I got blasted with a $700 electric bill this month, and we didn’t really do anything new or different. So this doesn’t surprise me really.
If electricity is going to cost this much, I guess the only way electric gets “cheaper” than gas is by hiking gas prices until its cheaper to charge. Consumers are never going to win though.
Why was your bill $700 though?
Is that all new charges for the previous month, is there an unpaid amount from last months bill? If you owed $650 on the last bill and didn’t pay it while the new month generated $50 in new charges then yeah your bill will be for $700. Just as an example.
Just saying a number doesn’t mean anything. How did you manage to get charged $700.00 for your electric last month?
Edit: dude posted his bill below. His charge for one month is $350
No unpaid balance, just new charges. That was the cost of electricity for the last billing cycle.
I’m sorry but I simply do not believe your new charges were $700, especially if you “didn’t do anything different”. Did you host a rock festival in your backyard or something? Did you plug in a 12 foot pile of air conditioners on high the entire month on your driveway?
What state are you in and how many electric heaters are you using this summer?
Jesus, what’s your utilization or price per kWh? I use a shitload of electricity (around 2000kWh per month and my utility provider says average is more like 800) and my bill has never exceeded $300, even with an EV that I drive 1200 miles a month
You can make your own electricity at home if you have the room, by installing solar panels.
IMO everyone should invest in off-grid solar if you can manage it. I have electricity on tap no matter what the power company or their wires are doing.
Or if gas is actually cheaper than electricity, just install a trailer hitch and a hitch cargo carrier, then mount an inverter generator on your cargo carrier and charge the EV on the go with gas.
I can’t wait to get solar. Personally I don’t have the cash on hand to pay the $40K quote I got for a 16kW system, and I’m not comfortable taking out that big of a loan with the economy being such a huge question mark, but in a year or two I’m really looking forward to it
Seems like bullshit to me. Recognizing the logical fallacy here, it’s still worth pointing out the firm has a history of working with major auto manufacturers, and is headquartered near Detroit. Their CEO, Patrick L. Anderson, also served under a Republican governor in multiple roles and is a contributor to numerous conservative research institutes.
It’s not a logical fallacy conspiracy when they’re really out to get you though.
That said, my experience charging an EV in the space of one month cost as much as 14 twelve gallon tanks of gas. There may be something wrong with my electric service but the power company is an evil monopoly that doesn’t care about anything but getting paid so…
There’s definitely a lot of nuance involved. For instance my service provider charges more for electricity than the public charge stations do (seriously fuck PG&E and every other monopolistic service provider), so I actually save money by not charging at home. It’s still absolutely cheaper than filling up on gas though, especially when I can find a spot where I don’t have to pay (like my work.)
Assuming gas is $3.75/gal where you live, that is $630. If you spent $630 on charging your car in one month then you either drive 3000 miles a month or have a problem with your electric meter. Assuming you live in the state with the highest electricity prices that isn’t Hawaii (because then we couldn’t assume $3.75/gal for your gas), your rate is $0.34/kWh. That means you 1853kWh.
Assuming you drive the least efficient EV, the Hummer, which goes 329 miles on 213kWh, you would have to drive 2862 miles in one month to spend $630. So for the worst case electrical price, with the worst case EV mileage, with average gas prices, you are driving a lot more than most people to spend 14 twelve gallon tanks of gas worth. For reference, switching that Hummer to a Bolt would only cost $278 to drive 2862 miles.
Did you charge at home during the night, or during peak hours/at fast chargers?
How many tanks of gas would you have gone through in a comparable vehicle?
Here’s my answer for this (with data!): For the month of July, I charged 440.0 kWh. I averaged 94% efficiency while charging, so the chargers actually used 469 kWh. There were 35 charges, for a total of 66 hours spent charging. My total electric cost is 15 cents per kWh (my plan doesn’t have peak/off-peak). I did no charging at superchargers in July.
In that timeframe, I drove 1314 miles. 355kWh were used while driving, giving me an average efficiency of 3.7 miles per kWh. You’ll note that I used 85 fewer kWh driving, that’s because thosed 85 kWh were used to precondition my car, keep the AC running while I’m in the store or on a bike ride, etc. Super wasteful, but it’s so cheap that I can’t help myself).
So to break it down: 15 cents per kwh * 469kWh = $70 to charge, $12.75 of which was just used for climate control while not driving.
My last car was a 2016 Honda Accord Touring V6 which, in my area and with my driving style, averaged about 22mpg (lots of steep hills, 85mph driving, and stop and go traffic. I live 15 miles from town by interstate and town has lots of traffic).
According to AAA, the average cost of gas in PA is $3.87 (I know that price changes, but the math gets harder if I look up the price of gas each time I would have had to fill the tank so I’m just taking the current avg). 1314 miles / 22mpg = 59.7 gallons of gas * $3.87 = $231.
For extra fun math, looking at purely fuel costs, the Accord would cost 17.5 cents per mile to drive (not including the fact that I’d need an oil change every 4 months, transmission fluid every year and a half, etc).
My current car at current electric rates costs 5.3 cents per mile to drive.
Additionally, i’m planning on getting solar in a year or two, which should bring my cost down to effectively zero. AND, we can charge for free at my wife’s work when she’s in the office (as well as at the park I bike at), but she wasn’t in the office at all in July; we both worked from home full time last month.
TL;DR: my Model 3 Long Range costs about a third as much per mile to drive as my similarly sized Honda Accord did before I sold it
I charge a Lightning at home with an 80 amp charger and before that I had a gas f150. The increase to my energy bill was about $30-$40 a month and offset about $400 a month in gas.
Thanks for doing the work.
Consideration for readers. Remember not everyone lives where you do and has the same access and infrastructure that you do.
Some US states are pushing for EV but do not have the power production needed to support it at scale. Maybe another 10 or 20 years when everyone has a nuclear reactor in their backyard.
I’m all for EV for those that it makes sense. For many, especially the impoverished, it’s just another barrier to overcome.
Yeah, this is bullshit. I charge my car at home by leaving it plugged in overnight. Costs me literally a few bucks a month to keep it charged. I don’t even notice it on my electricity bill.
If I were charging at fee-based charging stations all the time, the story would be different, but who the hell does that?!?
People who live in apartments and basement suites, basically anywhere with no garage. After 2030 or 2035 or whatever the deadline is there will be lots of people who have electric cars and no way to charge them overnight at home, so people will have to charge at public chargers everytime.
We were looking at getting an EV without being able to charge it at home. Charging it at public chargers here in the UK would’ve cost about the same as petrol. But having to rely on the public charging infrastructure in its current state made us decide against it, at least for now.
Out of curiosity, why couldn’t you charge it at home? Most electric cars can have their chargers plugged into a standard wall outlet. It’s slower, but it works fine.
Here in DK we are fine with public charging only. Still quite a bit cheaper than gas for a comparable car. And I suspect lower repair cost, (currently) free parking and eventual city closures for ICEs to be enough logical reasons for hesitant people. Personally I would have never bought an ICE. Felt bad enough getting a car at all.
This is absolutely stupid. The only way you’re spending more on EV charging is if you get the most expensive at-home charger with the most expensive professional installation, and then never use it because you only charge at the most expensive level-3 chargers. I almost exclusively charge my Bolt for free, but even when I pay for the electricity it’s the cost equivalent of getting 120-150 mpg. The level-3 chargers like Electrify America come out to be in the same ballpark as gas in terms of cost per mile, maybe even a little more… But you’d have to use them to ridiculous excess for the overall cost of driving to even approach ICE vehicles.
I’m not reading further down the line to see but did anyone notice the pic used in this post to show someone not understanding where their fuel door is? Back out and back in correctly and pump gas like a normal human being.
That’s a Costco, they specificially tell you to use any lane and the hose is long enough to reach. That person is just following directions. The stations are built with one way traffic flow and get very busy, it’s not practical to queue for a particular side of the car.
MOST cars have the fuel door on the left, Costco tends to have more cars queue in the lanes that match up with the left hand fuel door so regardless of what side your fuel door is on grab the lanes with the pump on the right of your car and you’ll get through a bit faster since you can pull it around.
This is pretty similar to the numbers I ran myself. Public charging costs about the same as gas, and home electricity (particularly if in a cheap area) is where the savings come from. This was using US numbers, which has some of the cheapest gas in the world.
