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The Nissan Leaf is a shockingly good deal right now if you can deal with the limited range. We got it as a second car, and the deal was $2,500 down, $200 per month for three years. And California has a $2,500 subsidy that effectively drops the price to $0 down if you income-qualify. And PG&E has a $500 subsidy, and they'll also lower your rates.

If you get all the subsidies, you're looking at less than $2,500 per year. I think that most people will save $500+ on gas and oil changes and PG&E rates, so for the three years, let's say that you pay $6,000 all in.

Essentially any new car will lose $6,000 in value over three years. You could lower your TCO by buying used, for sure, but if you care about worn finishes, little QOL things like bluetooth audio and reasonably good climate control, and lower risk of inconvenient maintenance, then I think the Leaf is pretty amazingly good.

IF you can deal with a 90 mile range. That's the big killer. But as a second car or for some people, it's kind of amazing.

Are you saying that PG&E's EV-A rate is "lowering" your rates?

I think that's only true from 11pm-7AM, which obviously is good if you're charging an EV, but it compensates by raising your daytime rates, which isn't a good deal for most people with more traditional domestic electric workloads.

So I wouldn't exactly interpret this as a straightforward "lower your rates". Or am I missing something?

It depends entirely on your schedule. There are a lot of people who are at work/commuting from 8-6 every weekday. IF no one is home during those hours, your power usage drops to just maintenance power for fridges and the like. The hours from 6pm-10pm are a bit of a challenge, but with some minor load shifting (start the dishwasher and clothes dryer at 10pm before bed), you can get some savings on TOU.

A few years back SCE had a EV-TOU plan that was peak hours only from 10am-6pm, and it was very easy to save money on that plan.

My attempts to be terse were misleading. We have very little daytime electricity use, as our house is empty during the day. I apologize if I misled anyone.

No worries! I just bought an electric car and have been investigating this intensively, I genuinely wanted to know if I’d missed a better option than EV-A!

Right now with our relatively limited driving, it appears E6 is better for me, but I’m sure if you drive enough, the 50% discount at night is worth it.

Where did you get that deal for a Nissan Leaf at 2500+36*200=9700? That's sweet. Any extra payment at the end of 3 years? Do you own the battery?

The leaf is for sale in Belgium at €32-38K.

I assume aetherson is effectively leasing, not buying. So after 3 years you don't own the battery, or in fact the car.

Which is why the relevant comparison point is how much a car you actually buy would drop in price.

>IF you can deal with a 90 mile range. That's the big killer. But as a second car or for some people, it's kind of amazing.

But what about my life in wide open spaces...

> Nail on the head. When your concern is cost, electric vehicles just don't make sense.

I agree with this. Electric cars are still affordable only to the affluent. Even a Nissan Leaf costs over $30k.

> I drive 5-10 thousands miles a year, and at $2/gallon gas, I'm looking at a total expense of 4-500 dollars per year.

This, however, seems really optimistic. 10k miles for $500 in gas assumes $2/gallon and 40 mpg, which is the EPA rating for highway miles in a Civic. Most people are driving >10k miles/year. Most people don't spend 100% of their miles on open highway at optimal speed, nor do most people drive a new car with max efficiency. And most people don't have $2/gallon gas even in the US (the average is closer to $2.50 currently).

Driving 12-15k/year, getting 25mpg, paying $2.50/gallon, you'd be looking at $1200-$1500/year for gas. That's still not enough to offset the difference in an electric car unless you assume long ownership and no major costs to, say, replace the battery pack at 5 years.

> Electric cars are still affordable only to the affluent.

I just now ran a Carfax report and found no fewer than 7 electric Ford Focus cars within 50 miles of my zipcode for less than $15k used. Two of them are less than $10k. Not sure what "affluent" means to you.

Set the goalposts and we can discuss it. If we're talking new cars, I think >$30k is for the affluent. If you want to consider used cars, maybe they become more attainable, but the supply is tiny (literally 50x as many used IC focuses as used electric focuses near me) and there's still a premium for the equivalent car (~20% from what I see).

I can buy a 2013 electric Focus for $13k. I can buy a 2012 BMW 328i for $14k. Are BMWs also affordable now?

Older BMW's have relatively high maintenance costs which is a real issue.

Not sure about that Focus, but electric cars have vastly fewer moving parts which should help quite a bit.

Older electric cars eventually need a complete battery pack replacement which is not a trivial cost. I don't know what the lifespan of the battery pack in a Focus is, though.

On an older focus that's not nearly the issue vs longer range electrics it's ~23 kWh * $150/kwh ~= 3,450$ and dropping.

I know people that spent that much just replacing a BMW's transmission. Yea, not free but everything else should be cheap so maintenance costs are likely to be far less over the next 5 - 10 years.

To be clear, I'm not actually advocating that used BMWs are affordable.

Edit: I do wonder how many of these "cheap" electric cars will ever have a replacement battery pack. When your car value drops below $5000, are you really going to spend $3000 (guesstimate including labor) to replace the battery?

Sure, I just meant if the TCO is around 1k/year higher on the BMW they are not really equivalent options for most people.

Anyway, this might change if they are more common, but for now used electrics seem to have a significant price premium suggesting people think replacing older battery packs is probably a good long term deal.

> used electrics seem to have a significant price premium suggesting people think replacing older battery packs is probably a good long term deal.

Maybe. Depends on how you interpret the numbers. The electric Focus seems to command a premium of ~20% over the SE for a comparable used car near me, but the MSRP is >50% over the SE new. So you could see that as used buyers believing that the electric is worth 20% more than the comparable used IC, or you could see that as buyers believing that the a value of an electric drops much more rapidly than the value of an IC. Maybe after a couple more years these lines cross and the IC commands a premium. I honestly don't know.

This is complicated by the dramatic drop in new batters.

If a new x kwh battery pack cost 10k then but a new xkwh battery pack is only 4k new today then predicted deprecation calculations should arguably be based on the 4k price not the 10k initial price unless you expect such dramatic price drops to continue.

In any case, I think the current used prices would be vastly lower if people expected the kind of range and lifetime limitations you get from not replacing the batteries.

> Are BMWs affordable now?

A 5 year old base 3-series has always been affordable, unless you include maintenance and the price/availability of parts.

I just bought a 2015 Nissan Leaf that just came off lease with 20k miles on it for $12000. I financed it for the credit bump and the monthly payment is $240 a month. That is about $80 more a month than I was paying on gas and full coverage insurance is about the same as my old car (2007 Accord).

It has a 70k warranty on all major systems and 2 years of road side assistance. Which reminds me I can remove that from my insurance coverage and save about $15 a month.

I was spending over $1000 a year maintaining my old car so for the same or less expense I now have what I consider a much nicer car and modern features. It's also a lot more fun to drive.

I find it interesting that these electric cars are dropping so much and value in the first three years. More than half. And that's on dealer resell, not the trade-in value. Last time I bought a three-year-old car, the dealer resell price was about 75% of the original retail.

From what I understand it's partially because of the uncertainty of unproven technology, and partially because a lot of people bought them for the tax breaks.

Nissan didn't (and still might not) have active cooling in their batteries and was seeing high failure rates in states like Arizona. Because of this, Nissan ended up extending battery warranties to 8 years / 100,000 miles. Basically if there is anything wrong with the battery or it's capacity drops below 9 bars (starts at 12), then Nissan will replace it.

Combined state and federal deductions on EVs were up to 50% of the purchase or lease price of a Leaf and could be deducted over several years. This combined with annual fuel savings when gas was $4 a gallon meant people could drive a new car for little more than the cost of insurance since Nissan was including free charging at qualified stations for 2 years. So a lot of Leafs were bought or leased and being dumped on the market now that all the incentives are drying up.

Absolutely agreed with all of this, and well done on the analysis--you backed out my back-of-the-envelope numbers.

Gas has been ~$2 where I live for a very long time, and you're right, I'm closer to 5 than 10k miles, and much of it is city.

I don't travel much though. :-)

>> I drive 5-10 thousands miles a year, and at $2/gallon gas

I assure you that even at nearly $8/gallon over here, an electric vehicle still didn't make much sense when we were buying a new car last year. Even the cheapest Leaf was so much more expensive than a well specced VW Polo that it made no sense to go electric, we did the calculation and the difference in price would not be returned in the savings over the time we are likely to keep the car for.

> what amounts to a nominal gain in mileage.

A Prius is 46 combined, the Civic is only 32 combined (as per fuelly). The base Civic uses 50% more fuel than a Prius, I'd hardly consider that "nominal", that's the difference between a 6.2L V8 powered Corvette (22 combined on fuelly) and a Civic.

Another way to look at it is, $2/gallon gas in a Prius is $3/gallon in a Civic.

Sure, but, as (s)he said, (s)he drives 5-10K miles / year. For 10K miles, that's a difference of less than 100 gallons of gas per year, meaning less than $400 / year in gas for the Civic vs the Prius. ~$1 / day probably isn't going to drive behavior change or a willingness to spend more for an otherwise-inferior car.

> When your concern is cost

Not everyone's concern is solely cost, of course. Some of us are happy to pay a little more for a car that eliminates our families largest contribution to global warming. Yes, new Tesla's and other EVs are not cheaper than ICE vehicles today. The Model S has only been available for 5 years. You can't expect EVs to beat ICE vehicles with over 100 years of engineering from minute 1. Give it some time.

Absolutely agreed that not everyone's concern is cost. I don't live an affluent area, however. I'm lucky to have a job with benefits, if that tells you anything. I can't imagine my neighbors caring too much.

At 5K-10K miles per year, you'd almost be better off with delivery, Lyft and rental cars ...

Depends on your circumstances. I'm something under 10K but I have basically no delivery and very limited Uber/Lyft available. When I do weekend activities, I often want an SUV outfitted for my needs. If I did rent a car, I'd have to get a cab or something. This isn't even back of beyond but it's exurban and there's no way I could do without my own car in my driveway even though my mileage is modest.

Why do you assume I live in an urban area where those are options?

5-10K miles per year and quoting highway mileage numbers?

Even elderly drivers that I know in rural areas in the US have a difficult time staying in 5K-10K miles per year.

Someone living in a rural or suburban area in the US has a 30 mile round trip for just about anything. Even 3 trips a week would put you above 5K miles. And you won't be getting 40mpg on those roads.

So, either you really don't do much (possible) at which point delivery probably suffices as you have minimal needs.

Or, you don't have to drive very far, which would tend to place you in a dense suburb or urban setting.

Or, you could, of course, simply be one of the lucky people who live in a rural/sparse suburban setting that just happens to have everything you need within a walk or very short drive. Those places do exist--the number of people who have the opportunity to live in them is very small, however.