Need help calculating electric cost for 2024 Prius Prime in L.A

Welcome to PriusChat... Investing in solar panels and a power wall for your home charger will be more expensive at first but it will eventually pay for itself. Once you get to that point you'll be charging your car up for free! It's essential for every EV owner and we need the feds to help people pay for these systems via the usual tax breaks.

 

Welcome Keith; Your missing one critical number. Your average mileage per kWh. My gen4 has what looks like a daily spreadsheet under one of the MID option menus. That will give you a better estimate and breakeven point of gas vs electric. My gen4 is rated at 53 mpg and I'm averaging around 4 miles per kWh. Yours may be higher or lower, depending on your driving style, commute, highway vs city driving. I round down to 50 mpg, because it takes a bit more kWh to charge the battery than what your getting out of it. Conservation of energy and general laws of physics.

Based on your numbers; it's costing you $0.09167 per mile in gasoline. You just need to pull your average miles/kWh from your car to figure out your breakeven point for running gas vs electricity.

Hope this helps....

 

Here's a couple gas versus electric charts i'd cobbled together quite some time ago to give a reminder of comparable cost differing between gasoline versus kWh's of electricity;



ymmv
.

 

NorCal Prime owner and PGandE slave. It’s my belief that all CA users share your dilemma. I got solar (no power wall) and try to Level 1 charge when the sun is shining. A little tough in winter here. You should be able to do better.

 

Indeed your math and assessment of your situation is logical. Best reason to own a prime there is.

I also get about 42 miles per charge, and draw 12.5kWh to 13.5 kWh from the wall with the provided L1 EVSE for a full charge.

If you can find a “free charge program” through your utility provider, or employer the math can be different.

The prime gives you options to adapt to changing prices and to have the best of both worlds now.

 

Have you ever considered building your own power wall? The systems are fairly simple and reasonably priced. Of course the batteries that you build it out with aren't cheap, but way cheaper if you do it DIY style and hunt down a good price for them rather than buying a power wall as a complete stand alone product.

 

Personally I’m no big fan of on site electrical storage. The engineering trade offs just don’t work for me. 1. Do I want to just use my own electric storage for night ops only? 2. Do I want backup for electrical outages? 3. Do I want to use the storage for cloudy days/ weeks? **location location. Then how many hours or days storage do I want for the above—it can get real expensive depending on how much you’re trying to do. Finally, my solar will then need more panels to to both charge up the batteries (how large?) and provide daily power—more expense. Plus now NEM 3.0 is forced on me ($$).
I’m sure it works for others. Me and the grid have an unhappy marriage, but it works for us (as sick as it is).

 

I sure hope future homes are required by law to have both solar as well as a powerwall... We need to decentralize our energy infrastructure and eliminate the mass murdering corporations from the equation. The amount of people PG&E has killed from their cost-cutting measures / lack of maintenance is unprecedented, yet board members never have to worry about jail time and all the hundreds of millions in fines and penalties are passed on to rate payers! This deadly and irresponsible insanity is not sustainable by any measure!

 

Depends on where you live. Where I'm at in Canada I doubt the overcast and early sundown winters would help much to recuperate the cost when the overnight rate for hydro electricity which is already renewable and quite green is 8c/kwh.

Solar is very expensive and won't recoup for a long long time

 

Gawd, that’s a killer rate. I guess the geographic sweet spot is either desert south for solar or Canadian north for hydro. (I’m stuck in the middle) I spent the happiest 6 months of my life in Montreal when I first retired. “Go Habs!”

 

Holy freaking moly. California electrify rates are insane. Here in Portland it’s kWh x $0.08814. Maybe I should get a prime and drive for free lol

 

Geez, the CA electric rates are insanely high. Better to get a traditional hybrid rather than a plug in or a plug in with the solar roof. The Prime works well for me where I live with rates of $0.065 for the 1st 1000 kWh, and $0.067 after that. We get our power directly from BPA and our utility is non-profit.

 

Well of COURSE their power is obscenely expensive. CA has to buy the Lion's Share of power from outside the state. Factor that dynamic into the equation also - they have shut down San Onofre nuke reactors & have plans on shutting down the Diablo Canyon reactors by 2029 or 30. It's already on some sort of extension. LOL
You can easily find some parts of SoCal being charged 50¢/kWh
Hardly makes running Electric of any value when you can also easily pay $5.25/gallon for gas.
but again ~ ymmv
.

 

My '24 Prime got 4.3 miles/kWhr over 387 battery-only miles. By my arithmetic, if your electricity costs $0.40/kWhr off-peak, then you will pay about $0.40/4.3 miles = a bit over 9 cents per mile around town.

I set the charging schedule in my car to be daylight-only, because our electric coop is 100% daytime solar. You can set your charging schedule to use only off-peak electrons, too.

 

At those rates, you would have to have gas cost more than around $5.60 per gallon for it to make sense to run EV-only vs. HV mode.

(Assuming you get around ~120 mpge or ~3.5 mile per kWh on EV mode after charging losses, 50 mpg in HV mode, $0.40/kWh home electricity rates. All of those numbers are pretty variable, but are at least in the ballpark of normal Prius Prime usage.)

It might even be cheaper to run charge mode compared to plugging in sometimes, depending on losses from that mode.

The gas price target to beat would be something between $4.50 and $6, depending on your actual efficiency and distances driven, so it’s already close to a break-even point at $4.40. If gas prices go up and utility prices stay the same, your local driving on EV-only should give some arbitrage on these unusually high energy costs, since you can choose whether to run the car as a hybrid or an EV.

 

When comparing the cost of running on electric vs gas you can't just look at the published kWh rates. You have to include all the other charges that are added to the basic kWh rate. So you need to divide the total of the bill by the total kWh used. If you have rates that vary that gets complicated but you can't just ignore this.

Figuring cost based on the official published kWh rates alone is the same as figuring gas cost without any state or federal gas taxes.

Where I live the additional charges include a "fuel adjustment" charge, an "electric surcharge", and state and county taxes. My most recent bill total was almost 2x the official kWh rate after all the additional charges.

Many (perhaps most) people who think they're going to save money by buying a Prime vs a non-Prime model will not see any savings for a long time. Maybe never.

Maybe it makes more sense in California where gas prices are very high but from what some are saying so are electric rates. I guess the state of California also offers a rebate but since dealers seem to routinely jack up the prices - especially of Primes - the effect is that the state is subsidizing price gouging by the dealerships. I assume there is no provision in the rebate that requires the car to sold at MSRP.

Perhaps a Prime makes economic sense for some people. But I know a Prime would not make sense for me. On my last fill up gas was $3.29 but it's gone up to $3.50 recently. But I usually pay less because I can often get a $50 gas card for $40 at a local supermarket (with a $50 food purchase). I just picked one up so that will give me gas at $2.80. At least half my mileage so far has been at the 20% off rate.

I've never seen any Primes for sale around here but I figured I would likely have to drive over 400,000 miles to hit the break even point. That's just based on the difference in fuel cost. And I assumed that all my miles in the Prime would be electric, no gas at all, which is not realistic for me. Another factor which many people fail to consider is the increased cost of car insurance.

 

Where I live in Colorado, the math is more straightforward for the long-term advantages of EVs and PHEVs over gas cars. Electricity is relatively cheap, and gas is often relatively expensive (especially on road trips through the mountains, but even locally).

$0.1149 per kWh is my current home electricity price for PHEV charging. There is no on/off-peak pricing (yet), and this includes the access charge per kWh, the cost adjustment, and the capacity charge. It does not include the access charge per day, since that is baked into my bill at a fixed rate of about $18 per month regardless of usage. My electric bills are $35-60 per month (no AC, no electric heat, gas appliances) so a PHEV shouldn’t significantly increase my cost per month no matter how much I drive it.

Local gas cost is currently below $3 for 85 octane regular and just above $3 for 87 octane regular (what I actually fill up with, since I have reason to believe that 85 octane isn’t good enough for an engine that I want to last indefinitely). I expect gas prices to go up from here, since gas prices in recent years been more expensive than national averages. 87 octane in Colorado is currently almost exactly at the national average for 87 (our midgrade is most states’ regular), and has often been more expensive.

At current prices here, it’s roughly half the cost to fuel a Prius Prime in EV vs. HV. This doesn’t account for other factors, but from a fueling perspective, that is extraordinarily affordable, and will add up to some minor savings over time. I don’t know the break-even point for mileage or years of ownership, but in urban driving it is nearly guaranteed to save some money over a Prius. Both are extremely efficient, and either would be a similarly good hedge against rising fuel prices. I did the math on EVs and most of the current crop of EVs wouldn’t significantly out-perform a Prius Prime (or a Prius) in efficiency adjusted for cost in most conditions, so the only potentially cheaper EVs from a lifetime cost-of-ownership perspective are typically heavily depreciated used EVs, with Colorado costs.

There is also the $5000 state tax credit subsidy for EVs/PHEVs when purchasing new, which incidentally covers most of the difference in cost between the Prius and Prius Prime.

 

Yep, a person definitely needs to do their homework (math) before pulling the trigger on a Prius vs Prius Prime. When I purchased mine, there was $4500 Toyota rebate, along with a $1000 California green car rebate, and the federal rebate for cars with greater than 8 kWh batteries in them. The car was basically cheaper than a regular Prius, which lost it's federal rebate - at the time. I was looking to replace my wrecked Prius C with a Corolla hybrid; until I found out about the Prime rebates.
After a year of data; I'm saving one tank of gas a month over my old Prius C on the same commute - that's after the additional electricity cost offset. So spending $40 a month less in gas or $480 a year. I'm at $0.13/kWh, subtract a penny for every kWh I use between midnight to six AM. That's when I programmed the car to recharge and how I keep track of car electricity usage.
My calculated breakeven is around $0.36/kWh plus time it's going to take to charge the car. IMHO it isn't worth it to pay for a charge, away from home, and spend the time waiting to get the car charged - got better things to do than waste my time waiting for the car to recharge - just to save a couple of pennies.

Hope this helps....