Cost electric vehicles seem shill to me.

Introduction

I’m no expert on the economics of electric vehicles (EVs). I’ve never been able to afford one, and perhaps for that reason, I’ve always been skeptical about them. But at a recent gathering of EV enthusiasts, someone asked an interesting question: how much does it cost to run an EV? The answer surprised me!

Electric vehicles cost 3-5 times as much as conventional cars.

While it’s true that electric vehicles have higher up-front costs, they also have lower maintenance and insurance costs. In fact, an electric car will likely cost you less than 1/3 what you’d spend on gas in a conventional vehicle. Assuming you drive 12k miles per year (about the average for Americans), your annual fuel bill would be about $2,500 for an EV versus $7000 for a regular car.

Electric cars also need less frequent oil changes and other routine maintenance because they don’t use oil at all! That said, EVs do require more frequent battery replacements than traditional vehicles do–but this is still cheaper than paying high gas prices every month.

Most of the cost is in the battery.

The battery is expensive, but it’s only a small part of the cost of an electric vehicle. The most expensive component of any EV is its battery pack–and that’s because batteries are more energy dense than gasoline or diesel fuel and can last for thousands of cycles with minimal degradation in performance.

The manufacturing process for lithium-ion batteries is difficult, too: we’re talking about putting together 18650 cells by hand inside incredibly tight tolerances. If you’ve ever seen one up close, they look like nothing so much as tiny little jars full of chemicals and metal wires (or their equivalents).

Recharging the battery is expensive.

You can recharge the battery at home, or you can charge it at a charging station.

Charging stations are expensive to build, maintain and run. They also require significant installation costs.

The batteries degrade after a few years.

The next problem is that the batteries degrade after a few years. This is a well-known fact, but it’s not widely discussed. The number of charge cycles your battery can handle before it dies depends on how hot or cold you keep it during charging (and also how much energy was in the battery to begin with). It turns out that most electric vehicles are stored outside at night in the winter, which means they’re losing heat through their motors and wiring as they sit there doing nothing.

Battery degradation also happens when they get too hot: if your car gets parked in direct sunlight on a summer day, its battery will degrade faster than normal as well–as much as twenty percent per year! This brings me back to my original point: these things are expensive! A typical lithium ion battery costs between $5K-$10K; many EVs have multiple batteries for redundancy purposes; some even have multiple motors so one can switch off if another goes bad due to excessive strain caused by driving up hills too fast (or whatever).

Electric vehicles are expensive, but they can be cheap if you don’t need more than a few years out of them.

Electric vehicles are expensive, but they can be cheap if you don’t need more than a few years out of them.

If you’re planning on keeping the car longer than that, electric vehicles are not cheap. If you can’t afford a new car, electric vehicles are not cheap either.

Conclusion

I am not saying that electric vehicles are not a good idea. I think they are, and I would love to own one someday. But if you’re looking for a car that will last for more than five years without needing any major repairs, then an EV probably isn’t the best choice unless it’s really cheap (and even then!).