Best Value EV

AnotherJoe

foxy-stoat wrote: »

Just curious, how do you know how much home charging actually costs you, do you have a check meter or gauge that logs how many KWH's your drawing?

Did the sums for a 2015 Zoe vs 2012 Corsa 1.3 diesel and I worked out that a the Zoe (rented batteries) was 1p per mile cheaper than the Corsa before home charging was allowed for. Zoe cost £2000 more to buy than the Corsa I was looking at, but newer with less mileage though. There is a grey area if you rent the batteries as that is a kind of warranty on part of the car that the Corsa didnt have.

Based my figures on driving 15,000 miles a year.

You don't have to rent batteries with the Zoe but they like to keep that hidden. I wouldn't get one because I don't like what seems like an cheat to me they say the car is so much and in t( minute small print is another £100/month, which is half what I'm paying on my EV batteries and all.
As for working out how much, you reverse engineer it.
In my case, battery is 30 kWh which will do about 120 miles. So, 4 miles per kWh. A kWh costs me 12.5p so a mile is about 3.1p and once you add on the innneficiences of charging (it's about 90% or so efficient) it's probably closer to 3.5p a mile. (4 miles / kWh is pretty standard I think the Zoe would be around that. )
What do you get from the Corsa in mpg ? If I guessed 60 mpg and said a gallon was £6, which are probably optimistic that's 10p a mile. It's probably less mpg and more over gallon so more than that ? So, 15,000 miles cost an extra 6.5p x 15,00p = £975. Call it a round £1k extra easily.

I only do about 1/3 your miles so will never win out on pure fuel savings although my previous car got close to 30mpg than 60 so there is a saving there but it's justa more enjoyable ride at the same sort of price I was paying for my previous cars once you factor in stuff like depreciation which is easy to forget. I'll never get another ICE car having driven EV.
Next year I'll get a car with double the range ,250 miles or so, which means I'll never be reliant on public chargers and can also get rid of the wife's ICE it's only been kept in case we needed a long distance car. So there's a saving there as well.
Bigger picture is that as EVs get cheaper these type of sums will work out for more and more people, when the headline price is the same , which is maybe 5 years off, it's game over for ICE.

foxy-stoat

In the exercise I did the cost of the Zoe was around £5000 (Corsa's I was looking at where £3000) - there are no owned outright batteries at that price range as I would of needed to spend another £4,000.....I even saw a couple of damaged Zoes for sale for strong money (with no batteries).

So in effect you are pre-buying the "fuel" @ £1440.00 per year - which is around 12,000 miles worth of diesel.

So in my calculations if I can get free charging at work or in the local car park if available then the Zoe would save £150 a year on the whole cost of ownership, but in order to do that I would need to spend another £2,000 to buy the car in the first place. Now if the cost of diesel increases by more than 10p a litre then the cost saving will double.

My current car does about 48mpg but I was doing comparisons on the full cost of the 3 cars just to see how much I could save if I switched to a small diesel engined car or EV.

Wonder what the Treasury will do when there is a big hole in their tax revenue when/if a massive shift in UK folk stop buying diesel/petrol/VED - someone has to pay and it will probably be the masses.

AnotherJoe

foxy-stoat wrote: »

Wonder what the Treasury will do when there is a big hole in their tax revenue when/if a massive shift in UK folk stop buying diesel/petrol/VED - someone has to pay and it will probably be the masses.

Road pricing the most likely IMO. Easy and very low cost to do via the MOT. They do it in New Zealand already I understand, Best to make hay before that becomes necessary. That's got to be ten years off.

foxy-stoat

AnotherJoe wrote: »

Road pricing the most likely IMO. Easy and very low cost to do via the MOT. They do it in New Zealand already I understand, Best to make hay before that becomes necessary. That's got to be ten years off.

Will that cover the loss of VED and fuel duty ?

Am sure the folk who only drive 3,000 miles a year will be up in arms!

AnotherJoe

foxy-stoat wrote: »

Will that cover the loss of VED and fuel duty ?
Am sure the folk who only drive 3,000 miles a year will be up in arms!

I was thinking just of fuel duty since VED would be trivial. They would arrange the per mile charge so that it did replace it, After all the fuel duty is effectively per mile.

VED is trivial to fix. Coudl be done per mile by averaging what ut is now, or just a new VED in the same way there are different VEDs now

System

scaredofdebt wrote: »

You just need to know the battery capacity of the car, typically around 40 Kw and how much you are paying for your electricity, typically around 15p per Kwh. So that's 40 x 15p for a full charge ie £6.

Not that simple. There are losses in the charger to take account of due to changing AC to DC and also the voltage conversion so you need to find out what the efficiency of the charger is and increase accordingly. No charger has 100% efficiency. As an example if the charger only had an efficiency of 50% it would need to use 80kW of mains electricity to charge a 40kW EV battery from 0.

Home chargers have an efficiency rating average of 85%, the fast chargers you find dotted around the UK at various MSAs have an efficiency no better than 94%, mostly due to the fact they use a higher mains voltage.

foxy-stoat

Tarambor wrote: »

Not that simple. There are losses in the charger to take account of due to changing AC to DC and also the voltage conversion so you need to find out what the efficiency of the charger is and increase accordingly. No charger has 100% efficiency. As an example if the charger only had an efficiency of 50% it would need to use 80kW of mains electricity to charge a 40kW EV battery from 0.

Home chargers have an efficiency rating average of 85%, the fast chargers you find dotted around the UK at various MSAs have an efficiency no better than 94%, mostly due to the fact they use a higher mains voltage.

So the only real way of telling is installing a check meter or use a smart metre and switch off the rest of the house.

gzoom

foxy-stoat wrote: »

So the only real way of telling is installing a check meter or use a smart metre and switch off the rest of the house.

I have a 'smart' charger at home that records all usage and uploads to the cloud via a WiFi link. You can set up how much per kWh you pay and it'll work out the rest.

Turns our I loss about 10% of electricity in the charging proces but its all pretty academic. When your paying 2.5p per mile in fule a 10% change is less than 0.5p/mile increase. There is also nothing you can do about as your eletricity bill will be the same regardless how much monitoring you do.

Stageshoot

Tarambor wrote: »

> I've never experienced such cheap motoring in my life

You don't save money getting an EV. There is literally no scenario where buying an EV currently saves money over buying an ICE equivalent even if charging costs are £0 due to the premium you pay when you buy and the depreciation when you sell. People are very reluctant to pay much for an EV with a 5 year old battery.

Hmmm

I Bought my Zoe in Nov 17 Brand New for £19400 Battery Owned

I ran it till Sept 18 and put 35k miles on it

In that time it saved me over £5k in fuel, it had no service costs or other running costs, it saved me 150 days congestion charge at £11.50 a day and 150 days parking in Westminster at £50 a day

I sold it privately for just £3000 less than I bought it new. it cost about £300 a month to run the 10 months but saved £5000 in fuel and £1750 in Congestion Charge & £7500 in parking

You do the math. even without the massive saving on CC and parking the car covered its depreciation on fuel saving alone

DoaM

35k miles in 10 months? 3.5k miles per month? ~160 miles per day? A minimum 1.5 hour each way commute?

I guess that's possible for people living "darn sarf"