The Nissan Leaf is the first mass-produced “battery electric vehicle” (BEV). It uses state-of-the-art lithium batteries. Despite this, the Leaf makes no sense at all. It costs more than twice as much ($35,430 vs. $17,250) as a comparable Nissan Versa, but it is much less capable. The Leaf accelerates more slowly than a Versa and has only about 25% of the range.
At $0.11/KWH for electricity and $4.00/gallon for gasoline, you would have to drive the Leaf 164,000 miles to recover its additional purchase cost. Counting interest, the miles to payback is 197,000 miles. Because it is almost impossible to drive a Leaf more than 60 miles a day, the payback with interest would take more than nine years.
However, cost is not the biggest problem with BEVs.
On Wednesday, Jan. 26 a major snowstorm hit Washington D.C. Ten-mile homeward commutes took four hours. If there had been a million electric cars on American roads at the time, every single one of them in the DC area would have ended up stranded on the side of the road, dead. And, before they ran out of power, their drivers would have been forced to turn off the heat and the headlights in a desperate effort to eek out a few more miles of range.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/louiswoodhill/2011/09/14/electric-cars-are-an-extraordinarily-bad-idea/
A bad idea indeed. How did the idea of an electric car become so widely embraced? Anyone know? Who made it seem seductive?
At $0.11/KWH for electricity and $4.00/gallon for gasoline, you would have to drive the Leaf 164,000 miles to recover its additional purchase cost. Counting interest, the miles to payback is 197,000 miles. Because it is almost impossible to drive a Leaf more than 60 miles a day, the payback with interest would take more than nine years.
However, cost is not the biggest problem with BEVs.
On Wednesday, Jan. 26 a major snowstorm hit Washington D.C. Ten-mile homeward commutes took four hours. If there had been a million electric cars on American roads at the time, every single one of them in the DC area would have ended up stranded on the side of the road, dead. And, before they ran out of power, their drivers would have been forced to turn off the heat and the headlights in a desperate effort to eek out a few more miles of range.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/louiswoodhill/2011/09/14/electric-cars-are-an-extraordinarily-bad-idea/
A bad idea indeed. How did the idea of an electric car become so widely embraced? Anyone know? Who made it seem seductive?
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