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3rd Thing I’ve Learned From The Tesla–NYTimes Firestorm
This article was originally published on EVObsession.
We all love math, by _Untitled-1 (some rights reserved).
I think this is the last major thing I learned from the Tesla–NYTimes saga. (Also see my first and second revelations, as well as this list of 5 myths that have been spread all over town in the midst of this internet brouhaha). Unfortunately, this one is again a sad comment on the masses (combined with a positive comment — or 5 — about EVs).
Basically, from the many articles and comments I read, I learned that a lot of people can’t do (or don’t try to do) math. Possibly the most common (and ridiculous) thing I heard about electric vehicles — over and over again — was that they are more expensive than gasoline-powered cars.
Yes, if you look at only one number in the equation — the purchase price of a vehicle — electric vehicles are more expensive. (And, yes, this does influence a great number of buyers.) However, doing this is like looking at this:
3 + 1+ 1
and saying it’s greater than this:
2 + 10 + 10
simply because the 3 is bigger than the 2.
But what am I getting at when it comes to electric vehicles? I’m talking about five other costs (which we do pay) that make gasoline-powered cars much more expensive than electric vehicles:
- fuel & maintenance costs
- time costs
- health costs
- global warming / climate change
- energy security costs
If you simply look at the price of electric vehicles (e.g. $28,800 for a Nissan Leaf, $29,125 for a Mitsubishi i, or $25,000 for a smart electric drive) + the price of their fuel + the price of maintenance, many of you would find that they’re cheaper than comparable gasoline-powered cars.
However, that’s not the end of the equation. We also spend hundreds of billions of dollars a year on health costs related to the burning of gasoline, as well as trillions of dollars a year related to protecting supplies of foreign oil that we have become dependent on, and potentially even much worse if we don’t get global warming and climate change to stop (and, first, slow down).
Furthermore, there are considerable time costs to owning a gasoline-powered vehicle versus an electric vehicle. As stated in my last article, you save a ton of time standing or sitting at gas stations when you own an electric car — because instead of doing that, you simply have to plug the car in when you get home or to work, and then unplug it again when you leave.
Of course, there are actually several other benefits to electric vehicles that you could try to quantify, but the case has already been soundly made, so the rest is just fun and games.
The bottom line: as long as you do a somewhat decent job of quantifying the costs of an electric vehicle versus the costs of a gasoline-powered vehicle (e.g. get a hypothetical grade of “D”), you will see that electric cars are already much cheaper than gasoline-powered cars in the vast majority of cases. Give it a try!
3rd Thing I’ve Learned From The Tesla–NYTimes Firestorm was originally published on: CleanTechnica. To read more from CleanTechnica, join over 30,000 others and subscribe to our free RSS feed, follow us on Facebook or Twitter, or just visit our homepage.
2013-02-19 05:15:21
Source: http://cleantechnica.com/2013/02/19/3rd-thing-ive-learned-from-the-tesla-nytimes-firestorm/
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