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Comment by sokoloff | Hacker News Reader

> electricity is generally an order of magnitude cheaper

Electricity is not an order of magnitude cheaper.

You can figure on getting about 4 miles per kWh. Where I live, the kWh delivered is $0.20, so $0.05 per mile for energy.

A gas car getting 25 miles per gallon with a gallon costing $4.00/gal (slightly more than it costs around here) costs $0.08 per mile for energy.

If you could buy electricity for half of my price, you'd be $0.025 per mile, meaning a 25mpg car would need to be buying $6/gal gas in order for electricity to be an order of magnitude cheaper.

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Where I live, gas is $1.56/L and electricity is around 11¢/kWh.

So assuming 6km/kWh and 100km/9.5L, the difference is a factor of 8. Also, my car is not nearly this fuel-efficient—I get about 14L/100km.

I assume you made those prices up as unrealistic, but it just depends on where you live.

Going by the prices you listed, I assume you are also from quebec ? Keep in mind gas prices in parts of the US are much lower than ours, and 14L/100km sounds like a lot for a sedan (which is the type of vehicule that gets 6km/kwh). So I don't think their figure is that unrealistic for the average North American use case, and you have to factor in the fact that we just have exceptionally cheap electricity too.

For what it's worth, energy prices in kentucky have us paying on average 9 cents per kilowatt. That gets you within striking distance of an order of magnitude. It's a significant savings either way.

Gasoline is only going to get more expensive. Electricity _might_ get cheaper

We’re only .12ish per kWh in Florida but they have an time based plan where I can get .08 off peak hours which would be ideal for an electric.

(I may have the math wrong it’s kind of confusing … https://www.fpl.com/content/dam/fpl/us/en/rates/pdf/res-jan-...)

Don't feel bad-- it's incredibly confusing. We have solar, and I have no idea what we actually "pay". We over-generate in the summer months but re-use those credits at a different value over less-sunny months.

But the kicker is, in the winter, production is so low that even our off-peak charging hits tier 2 so the rates are thrown all out of whack.

It's probably actually cheaper to charge our car at a supercharger in november/december/january than to charge at home, tbh.

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