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I just spent a week with a Chevy Bolt while one of our family cars was in the shop. The good: nice small car, everything is pretty easy to use. The meh: withou

I just spent a week with a Chevy Bolt while one of our family cars was in the shop. The good: nice small car, everything is pretty easy to use. The meh: without hardware installed in my home, keeping the car charged up for regular family use is problematic. Sometimes there is just not 2 hours to swing by a charging station, and so we spent most of the week with the Bolt showing under 40 miles in range. The bad: hitting the charging station for 70 miles in range costing $13 (this was consistently the deal for the week). My Subaru Crosstrek has a lifetime average of 27Mpg, so at $3.80 per gallon of gas, the cost to get the same range would have been $9.86. I was pretty surprised that it was 25% more expensive to charge the Bolt. Note: I was charging between 4pm-6pm, and my understanding is charging rates are lower in the evening... but, apples to apples, the Bolt was more expensive to fuel.

TheLoafOfBread 4y ago
Exactly my experience with Enyaq in Europe. Now add unique and stupid applications for each charger which were probably made by a guy with phd in Crappiest UX design and regularly broken or incompatible chargers (yep, same CCS plug but car will refuse it...) and I am really skeptical to any BEV future.
tuatoru 4y ago
This is the dirty secret of EVs (or one of them): public charging costs as much as gasoline for an equivalent ICEV, or more. Whenever I run the numbers to decide between an EV or an ICEV, I get payback periods in the hundreds of years. (I can't charge at home. YMMV.) Edit: This would change if a battery-swapping industry model were widely adopted. If the battery was not included in the cost of the car but amortized over 10 or 20 years by a swapping station, the NPV of an EV looks much better.
- indymike 4y ago
  > Whenever I run the numbers to decide between an EV or an ICEV, I get payback periods in the hundreds of years. (I can't charge at home. YMMV.) That was the eye opener for me: the cost of charging and eventual battery replacement made the ICE a long term better spend.

TheLoafOfBread 4y ago

Exactly my experience with Enyaq in Europe. Now add unique and stupid applications for each charger which were probably made by a guy with phd in Crappiest UX design and regularly broken or incompatible chargers (yep, same CCS plug but car will refuse it...) and I am really skeptical to any BEV future.

tuatoru 4y ago

This is the dirty secret of EVs (or one of them): public charging costs as much as gasoline for an equivalent ICEV, or more. Whenever I run the numbers to decide between an EV or an ICEV, I get payback periods in the hundreds of years. (I can't charge at home. YMMV.) Edit: This would change if a battery-swapping industry model were widely adopted. If the battery was not included in the cost of the car but amortized over 10 or 20 years by a swapping station, the NPV of an EV looks much better.

indymike 4y ago
> Whenever I run the numbers to decide between an EV or an ICEV, I get payback periods in the hundreds of years. (I can't charge at home. YMMV.) That was the eye opener for me: the cost of charging and eventual battery replacement made the ICE a long term better spend.