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These must have come down, I'm not surprised. I'm sure the demand is increasing. We bought our units about 3 years ago and they were almost $600. Good for you for doing it yourself.
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Electric Vehicles on the horizon? Do your homework
- Thread starter Janderso
- Start date
Two of my friends have had EVs for several years now. I talked with them about their experiences. They basically said the same thing: They like their cars, and would not go back to IC for their daily driver.
I spoke to one of my friends about this in more detail. He pointed out that he has not had to buy a tank of gas for his car in something like 5 years. He said his maintenance costs for 100,000 miles basically were the cost of tires and windshield wipers - no oil, transmission fluid etc. He sold his first EV used, just like he would any other car, and got what he felt was a good price for it.
He does have a 220v charger at home, but doesn't feel he really needs it. He said he generally drives under 65 miles a day, and could easily re-charge every night with a regular charger. If he needed to, he could drive it to the dealership or one of several other places and top it off quickly if he needed to, and several places nearby are free. He has driven it from here (Georgia) to New York, and down to South Florida. Charging along the route was not a problem. He picked a spot where he wanted to stop for lunch, dinner, or to take his wife outlet shopping, and when they were finished, the car was charged. (Granted, like me, he doesn't like to go more than 4 hours or at a stretch without a break.)
I am concerned about the recycling of batteries. But I am also reading cases where the batteries are being recycled and re-purposed. I used to drive my cars well over a hundred thousand miles. I did that for years, because I didn't have a choice, I couldn't afford to replace them before that. Now, I generally replace them about every 90-100,000 miles , which is about every 4 - 5 years. As a result, my warrantee generally expires 3/4 of the way through the life of the car, and I get progressively nervous that I'm going to have a big expense the longer I keep the car. Basically, I'd rather replace it well before It wears out, and let someone else deal with it when it wears out. It's a win win - they get a well maintained car that has a fair amount of life left in it, at a price they can afford, and I get a new car and no headaches.
If I can get a car that I like, that performs the way I like, that I don't have to stop at the gas station for, and that will be under warrantee for the entire time I own the car, with no gas expenses, no maintenance expenses other than tires... I'm thinking my next car will be fully electric.
I spoke to one of my friends about this in more detail. He pointed out that he has not had to buy a tank of gas for his car in something like 5 years. He said his maintenance costs for 100,000 miles basically were the cost of tires and windshield wipers - no oil, transmission fluid etc. He sold his first EV used, just like he would any other car, and got what he felt was a good price for it.
He does have a 220v charger at home, but doesn't feel he really needs it. He said he generally drives under 65 miles a day, and could easily re-charge every night with a regular charger. If he needed to, he could drive it to the dealership or one of several other places and top it off quickly if he needed to, and several places nearby are free. He has driven it from here (Georgia) to New York, and down to South Florida. Charging along the route was not a problem. He picked a spot where he wanted to stop for lunch, dinner, or to take his wife outlet shopping, and when they were finished, the car was charged. (Granted, like me, he doesn't like to go more than 4 hours or at a stretch without a break.)
I am concerned about the recycling of batteries. But I am also reading cases where the batteries are being recycled and re-purposed. I used to drive my cars well over a hundred thousand miles. I did that for years, because I didn't have a choice, I couldn't afford to replace them before that. Now, I generally replace them about every 90-100,000 miles , which is about every 4 - 5 years. As a result, my warrantee generally expires 3/4 of the way through the life of the car, and I get progressively nervous that I'm going to have a big expense the longer I keep the car. Basically, I'd rather replace it well before It wears out, and let someone else deal with it when it wears out. It's a win win - they get a well maintained car that has a fair amount of life left in it, at a price they can afford, and I get a new car and no headaches.
If I can get a car that I like, that performs the way I like, that I don't have to stop at the gas station for, and that will be under warrantee for the entire time I own the car, with no gas expenses, no maintenance expenses other than tires... I'm thinking my next car will be fully electric.
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- Mar 26, 2018
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Service costs are much less!
I should add, the industry says the parts and service departments need to realize they will have 70% less business in an EV world.
What do you tell all those guys and gals that are graduating from the automotive technical schools?
I should add, the industry says the parts and service departments need to realize they will have 70% less business in an EV world.
What do you tell all those guys and gals that are graduating from the automotive technical schools?
- Joined
- Aug 3, 2017
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- 2,437
Some of the electric cars are getting INCREDIBLY affordable these days. Recently the Chevy Bolt was available for <$20k new, and used Leafs/Bolts are available at around $12k. That is a pretty 'average' used car price. In our case, the Kia was $32k all-said-and-done, which is incredibly competitive.
I think the thing that will help the most for affordabillity is getting them into the used market. That said, the biggest hold-up is going to be people who don't park on their own property. Access to overnight charging + an EV is a game-changer for anyone who does <200 miles a day.
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You can even get non-installed ones: https://www.amazon.com/BougeRV-Charger-Portable-Charging-Electric/dp/B07P9C963L/ so you just need access to a dryer outlet. There are even smart-splitter-boxes available if necessary (though for another ~$300).
The only thing you need at that point is a dryer vent. I looked, the Grizzle-E version we got, and it seems that we optioned it up
I think we paid about $450 for ours. But this is the one we got, which supports just about all charging speeds: https://grizzl-e.com/product/usa/chargers-usa/grizzl-e-refurbished-2/In our 1 month of driving, I think we've already saved about $400 over a similar ICE car. Even more so since we were using my F250 as our 'family car', and now we drive the EV.
I WILL say as someone who wrenches on my own cars, the reduced maintenance is going to be a little sad. Even brake jobs end up almost never needing to happen on the EVs. In our 1 month, we still haven't worn through the anti-rust coating on the rotors. I believe that means we do very nearly 100% engine-braking.
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If you add up the billions spent on gas/diesel powered vehicle maintenance, well it's sad alright.
The entire industry will be changed, in a big way.
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There you go. One satisfied owner!!
There is no substitute for experience.
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I have a Chevy Volt and a Cadillac ELR. I got the Volt when I was driving a different Cadillac (My old STS) and it was taking $60 per week in gas. With the Volt and ELR it is $6-7 every 3 weeks or so. Plug in overnight and gas engine kicks in when the electric runs out.
The technology is no way near perfect but I feel these are steps along the way and it is good.
We need a few huge technology breakthroughs with motors, solar and batteries to make things work the way people think it should.
The technology is no way near perfect but I feel these are steps along the way and it is good.
We need a few huge technology breakthroughs with motors, solar and batteries to make things work the way people think it should.
I find it amusing that the loudest critics of EVs, are people who have never owned one. That said, they have a niche that is useful now and can be more in the future. I also don't think it's likely that, in the near term, they will completely take over everything. Long term has too many variables to really even make an educated guess.
Having used L1 and L2 chargers, on my Leaf I can charge from almost dead to 80-90% on L1 over about 8 hours. L2 can fully charge in a couple of hours. L3 I can use but never have, but from what I understand it's about the same as the Tesla fast charges, so about 30min to 80%. The Leaf is a smaller battery, lower range commuter vehicle. About 80 miles total range. Good enough for short trips around town, and both my wife and I have charging available at the office. So I can charge there or at home with L2, as I installed a charger in the garage. How much that costs ends up coming down to how long of a run the electrician or you need to make and how difficult that is. I happened to have 220 available in the garage already, so I connected to that.
For people like me, who can charge daily, it just becomes part of the I'm home ritual. Get out, plug in, forget about it. I never have to think about fueling or being stuck really, as I can make both directions of the commute without charging. Charging at work is just a convenience. This is about 90% of my driving time, so it does help. We already had to have 2 vehicles, so having one be an EV hurts nothing for us.
Pricing is what you want it to be. You can get a used one with full battery health for about $12k. New starts around $30k it seems for most brands, even Tesla is about $35k for the Model 3. Or you can drop 100k+ on high end Tesla, BMW, etc.. The low end used gas cars is lower, but they have had a lot longer to get there.
Recycling right now isn't much, but instead we are seeing more re-purposing. In theory, this is also better for the environment. Older packs are being rebuilt by swapping cells around and re-used for forklifts, home backup power, and even road EVs that just might not need as much range. Most people commute less than 30 miles per day, total. So even a somewhat beat up pack can be useful for a lot of people. There is some recycling infrastructure around from power tool and other smaller batteries, and it's only improving. I would like to see more movement here, but it will come with time. The materials in the packs are expensive enough to be worth the hassle and cost. Cobalt is kind of a non-issue, most battery makers are moving away from it for many reasons. But right now it makes financial sense to get as much use out of them as possible.
Emissions... To compare fairly, you have to include the emissions in manufacturing and disposal of ICEs in their costs. Most comparisons I've seen put them about the same if you average them out. And driving EV has almost no emissions, though it's fair to say the tires and brakes wearing have to count for something. Even if you compare full life cycle including electricity generation, EV comes out ahead with the exception of a few coal heavy areas, even that depends a bit on the study as some are a bit higher or lower. However, coal is rapidly being phased out for cost reasons alone, so EV will only improve there.
Maintenance is a complete blow out for EV. No oil changes, no DEF for diesel guys, no fuel, nearly no brake wear. One moving part, with fully sealed bearings compared to an ICE and transmission with a few hundred moving parts and a pumped oil lube system to keep changing out. The rest, tires, suspension, etc end up a wash. Remembering to fill up the washer fluid is about as much as I have to do on the EV. I've put about 30k on the Leaf, it came with about 20k.
Hybrid... Well, I have owned two of them. A 2006 Prius, and a 2021 Highlander. Even with adding oil changes to the maintenance, the Prius was surprisingly maintenance free. I changed the coolant once too, and took the brakes apart because I was worried about them after about 100k miles. They were fine, about 90% of the pad remaining. That was about it. The Prius got about 45MPG for the whole time I had it and I did road trips and local driving with it. Great little car. Cost was about the same as other similar size cars at the time, and shortly after I got it, gas shot up to about $4.50/gal here. We're up to about $3.50 now, so I'm guessing the Highlander is going to be nice there. It's getting about 35MPG overall and no maintenance as it's only got 1500 miles on it. So I can't say anything really long term about it. In theory, hybrids have the maintenance issues of both ICE and EV, but in practice it wound up in between them for me. Overall, I liked it enough to buy another one. Sadly, the Prius got t-boned at about 30 mph, totaling the car. I walked away with minor injuries, thankfully. And a through dislike of people running red lights.
If you need longer range, road trips with <30min breaks, or really heavy hauling, EV is probably not the best choice. Though Teslas seem to be able to handle the first two pretty well now days. And they have demoed semis, so maybe later. I have a LOT of questions about the reality of that sort of setup, but we'll see. I personally think OTR trucking is going to stay diesel for a while, but I've been wrong before.
As for service guys, well, there are going to be a LOT of ICEs to work on short term. And everything has some units that have issues, so EV/Hybrid will need work too. There are still parts that will need replacing. If the world does go more and more EV, they will have a lot more warning than many industries did, and I hope many of them are willing to see the writing on the wall and adapt. There was a time when people were predicting that NYC was going to be buried in horse dung if things didn't change. Trains and cars made it pretty rare to see a horse in NYC these days. Or to use a more familiar example for this forum, machinists had to learn to adapt to a CNC world. Everything changes and change is often painful, but we adapt.
Having used L1 and L2 chargers, on my Leaf I can charge from almost dead to 80-90% on L1 over about 8 hours. L2 can fully charge in a couple of hours. L3 I can use but never have, but from what I understand it's about the same as the Tesla fast charges, so about 30min to 80%. The Leaf is a smaller battery, lower range commuter vehicle. About 80 miles total range. Good enough for short trips around town, and both my wife and I have charging available at the office. So I can charge there or at home with L2, as I installed a charger in the garage. How much that costs ends up coming down to how long of a run the electrician or you need to make and how difficult that is. I happened to have 220 available in the garage already, so I connected to that.
For people like me, who can charge daily, it just becomes part of the I'm home ritual. Get out, plug in, forget about it. I never have to think about fueling or being stuck really, as I can make both directions of the commute without charging. Charging at work is just a convenience. This is about 90% of my driving time, so it does help. We already had to have 2 vehicles, so having one be an EV hurts nothing for us.
Pricing is what you want it to be. You can get a used one with full battery health for about $12k. New starts around $30k it seems for most brands, even Tesla is about $35k for the Model 3. Or you can drop 100k+ on high end Tesla, BMW, etc.. The low end used gas cars is lower, but they have had a lot longer to get there.
Recycling right now isn't much, but instead we are seeing more re-purposing. In theory, this is also better for the environment. Older packs are being rebuilt by swapping cells around and re-used for forklifts, home backup power, and even road EVs that just might not need as much range. Most people commute less than 30 miles per day, total. So even a somewhat beat up pack can be useful for a lot of people. There is some recycling infrastructure around from power tool and other smaller batteries, and it's only improving. I would like to see more movement here, but it will come with time. The materials in the packs are expensive enough to be worth the hassle and cost. Cobalt is kind of a non-issue, most battery makers are moving away from it for many reasons. But right now it makes financial sense to get as much use out of them as possible.
Emissions... To compare fairly, you have to include the emissions in manufacturing and disposal of ICEs in their costs. Most comparisons I've seen put them about the same if you average them out. And driving EV has almost no emissions, though it's fair to say the tires and brakes wearing have to count for something. Even if you compare full life cycle including electricity generation, EV comes out ahead with the exception of a few coal heavy areas, even that depends a bit on the study as some are a bit higher or lower. However, coal is rapidly being phased out for cost reasons alone, so EV will only improve there.
Maintenance is a complete blow out for EV. No oil changes, no DEF for diesel guys, no fuel, nearly no brake wear. One moving part, with fully sealed bearings compared to an ICE and transmission with a few hundred moving parts and a pumped oil lube system to keep changing out. The rest, tires, suspension, etc end up a wash. Remembering to fill up the washer fluid is about as much as I have to do on the EV. I've put about 30k on the Leaf, it came with about 20k.
Hybrid... Well, I have owned two of them. A 2006 Prius, and a 2021 Highlander. Even with adding oil changes to the maintenance, the Prius was surprisingly maintenance free. I changed the coolant once too, and took the brakes apart because I was worried about them after about 100k miles. They were fine, about 90% of the pad remaining. That was about it. The Prius got about 45MPG for the whole time I had it and I did road trips and local driving with it. Great little car. Cost was about the same as other similar size cars at the time, and shortly after I got it, gas shot up to about $4.50/gal here. We're up to about $3.50 now, so I'm guessing the Highlander is going to be nice there. It's getting about 35MPG overall and no maintenance as it's only got 1500 miles on it. So I can't say anything really long term about it. In theory, hybrids have the maintenance issues of both ICE and EV, but in practice it wound up in between them for me. Overall, I liked it enough to buy another one. Sadly, the Prius got t-boned at about 30 mph, totaling the car. I walked away with minor injuries, thankfully. And a through dislike of people running red lights.
If you need longer range, road trips with <30min breaks, or really heavy hauling, EV is probably not the best choice. Though Teslas seem to be able to handle the first two pretty well now days. And they have demoed semis, so maybe later. I have a LOT of questions about the reality of that sort of setup, but we'll see. I personally think OTR trucking is going to stay diesel for a while, but I've been wrong before.
As for service guys, well, there are going to be a LOT of ICEs to work on short term. And everything has some units that have issues, so EV/Hybrid will need work too. There are still parts that will need replacing. If the world does go more and more EV, they will have a lot more warning than many industries did, and I hope many of them are willing to see the writing on the wall and adapt. There was a time when people were predicting that NYC was going to be buried in horse dung if things didn't change. Trains and cars made it pretty rare to see a horse in NYC these days. Or to use a more familiar example for this forum, machinists had to learn to adapt to a CNC world. Everything changes and change is often painful, but we adapt.
Be very careful when computing the emissions associated with EV batteries and powertrains. Sometimes, bad assumptions can lead to skewed results. For example, I saw one calculation that said that sulfur emissions from nickel mining were much larger for the nickel metal hydride batteries in earlier electric cars than for comparable petroleum burning cars. This is true, but I would consider it an Internet factoid. Here's how you arrive at that number. Nickel recycling was pretty bad at that time, due to the fact that most nickel ended up in steel alloys that did not get recycled well. So, one is tempted to assign a correspondingly low percentage and combine it with the dirtiest nickel smelting operations, which are in Indonesia. If you take that number, you get more than the lifetime sulfur emissions of a fossil fuel burning car. It was already pointed out that using recycling percentages for stainless steel does not really apply to large EV batteries, which are removed and recycled entirely by the service facility. And, the number quoted is sulfur emissions. Any modern fossil fuel burning car will naturally have low sulfur emissions, due to the fact that sulfur content in automobile fuel is strictly regulated. It is a poison of catalytic converters so the refineries need to keep it low. Note that this says nothing about CO2. But, in a weird way, the comparison of lifetime sulfur emissions makes a great talking point, and is entirely defensible, especially in an academic setting. Another comparison is CO2 footprint of the motor. There isn't enough data on 100 horesepower brushless or induction motors used in EV's, so the investigators take their figures from the most readily available comparable data: large, high efficiency, stationary industrial motors. These are huge, thousands of pounds, and they outweigh the electric vehicle. But, they have the most closely comparable source numbers. So, they are used in the paper for the CO2 comparison calculation. This one may have been retracted, since there was a huge fuss. But, in a weird way, the comparison has a little truth to it.