is the number of electric miles you drive.

If you can figure out a way to charge your battery four times a day and use up all four of those charges (even if it takes you a couple hundred miles to do it), your savings will be four times as great as someone who charges once a day and uses their charge by driving 20 miles in EV mode only.

Arthur

 

1 KWH delivered by Virginia Power creates 1.2 lbs CO2 (per US DOE):
http://www.eia.doe.gov/pub/oiaf/1605/cdrom/pdf/e-supdoc.pdf

I get roughly 4 miles per KWH. (That's been cited already in this thread, and matches the findings of the US national laboratories tests of a Hymotion-converted Prius.)

So, that's 0.3 lbs C02 per mile (1.2 lbs/KWH / 4 Miles/KWH).

A gallon of gasoline generates 19.5 lbs C02 when burned (per US EPA):
Emission Facts: Greenhouse Gas Emissions from a Typical Passenger Vehicle | US EPA


I get the EPA 46 MPG when burning gas.

So, that's .42 lbs C02/mile (19.5 lbs/gallon / 46 miles/gallon).

Finally, 0.3/0.42 = 0.71

Electrical miles produce 71% as much C02 as gasoline miles, in my car, when charged from the grid.

I had been buying wind power through my utility, which, in theory, gave me clean electric miles. That was part of the reason I went for the Hymotion kit. But the vendor dropped all Virginia residential customers early this year. So I'm back to buying the standard mix of power here in Virginia. It's not very different from the US average. It gives me a modest reduction in C02 per mile. But it is not what I would call low-carbon transportation.

 

The answer depends on what your goal is. My goal is to minimize the amount of gasoline used, for a given travel distance. This also minimizes C02 and maximizes bragging rights. (My brother owns a Prius, and until we got the Hymotion conversion, he always claimed much better mileage than my wife and I get.) So, I drive it purposefully to maximize the fraction of energy derived from electricity. Which means trying not to demand more power at any given instant than the electrical side can produce.

From my perspective, if I want to go 100 miles, I can do that on five charges driving conservatively, or one charge driving un-conservatively. The first case uses no gasoline, the second case uses slightly less gasoline than a stock Prius. So for me, the right metric isn't to maximize the number of charges, it is to maximize the number of charges per mile.

 

You're absolutely correct. It depends on your goal. This discussion was about the goal of paying for a Hymotion system with the money that the Hymotion system saved you. With that goal, the more you use the Hymotion system, the sooner it will pay for itself. It doesn't matter if you also use lots of gas. Unless, of course, you decide to drive much less efficiently than you did before you got the Hymotion system. Then, you're fooling yourself if you think that your calculations mean anything.

Like you, my main goal is to use as little gas as possible, regardless of whether my Hymotion system ever pays for itself. Here is my personal data for the last 9 days:

date _mi_ gal_ kWh mi/gal
5/12 15.8 0.11 4.50 139
5/13 27.7 0.28 6.42 100
5/14 12.2 0.04 3.72 296
5/15 12.5 0.00 3.98 infinity
5/16 08.3 0.13 1.79 063
5/17 00.0 0.00 0.00 000
5/18 12.6 0.03 3.84 490
5/19 39.2 0.66 4.86 061
5/20 24.8 0.21 6.35 123

The miles and gallons are raw data from my ScanGauge. The kWh comes from my Kill-A-Watt meter. The mi/gal numbers are adjusted for known inaccuracies in the ScanGauge data.

You can see that my mileage drops quite a bit when I exceed the range of my Hymotion pack (5/19) or am in a hurry (5/16). On days when I have to make two round-trips to work (5/13 and 5/20), I only have time to recharge about halfway between trips. Even so, I usually manage to keep my mpg over 100 on those days.

So, yes, bragging is one of my goals, too.

Arthur