Electric cars and hybrids, is it too early?

I read a wonderful article about solar energy and decided to write a little about electric cars.

Recently, a lot of noise about them. Huge investments flow into production and infrastructure itself. A fun example is the Karma scam . But as always there is a downside.

There is another aspect and let's calculate it. As it turned out with solar cells, I think the problem is the high price of batteries in principle. Here we take the well-known figure of the retail cost of the battery, for example, Nissan Leaf is already $ 18,000. Let's say she will serve honestly her 10 years or 160,000 km. It turns out that it costs us $ 1800 per year. Now let's calculate when at least it will pay off for us and whether it will pay off at all. I run about 15000km per year and spend on gasoline with an average consumption of 10l / 100km and $ 1.30 per liter for the year 2000 $. And the electricity we have is the cheapest 5-7cents / kWh and in terms of 21.25 kWh / 100 km it turns out for 100 km of electricity mileage it will cost $ 1.50. Then my 15000km will cost me $ 225 for electricity. We get that now I spend $ 2000 per year on gasoline and I will be $ 225 on electricity and $ 1800 + battery depreciation = $ 2025. Wow! So I say wow! And this is under ideal conditions for electricity and battery survivability in mid-Russian winters.

Yes. In Russia, gasoline is probably a little cheaper and electricity is more expensive, but this will not significantly affect the result. From the calculations, we intentionally threw out the price of the car and the electric car so that they would not get confused and would not fog the calculations. With them, in fact, the picture will turn out even worse (not in favor of hybrids and electro).

I would like to say a few words about hybrids. I am very amused by the claims of manufacturers and sellers of hybrids about fantastically low fuel consumption. It seems that the law of conservation of energy and the inevitable losses when pumping it from one species to another were canceled for them. As in that joke: Everyone has Saturday and they have Thursday.

Accordingly, at the current “low” gas prices and high battery prices, all this hybrid-electro scam is not economically worth the effort, but it is just another banderlog for new cars with new, praised by Greenpeace and timely caught up marketers, super merits. In addition, electricity is also not taken in 90% of cases from a conditionally environmentally friendly source like water, sun and wind.