I didn't by one for running cost reasons; more safety and speed. However, anecdotally it seems to chew through tires - which isn't mentioned, but is obvious with a quite heavy powerful car - and they're relatively expensive. Charging, some placed really gouge you - I mostly charge at home (~0.115k/wh), and some local places are 3-5x that; home charging is the cheapest I've found.
> Charging, some placed really gouge you - I mostly charge at home (~0.115k/wh), and some local places are 3-5x that; home charging is the cheapest I've found.
I wouldn't call it gouging. You're excluding the capex on your home charger in your comparison, but public chargers have to include that, maintenance costs as a result of public abuse, maintenance of payment infrastructure, rent for the site, and taxes. If you consider what a public charger might take in a day, it's clear that the non-marginal costs are the majority of the cost.
I'm sorry, but I feel compelled to interject with a friendly PSA, "k/wh" (thousand per watt-hour) isn't a real unit in this context, it's $0.22/kWh ($0.22 per thousand Watt-hours)
> If this results in a 500% markup, customers should rightly be outraged.
No, it just means that the economics are different than what you think and that you should adjust your expectations accordingly.
For example, we can expect most electric car owners to charge at home with public chargers predominantly being placed on or near long distance routes. Public chargers elsewhere may struggle to be viable, except perhaps where home charging is impractical (eg. in areas where people don't have off-street parking).
You need to ask for credit for the tread wear warranty when buying new tires.
They won’t give this automatically but if you ask they should immediately do it cheerfully at a good shop.
If you’re in the US, I’ve had good experience with Discount Tires and Americas Tires (same company; they use a different name depending on what state you’re in). Savings for me has been about 50% each time.
And Costco is the worst for this; I suspect they get the warranty money and pocket it because they sure put up a wall with a bad policy that says they don’t honor the warranty unless the tread gets down to a dangerous level.
2. Follow recommended guidelines for inflation and rotations
3. Use tires until they wear down to the level where change is recommended. They have to be below a certain depth (3mm I think?) to qualify. (A problem with Costco is last I checked they required them to be down to 1mm if I recall correctly. That's pretty low, and possibly dangerous.)
4. Go to tire store, ask for credit for tread wear. Normally at time of purchase, but you could gate your purchase by seeing what they say and if they don't play ball, go elsewhere.
5. They have a record of your car's mileage when you bought the tires. Or it's on the receipt if you bought elsewhere, or the original mileage is zero if the old tires first came on the car. They check your mileage now. They subtract the two and find the result. Tread warranty goes for 45,000 miles but you've only driven 20,000 miles. If they are strict, they check their records and see that you've done the recommended rotations. Or maybe they are not strict and don't care.
6. They give you a credit prorated to how many miles you got out of the tires. You got only 50% of the warranty miles? Then it's a (roughly) 50% credit on the price of the tires. So if the set of 4 is $1000, they give you a credit of $500. Your new tires cost you $500 out of pocket. These numbers are not exact… don't be surprised if it's 45% or something, might be something I'm forgetting here.
6a. Live in a state where people are chill. California comes to mind. Consumers are treated really well here.
7. Repeat with each new set of tires. They go by the full price of the tires before the credit, so even though you paid $500, your tires were $1000 tires (full set) for your next set you still get the same $500 credit even though you paid only $500 last time. In other words the new credit each subsequent time around is 50% of $1000, not 50% of the $500 you paid.
Important to know, these warranties are paid for by the tire manufacturer, not the reseller. Therefore the reseller should not care and should be happy to give it to you. They recoup it from the manufacturer. That could in theory argue against going to a branded one-brand shop, because presumably they would fight harder against honoring the warranty, as compared to a place that sells multiple brands.
noticed you mentioned speed.. That's probably why you are going through tires so fast.. ya EVs go through tires a lot faster but if you drive fast and more so accelerate fast then you will really go through tires
I don't think so. In cities quality of air will increase dramatically once majority of ICEs is migrated to EVs. Obviously it will be even better if many private vehicles are replaced by public transportation. But one is not excluding the other.
>The company found that a car’s four tires collectively emit 1 trillion ultrafine particles — of less than 100 nanometers — per kilometer driven. These particles, a growing number of experts say, pose a unique health risk: They are so small they can pass through lung tissue into the bloodstream and cross the blood-brain barrier or be breathed in and travel directly to the brain, causing a range of problems.
That's extraordinarily problematic for human beings, particularly if storm water runoff finds its way into a city's water supply.
ICEs use tires as well, uh? So you just need to factor in the difference between ICEs and EVs tires wear. ANd you should also subtract for EVs particles from brakes (they are bad for human beings as well) and obviously exhaust emissions.
Good article! Thanks. Unfortunately climate change will also decimate fish stocks. I hope the industry will find a less harmful chemical to use instead of 6PPD.
