Electric Cars Are Already Cheaper To Own and Run Than Petrol Or Diesel, Says Study (theguardian.com)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Electric cars are already cheaper to own and run than petrol or diesel cars in the UK, US and Japan, new research shows. The lower cost is a key factor driving the rapid rise in electric car sales now underway, say the researchers. At the moment the cost is partly because of government support, but electric cars are expected to become the cheapest option without subsidies in a few years. The researchers analyzed the total cost of ownership of cars over four years, including the purchase price and depreciation, fuel, insurance, taxation and maintenance. They were surprised to find that pure electric cars came out cheapest in all the markets they examined: UK, Japan, Texas and California.

Pure electric cars have much lower fuel costs -- electricity is cheaper than petrol or diesel -- and maintenance costs, as the engines are simpler and help brake the car, saving on brake pads. In the UK, the annual cost was about 10% lower than for petrol or diesel cars in 2015, the latest year analyzed. Hybrid cars which cannot be plugged in and attract lower subsidies, were usually a little more expensive than petrol or diesel cars. Plug-in hybrids were found to be significantly more expensive -- buyers are effectively paying for two engines in one car, the researchers said. The exception in this case was Japan, where plug-in hybrids receive higher subsidies. The study has been published in the journal Applied Energy.

Comments

Corrects its own headline in the third sentence

[SlaveToTheGrind]

At the moment the cost is partly because of government support, but electric cars are expected to become the cheapest option without subsidies in a few years.

So it's cheapest -- as long as you ignore that pile of money over in the corner that someone else is paying, and one we promise will go away Real Soon Now. Good grief.

Re:Corrects its own headline in the third sentence

[someone1234]

Maybe there should be a healthcare tax on diesel.

Re:Corrects its own headline in the third sentence

[rgbatduke]

Yeah, and I strongly suspect that somebody just can't do arithmetic as well. Perhaps SOME electric cars are less expensive than SOME gasoline cars, but there is a huge range of prices for gas cars, even in a given class. If you compare a high end luxury gas car to the cheapest electric, add in the subsidy, and make negatory assumptions about the probable price of gasoline over the expected lifetime of the car, you can probably fudge it to make it come out a win, but if you compare apples to apples without subsidies, it isn't so clear. Suppose a car goes 12,000 miles in a year. At 20 mpg, that costs 600 gallons of gasoline, or around $1500/year. Over a ten year lifetime, fuel costs are only around $15,000, so if electric cars ran FREE you'd need price points for CHEAP electric cars to match those of CHEAP gasoline cars within around $12,000, allowing for the cost of money. But the cheapest electric cars are easily this much more than the cheapest gasoline cars, and even the study only allows for a 10% difference in maintenance costs, which really remains to be seen as these costs are highly variable by manufacturer. But electricity is NOT free -- even if it is being provided "free" in some places it is really just another subsidy, and costs SOMEBODY somewhere between $0.10 and $0.20 per KWH.

I ran into the same difficulty with our Priuses. The first Prius we bought was $40,000. At the time, we could have easily gotten a similar size/class car for maybe $20,000 to $25,000, one that got around 30 mpg. There is no way we paid off the difference in financing costs over the lifetime of the car with the marginal savings on gasoline at around 50 mpg. New cheap Priuses are better -- close to break even -- but electric cars IMO have a ways to go.

Re:Corrects its own headline in the third sentence

[taiwanjohn]

In a few years, EVs will be cheaper anyway, even without any subsidies. The price of battery storage (in $/kwh) has been declining steadily at about 15%/yr for the last couple of decades. By 2022~23 there will be several EVs on the market for around $20k, simply because the batteries will be that cheap by then.

At that point, it's getting close to 'game over' territory for the ICE vehicle market. If EVs are cheaper all around, they will win. (Not to mention that they also tend to be far more reliable, because they only have a few dozen moving parts, rather than thousands.)

A Stanford lecturer, Tony Seba, wrote a book about this upcoming market shift, called "Clean Disruption." He also does a lecture on the topic, which you can find on YouTube. Pretty interesting stuff.

Re:Corrects its own headline in the third sentence

[shmlco]

"Your EV wastes more energy than my diesel."

Are those your numbers or Volkswagen's?

Re:Corrects its own headline in the third sentence

[serviscope_minor]

Most electricity is generated from fossil fuels, so it would be hit by the same tax.

Why? Powerstations, even coal fired ones, don't dump huge amounts of very nasty particulates into the air at ground level right in the middle of densely populated cities.

Do note that EVs are not more efficient than ICE vehicles. Take the ~40% efficiency of an electricity-generating coal plant, multiply it by 90% transmission losses, by the 75% battery charging efficiency, and approx 85% electric motor efficiency, and you get (0.4)*(0.9)*(0.75)*(0.85) = 0.2295. Or 23% energy efficiency for EVs.

So basically, you get much better pollution control without any loss in efficiency? Sounds like a huge win to me.

Except...

That's if you have an old coal plant. If you have a combined cycle plant you'll hit 62% thermal efficiency on the front end, never mind if you use nuclear or renewables.

Your figures for charging are pessimistic. Charging is more like 80-90% efficient.

http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/doc...

Distribution losses are more like 6.5% in the US not 10% that you quoted. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

And even some random low power cheapo electric motor easily beats 85% efficiency:

https://www.acdcdrives.co.uk/t...

And larger motors are almost always more efficient.

And even if we take your incredibly pessimistic numbers, you still have the advantage of electric braking. But more realistically, the efficiency is more like 42% plant to wheel (47% taking the more optimistic end of the range).

So penalizing technologies solely based on pollution emissions is equivalent to penalizing higher energy efficiency. Higher efficiency and higher pollution come as a package deal with combustion processes.

Which is a phenomenally good argument for electric cars. If you want the efficiency, you want to put the relatively dirty place a long way from people and all in one place so you can have effective scrubbers on the output.

Re:Corrects its own headline in the third sentence

[Rei]

Also, more to the point, new electricity generation in the US (and most of the developed world) is a mix of wind, solar and natural gas. Modern natural gas baseload plants (combined cycle), BTW, are around 60% efficient, not 40%. Coal is dying.

When you add new load to the grid, they're not filling that load with coal; they're filling it with renewables.

Re:Corrects its own headline in the third sentence

[squiggleslash]

Most electricity is generated from fossil fuels, so it would be hit by the same tax.

Kinda. You state the inefficiency of electric cars by only measuring fuel->drivetrain efficiency, but:

1. Ground->Distribution for fuel is much more efficient for electric power plants than for cars: power plants can make use of trains and pipelines, cars have to use a network of fueling stations.
2. Not all electricity is generated from fossil fuels
3. Centralized electricity generation provides fewer points for environmental clean-up, making it both easier and more efficient, thus cutting any (sane) environmental fuel tax significantly
4. ICE engines can't generally turn braking energy into gasoline. While regenerative braking's efficiency is frequently overstated, it's still a factor.

Real world experience seems to support the notion that electric cars are more efficient. People generally run them for pennies (well, dimes - that's a 10c coin for non-Americans out there) a day, as opposed to dollars for ICE engines. If it were somehow more efficient to fuel a diesel VW Golf than a Tesla, then you'd expect that to be reflected in the relative costs of running them. Existing taxes on gasoline and diesel are tiny, and indeed gasoline is frequently subsidized, both by government and by the businesses selling it (the 7-Eleven, not the pump, is where the money's made in an average US gas station) so that doesn't explain why it cost so much more.

That's what's being glossed over in the environmental movement's crusade to eliminate diesel vehicles based solely on emissions.

It's not lost, it was originally a popular argument in the 1980s, before it became clear that diesel was significantly worse with emissions per gallon than gasoline. France even subsidized diesel for a while, leading to massive pollution problems. Burning diesel may result in less CO2 per mile than gasoline, but the health effects are disastrous when the other pollutants are taken into account.

Despite being a tiny minority of vehicles and accounting for a relatively small percentage of total fuel sold, diesel-powered vehicles and equipment account for nearly half of all nitrogen oxides (NOx) and more than two-thirds of all particulate matter (PM) emissions from US transportation sources. Tens of thousands of people die in the US every year due to particulate pollution, this isn't a theoretical problem.

Is it solvable? Sure. If burned at scale, it becomes easy to do "clean diesel" using a mixture of fuel additives and filters and converters of various kinds. At scale in practice means "Anything the size of a Diesel locomotive, or larger, with, like the locomotive, a dedicated team of support staff on hand to change filters and maintain additives, who aren't going to shirk off the job dismissing it as "treehugger bullshit from the lieberals in Washington."

Electric cars make sense. Increased use of diesel would be a massive retrograde step towards dirty air and the kind of issues with mass respiratory syndromes that I saw when I grew up with in the 1970s and 1980s and haven't seen since. Let's not do that.

Re:Corrects its own headline in the third sentence

[Anonymous Coward]

No, we've just gone through this in the UK. Diesels were given a tax break (less tax on fuel) for decades because of the lower CO2 emissions, and now we've got dangerously high NO2 levels everywhere and lots of health problems attributed to particulates from diesel soot.

And that's all with Euro spec diesel and diesel engines. With the bunker fuel they sell as diesel on your side of the pond and lax environmental regulations, it's a health hazard to be anywhere near a diesel powered vehicle.

Re:Corrects its own headline in the third sentence

[hey!]

People pay piles of cash to subsidize ICE vehicles too.

There are in fact two big piles, in fact. The first and larger pile is the non-governmental pile: this is the least visible pile because it's spread out over the population in things like medical bills. Air pollution in the US causes 16,000 premature births, and that alone costs the public 4.3 billion annually.. Overall cost to the US health care economy from ICE air pollution is on the order of $40 billion a year, conservatively. That's not counting the subjective costs of being sick or dying prematurely, it's straight up health spending.

Many of the public costs of ICE nobody so far as I know have even attempted to quantify, like the cost of noise. The noise cost of ICE vehicles is mind-boggling if you think about it: just take the difference in value of a real estate property located on a noisy street vs. a quiet one and multiply that by all the properties which are exposed to high levels of traffic noise. Surprisingly noise pollution has a health cost too, estimated in the billions for heart disease alone.

The second big pile is the government spending pile. This takes some explicit forms, such as the costs of drafting, monitoring and enforcing vehicle pollution regulations. But most of it is squirreled away under other headings. Do you really think that we'd spend a dime in the Middle East on defense if there were no oil there, or if oil were as worthless as sand?

The externalized costs imposed public by internal combustion engine car are staggering. They're just as much public subsidies as any government program, and they're much larger than e-car subsidies. The only difference is that they aren't gathered into a single line item in the budget, which means we don't automatically have to argue for or against the fairness of that subsidy every year. In fact the burden distribution for ICE vehicle external costs is wildly arbitrary and unfair. It's just easy to ignore that.

The whole point of e-vehicle subsidies is to bring down net externalized public costs for vehicles all types in the long term.

Re:Corrects its own headline in the third sentence

[drinkypoo]

And that's all with Euro spec diesel and diesel engines.

Guess what? That's inferior to US spec, where you wind up having to have a catalyst and inject DEF — thereby eliminating almost all NOx emissions. Meanwhile, direct-injected gasoline engines can produce NOx just like diesels...

With the bunker fuel they sell as diesel on your side of the pond and lax environmental regulations, it's a health hazard to be anywhere near a diesel powered vehicle.

On our side of the pond, most of the diesel is now ULSD.

Re:Corrects its own headline in the third sentence

[thegarbz]

On our side of the pond, most of the diesel is now ULSD.

Oh lol. Talk about picking on the spec that wasn't a health hazard and holding it high above your head. *golf clap* But since you're so proud of it, let's compare. ULSD in the USA contains 15ppm sulphur, introduced in 2006. A commendable effort. On our side of the pond the requirement was ULSD be 10ppm and available as of 2005 and was mandated as a requirement from 2009. No doubt by the time you'll shave off those 33% we'll have banned diesel vehicles.

And to reply to your quote out of order:

Guess what? That's inferior to US spec

You're not even close. Never were. The USA has been a very distinct follower rather than a leader in the west when it comes to fuel standards. Not just in sulphur spec, but also in your much lower cetane (where the EU was 17 years ago), higher ash content (where the EU was 12 years ago), higher water content (this was actually at one time better in the USA), and the GP was right your thick diesel gunk has much more in common with bunker fuel than the higher cut-point EU specs.

where you wind up having to have a catalyst and inject DEF

You see you're conflating two issues. The diesel in the USA is garbage compared to that in the EU, but all of that is actually not relevant to NOx, or PM2.5 emissions which is the battle against diesel. These are a direct result of vehicles in the rest of the world focusing on fuel economy. So while a european car will produce more NOx and more PM2.5 emissions regardless of if you buy your diesel in europe or the USA, your lovely all American soot mobile will blast PM10, CO, and that wonderful global warming inducing CO2 out the tailpipe like it's going out of fashion.

Just like your large CocaCola in the USA is much larger than the large in the EU, so are your vehicle's insatiable thirst for fuel. I'm sure in 5 or 10 years you guys will catch up too, start producing fuel efficient engines, realise NOx is a problem, start peeing in the exhaust pipe to try and control the emissions and then stand there wondering why the EU fought a war against diesel vehicles (my own city has gone from 730000 registered diesel vehicles in 2006 to 120000 in 2016 and we're much better for it).

Join the craze man, being able to breath is like cool and stuff.

That's why I use gasoline

[jfdavis668]

I can't afford Petrol or Diesel.

Taxes

[kenh]

Let's not forget that in most markets electric cars get a free ride on public roadways. Gasoline taxes are collected to pay for the infrastructure combustion engines drive on, electricity has no such taxes so plug-in electrics pay no taxes based on usage, and hybrids only pay minimal taxes, based on the gasoline they use when the charge runs out.

Re:Taxes

[rmdingler]

Think of it as another way to subsidize new technology that may improve our future lives. Currently, there's not enough drivers using the free charging stations to create a taxing imbalance. When tax revenue is ultimately an issue for highway maintenance, one thing you can count on your local, state, and federal governors to do is figure out a way to tax electric vehicle usage.

Advantages:

The delivery logistics alone for petroleum-based fuels cannot economically compare to the efficiency of the national electrical grid.

Electric vehicles can be charged during off-peak generation hours.

Environmental savings alone by reducing/eliminating ICE emissions would more than offset electrical general pollution even if all new power was provided by the dirtiest coal buring plants.

Battery technology is currently in its infancy, and whatever current efficiency projections are, it seems a safe gambit future electric vehicles will improve in efficiency dramatically.

Re: Corrects its own headline in the third sentenc

[Anonymous Coward]

eGolf lease deposit - $4000
Lease monthly payment - $50
Price to drive to work 12000 miles at 4m/kWh and $0.11 per kWh - $330
Total cost of ownership over 3 years - $6740

Golf lease deposit - $3000
Golf lease monthly price - $170
Price to drive 12000 miles at 36mpg and $2.60 per gal - $867
Price for yearly service - $300
Total cost of ownership over 3 years - $12451.

The true cost of gasoline -- huge!

[Paul Fernhout]

To support AC's point:
http://www.dollarsandsense.org...
https://www.energyandcapital.c...
https://www.huffingtonpost.com...

From the first one, discussing the US defense-related costs as just one aspect: "Put all these numbers in perspective: The price of a barrel of oil consumed in the United States would have to increase by $23.40 to offset military resources expended to secure oil. That translates to an additional 56 cents for a gallon of gas, or three times the federal gas tax that funds road construction. If $166 billion were spent on other priorities, the Boston public transportation system, the âoeT,â could have its operating expenses covered, with commuters riding for free. And there would still be money left over for another 100 public transport systems across the United States. Or, we could build and install nearly 50,000 wind turbines. Take your pick."

But there are many other external costs to fossil fuels like health care costs (the legacy of leaded gas is still taking a tremendous toll on our society, but air pollution in general is a killer). For example:
https://thinkprogress.org/here...
"The average cost of a gallon of gasoline in the U.S. right now is $2.47. If that cost took into account the environmental and human health costs of burning the gasoline, however, it would more than double, according to a new study. The study, published this week in the journal Climatic Change, created models for the âoesocial cost of atmospheric release,â a method of determining the costs of emissions beyond their market value. According to the study, accounting for the social costs of burning gasoline would add an average of $3.80 per gallon to the pump price, raising the price to $6.27. Diesel has an even higher social cost of $4.80 per gallon. The study also measured the social costs of other fossil fuels not used at the pump. Coal, for example, would jump from 10 cents per kilowatt hour to 42 cents per kilowatt hour, the study found. And natural gas, which has emerged in recent years as a cheap source of fuel, would see its price rise from 7 cents per kWh to 17 cents per kWh."

And on the legacy of leaded gas (and how it has contributed to the USA's huge prison populations): http://www.motherjones.com/env...

A related essay I wrote in 2009 on "Why luxury safer electric cars should be free-to-the-user":
https://groups.google.com/foru...
"This essay explain why luxury safer electric (or plug-in hybrid) cars should be free-to-the-user at the point of sale in the USA, and why this will reduce US taxes overall. Essentially, unsafe gasoline-powered automobiles in the USA pose a high cost on society (accidents, injuries, pollution, defense), and the costs of making better cars would pay for themselves and then some. This essay is an example of using post-scarcity ideology to understand the scarcity-oriented ideological assumptions in our society and how those outdated scarcity assumptions are costing our society in terms of creating and maintaining artificial scarcity."

But the real answer (if maybe not politically acceptable) is not to subsidize electric cars. It is to tax *all* the externalizes of fossil fuel use at the point of purchase, bringing the cost of gas to, perhaps, US$10 a gallon or more. The tax could be redistributed as a basic income to everyone.

Perhaps the deepest irony about all this (mentioned in the above essay) is mentioned here by B

Re: Corrects its own headline in the third sentenc

[Rei]

Or instead, instead of playing amateur scientist on the net, the GP could listen to actual scientists who've studied the issue. ;)