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SpaceEVDriver

SpaceEVDriver

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Nice I am too kinda? I live 20 miles south east of Winslow down highway 99.
I grew up on an off-grid ranch about 20 miles northwest of Winslow (I-40 to 99/Leupp Road).

I live up on the mountain now.
 

Azgunguy

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I grew up on an off-grid ranch about 20 miles northwest of Winslow (I-40 to 99/Leupp Road).

I live up on the mountain now.
Nice. I don’t travel up Leupp but I’ve been up there before. I live off grid now down where I am. Almost to the new wind farm they put out here.
 

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Nice. I don’t travel up Leupp but I’ve been up there before. I live off grid now down where I am. Almost to the new wind farm they put out here.
That's a nice-looking array behind your truck. I'm more than a little jealous. We're finally getting solar put in this year.
 

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I didn't think I've ever had an EA or T DCFC cost me $0.50/kWh. I have seen the non-subscription prices for EA and T be as high as $0.64/kWh, but I've never paid that much. The maximum I've paid was $0.48/kWh. I included the $8 for EA and $15 for T subscriptions.

We got slow charging of 120 kWh for no additional cost to us. I included our at home 109 kWh at our local utility rate of $0.14/kWh (including fees and taxes). We got a free charge of 82 kWh worth $45 at an EA charger for some reason. We had L2 at a rental house that was covered by the rental fee.

Subtracting the 202 kWh of no-cost charging from 1429 kWh leaves me with 1227 kWh that we paid for directly. Subtracting the at-home charging of 109 kWh and $15.26 gives me 1118 kWh for $444.19, or $0.397/kWh average for the charging we paid for during traveling.

We paid $0.35/kWh at the hotels we stayed at--neither was free. Charging at a SC off peak can be as low as $0.22/kWh, and you can find those in the app.
Thanks for breaking that down.

At $0.397/kWh while using paid fast-chargers, that's about the same price as buying gas.

It's honestly a bit disappointing that the charge providers charge so much for electricity and it negates the "value" aspect of EVs when road tripping.

I can understand 40 cents per kWh in California where electricity is priced like champagne, but in low cost electricity states, why is it so high?
 

invertedspear

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it negates the "value" aspect of EVs when road tripping.
EVs are not ideal road trippers, they are ideal commuters. If you drive several hundred miles each time you get behind the wheel, you should know that an EV is not your best choice. So yes "while road tripping" the value of an EV is slightly negated. But road trips are usually the exception, and the cost advantage of going EV for all your in-town miles is often huge.

What I will say is that road tripping in an EV is amazingly consistent in cost/mile. 100 miles in AZ costs me roughly the same as CA. The same can not be said for gas. And EV chargers for road trips are in the middle of nowhere. Sticking to my common road trips, places like Dateland, Yuma, El Centro and Blythe/Quartzite all have fast chargers. The Supercharger in Quartzite is a freaking huge installation. The cost of building and maintaining these facilities and ensuring I can get from Phoenix to L.A. justifies the cost. Now the question is, will NACS adapters mean competition will reduce prices, or will they just give Tesla the monopoly on DCFC?
 

lightspeed

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EVs are not ideal road trippers, they are ideal commuters. If you drive several hundred miles each time you get behind the wheel, you should know that an EV is not your best choice. So yes "while road tripping" the value of an EV is slightly negated. But road trips are usually the exception, and the cost advantage of going EV for all your in-town miles is often huge.

What I will say is that road tripping in an EV is amazingly consistent in cost/mile. 100 miles in AZ costs me roughly the same as CA. The same can not be said for gas. And EV chargers for road trips are in the middle of nowhere. Sticking to my common road trips, places like Dateland, Yuma, El Centro and Blythe/Quartzite all have fast chargers. The Supercharger in Quartzite is a freaking huge installation. The cost of building and maintaining these facilities and ensuring I can get from Phoenix to L.A. justifies the cost. Now the question is, will NACS adapters mean competition will reduce prices, or will they just give Tesla the monopoly on DCFC?
I don't disagree with anything you said. Though I'm not sure that is it a benefit that EV charging is consistently expensive.

Maybe robo-taxis will replace commuter EVs for most city people. In the future, when self driving proves itself to be more safe than human drivers, it would be irresponsible to let people drive.
 
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Thanks for breaking that down.

At $0.397/kWh while using paid fast-chargers, that's about the same price as buying gas.

It's honestly a bit disappointing that the charge providers charge so much for electricity and it negates the "value" aspect of EVs when road tripping.

I can understand 40 cents per kWh in California where electricity is priced like champagne, but in low cost electricity states, why is it so high?
I don't begrudge a DCFC provider making some money--we live in a world where it's expensive to provide commodities like electricity for EVs. The installation investment isn't nothing. In CA the average cost of a kWh of electricity is about $0.199/kWh. If the DCFC provider charges $0.48/kWh, their immediate margin on the kWh is $0.281/kWh. Let's say it was $4.2M to install, operate, and maintain a 6-vehicle, 350kW station over 5 years*. If they want to make back 10% ROI, they have to get a return of $4.6M.

They need to sell 16.4 million kWh of electricity at that $0.281/kWh margin.

If their average provided power is 100 kW and they're providing that to 6 vehicles at a time, that's 27,333 hours of 6-vehicle charging they need to provide to cover the costs of installation, operation, and maintenance. That's 1139 days, or about 3.1 years before they can recover their installation costs. And unlike fossil fuel convenience stores, those capital costs aren't subsidized at the same rate as c-stores (which receive 100% depreciation in the year the capital costs are incurred).


*The capital costs as evaluated in 2017:
https://www.itskrs.its.dot.gov/2017-sc00381
 

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EVs are not ideal road trippers, they are ideal commuters. If you drive several hundred miles each time you get behind the wheel, you should know that an EV is not your best choice. So yes "while road tripping" the value of an EV is slightly negated. But road trips are usually the exception, and the cost advantage of going EV for all your in-town miles is often huge.

What I will say is that road tripping in an EV is amazingly consistent in cost/mile. 100 miles in AZ costs me roughly the same as CA. The same can not be said for gas. And EV chargers for road trips are in the middle of nowhere. Sticking to my common road trips, places like Dateland, Yuma, El Centro and Blythe/Quartzite all have fast chargers. The Supercharger in Quartzite is a freaking huge installation. The cost of building and maintaining these facilities and ensuring I can get from Phoenix to L.A. justifies the cost. Now the question is, will NACS adapters mean competition will reduce prices, or will they just give Tesla the monopoly on DCFC?
I will disagree with your first statement. We enjoy our road trips in the Mustang and Lightning far more than our previous ICEs. The only vehicle that's ever come close was a Toyota Sienna--if Toyota had kept their promise to go to all-electric, we would have a Toyota Sienna EV instead of the Mustang.

I agree with the rest of your comment.

I am a data nerd who gathers too much data and overanalyzes everything before making a decision. Before purchasing a new vehicle, I run, literally, millions of Monte Carlo simulations trying to understand where the break-even Total Cost of Ownership of a particular vehicle is compared with either a vehicle I currently own or from a set of choices I'm considering. I ran the simulation with the Lightning vs the Tacoma vs a F-150 ICE vs the R1T. The Lightning breaks even compared with our Tacoma (which we had already paid off) within 3-4 years of ownership and compared with an ICE Lariat within 1-2 years of ownership. These simulations include dozens of variables like the price of energy, maintenance costs, up-front costs, costs of consumables, resale values, etc., etc., etc. For example, I allowed the price of gas to vary (in a normal distribution manner) from $1.00 to $6.00 per gallon with a mean similar to the mean price of gas in AZ over the past 10 years, and allowing the price of electricity to vary from $0.15/kWh to $1.00/kWh (and similarly for a bunch of other variables).
 

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I will disagree with your first statement.
I should have said "Not your best choice financially" because yeah, I love the lighting over my previous F150 when it comes to road trips because it forces me to relax a bit more and not push for "making good time" and instead we have a good time.
 
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I should have said "Not your best choice financially" because yeah, I love the lighting over my previous F150 when it comes to road trips because it forces me to relax a bit more and not push for "making good time" and instead we have a good time.
I ran my route through gasbuddy. Their interface is garbage so I can't be certain the website understood the assignment. That said, they predicted a cost of about $150-$300 more for gas than I paid for charging.
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