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Comment by tarsinge | Hacker News Reader

I don’t know how you made your calculation but in France using grid electricity without optimization (like night pricing) EV cars costs at least 1/2 less to run (17kWh/100 km at 0,25€/kWh, compared to typical ICE 5l/100km at 1,95€/l). And then you have all the savings on maintenance.

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There really isn't savings on maintenance, all the cost is frontloaded and backloaded. It costs almost as much as the car itself to replace the batteries at the end of their life and EVs are pretty much universally more expensive to purchase in the first place for this same reason.

Also Europe has more expensive petrol prices than the US in general, that calculation is aggressively region-dependent.

The real kicker is GP is correct, mostly. You don't have to do much for optimization for the day-to-day operating costs to be less, but you do have to generally be wealthy enough to own your own home with a garage to install a charger in (or be super lucky and have one at an apartment, which is quite uncommon still).

And as I suggested, batteries are getting better and cheaper.

So the electric cars will keep improving their position relative to ICE. (I don't want to express any opinion on whether they are better or worse at the moment than ICE already.)

Oh, I agree that they'll get better and cheaper (some of the solid-state battery tech is very exciting even!) but I think it's a bit longer off than many think. My perspective in the Midwest US is quite different from the average SV tech bro that makes up a sizeable chunk of this sites userbase.

I'm not sure what you mean by 'bro'?

But I guess some people live in SV? I'm in Singapore, for what it's worth.

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