My attitude on the EV’s; appropriate for some uses in specific geographic locations, otherwise not a generalized replacement for ICE’s, and the electric infra-structure can’t support it anyway.

Edward- 50 cents a kilowatt, outrageous! (I distinctly remember paying 6 cents a kilowatt hour, all in, but that was pre-obama era)

It depends upon how many kilowatt-hours it holds, the charging efficiency, and the cost of electricity in your area. It is the charging time (hours) multiplied by the kilowatts of the charger (there are losses) multiplied by the price per kilowatt-hour.

“What is the Unit of sale? Am I buying kilowatt-hours or what?”

Yes, kilowatt-hours. You would probably have a charger in your garage, hooked up to your house’s electric wiring.

“I currently pay about 18 cents per kilowatt-hour for my house electric.”

That is about ⅓ what we pay in California. In my area, it is almost 50¢ per kilowatt-hour. Obama was right that Democrat policies would necessarily cause electricity prices to rise. Twenty years ago, I was paying around 13¢ per kilowatt-hour. Elections have consequences.

“My little car gets 25 mpg, gasoline costs me $3 a gallon. What is the electric vehicle version of this?”

You are paying around 12¢ per mile in gasoline. Maintenance, purchase-price amortization, and insurance are extra.

For electric vehicles (EVs), it would be miles per kilowatt hour, and the price per mile can be calculated. EVs are supposed to have lower maintenance costs, but the purchase price may be more, so the insurance may also be more.

Please be aware that battery capacity can degrade over time, so your 300 mile limit could become much less as the battery ages.

In California, the road to hell is paved with unintended consequences. The state government wants us to drive EVs, but it also boosts the price of electricity through the roof, making the EV less desirable. Fortunately, the federal government has declared that California is not allowed to ban the sale of fossil fuel automobiles, which the state had planned to do in 2035. Fortunately, California had also planned to build several power plants in order to assure that there would be enough electricity available to charge all those cars, vans, and trucks.

Oh, wait. There are no plans to build power plants in California. Huh. I wonder how our politicians thought we would power our EVs.
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Robert,
Your comment reminds me of a tale I heard the other day of a guy using his EV for a trip of 6 hour each way. Charging his vehicle added two hour to each leg for a 16-hour total travel time, and he estimated that he realistically can go 150 miles safely on a charge, not 300, but he had a Tesla pickup (Cybertruck?) rather than a Model Y. He mentioned that he could nominally recharge in half an hour, but it takes longer if the charging station is crowded.

My thoughts: if you have lunch while the car charges (would you have had lunch if you used a fossil fuel car, or would you have driven through?) then you may have a quick half-hour lunch up to a leisurely two-hour lunch while your car charges, depending upon how busy the charging station is. Hmm. Could it be time to invest in a restaurant next to a charging station? Probably not in California.

I wonder how long it takes a semi-truck to recharge, and I wonder how the extra time messes up the driver’s schedule and daily revenue.

Wayne and Dick: What you are both leaving out in these calculations is the time cost for refilling an EV tank. You can get your gas car refilled in less than five minutes, and you are on your way. An EV is going to take time, ranging from one to many hours.

Most people look at those time numbers and blanch at the idea of an EV for anything but short local trips. And then they consider the cost of buying the EV, and wonder why spend all that cash for something of such limited use. A gas car gives you flexibility at about the same or even less cost. Get a hybrid, and those problems vanish and you save on gas as well.

Gasoline SW Michigan coast– was down to $2.899/gallon until recent events. Spiked to $3.299 this morning.

Tesla Model Ys have 75 – 80 Kwh of battery capacity and go 4 – 5 mi. per Kwh. That yields a range of 300+ miles. At 18 cents/Kwh, a full charge for a model Y – if done at home – would run you about 14 bucks.

Most ICE cars have gas tanks with 12 – 15 gal. capacities to provide roughly comparable range capability. But, at 3 bucks a gallon, it might cost as much as 40 bucks to fill your tank. I live in CA and can’t really remember the last time gas was 3 bucks a gallon.

Gas prices, of course, include non-trivial amounts of state and federal taxation. At some point, electricity used to charge EVs will be subject to such taxes also as the roads must be maintained and that will require user fees as EV use advances – which I expect it to. Collecting such taxes at EV charging stations will be straightforward as all of the electricity dispensed at such stations goes toward road use by vehicles. For home charging setups, especially those that also include home battery backup storage and/or roof solar arrays, things will be a bit more potentially complex, but I suspect home chargers will soon be required to record the electricity they pass and the household smart utility meter will note that subtotal for extra taxation.

Governments being governments, there will be incentives to narrow the gap between present-day EV electricity costs and present day gas prices, but I think electricity will continue to retain an advantage because the infrastructure needed to generate and distribute electricity is just a lot cheaper than the infrastructure needed to refine and distribute gasoline.

Question: how much does it cost to re-charge an EV? What is the Unit of sale? Am I buying kilowatt-hours or what? I currently pay about 18 cents per kilowatt-hour for my house electric.

My little car gets 25 mpg, gasoline costs me $3 a gallon.
What is the electric vehicle version of this?

Anyone who thinks the idiotic subsidies are all that drives the EV market is very badly misinformed. EV cars are simply a fundamentally better technology than ICE cars and have a far better total cost of ownership even with no subsidies. EV drivetrains have a couple of orders of magnitude fewer moving parts than ICE and none that require more than once-in-a-blue-moon inspection or maintenance. Regenerative braking extends range. Electric motors produce maximum torque at zero RPM providing categorically superior off-the-line and while-moving acceleration. And buyers of the leading EV brand worldwide, Tesla, will soon be able to avail themselves of entirely autonomous operation – a major boon to many seniors and disabled, especially the blind. Anyone with a single-family home can also install charging hardware that makes stops at service stations a thing of the past.

Once Trump ends the subsidies, EVs will increase market share based entirely on their natural advantages. There’s a lot of twaddle being peddled out there about EVs, but more and more people will come to see that all of it is just the special pleadings of people with stakes in legacy automotive technology or fringe ideological axes to grind. Oil change outfits, tune-up shops, muffler shops and transmission servicers are going to go the way of harness shops and livery stables. Once vehicular autonomy becomes normative, the same will also be true of most of the body and paint shops. The only currently widespread auto-related businesses that should see little or no change to their fortunes are tire stores, car washes and detailing shops.

There is an opportunity here:
Remember when Waltz and Kelly bought the big gas guzzlers?

Have a bill forbidding any US state to ban internal combustion engine –the vehicle choice act…since every American should have the same
right as Kelly did to buy whatever vehicle they choose.

Richard M: Back about six or seven years ago (I can’t find my story then), I reported these discriminatory DEI policies at numerous corporations, and noted that they left the corporations very exposed to legal action and expensive lawsuits. These racial quota policies violated numerous civil rights laws, and they did so blatantly.

Then I stated my bafflement that the legal departments of these companies were not objecting loudly to these policies. They might have, but apparently management decided to ignore the obvious risks.

As expected and predicted, the chickens are now finally coming home to roost. First we have seen a decline in quality at these companies because of these idiotic policies. Now we are seeing them faced with legal action that is going to cost them dearly.

EXCLUSIVE: According to a whistleblower, Lockheed Martin awarded employee bonuses “on the basis of their skin color alone and contrary to documented performance.” In one case, the company forced managers to remove 18 whites from the bonus list and replace them with 18 “POC.

The story begins in December 2022, when executives told the whistleblower that his recommended bonus list had too many white employees on it. A senior executive, now in charge of F-35 engineering, told the whistleblower that his selections needed to “fit in the box.”

Link to full thread (it gets uglier as you read through it all):
https://x.com/realchrisrufo/status/1933188887985430745
The full City Journal article: https://www.city-journal.org/article/lockheed-martin-civil-rights-law-bonuses-race-merit

Experienced HR pros know not to put it in writing like this, where discovery requests can obtain it….

Curious to see how the Trump Administration reacts. I doubt the new DoJ staff will ignore this.

Ronaldus Magnus: You might have sensed my frustration at Batchelor’s effort to justify subsidizes, not just to companies but to individuals in order to buy Starlink. We have been down this road now hundreds and hundreds of times, and it does not work. That he could even be arguing that position considering how bankrupt the federal government presently is brings me back to my essay today:

Why Kennedy’s decision to fire everyone at the CDC advisory panel was only a start

This bankruptcy can be seen at all levels of government and intellectual life, throughout the nation. It is a bankruptcy so deep and profound that most of our “intellectual elites” can’t distinguish the difference between someone who came to this country legally, and those who snuck in illegally, breaking the law. They are so incapable of critical thinking that they can’t recognize a lawless riot by anti-American invaders, even when it is right before their eyes.

How many times does the little boy have to tell you that the emperor is wearing no clothes before you finally believe him?

Whether I was driving, or a passenger in a car, I used to point out every EV, and remind people that all of us helped pay for that individual to purchase and drive that car. Subsidies are taxpayer dollars. While I did not say it every time we encountered an EV, I did it enough that I was eventually asked to “tone it down.” But by then, friends and family were fuming at helping someone else purchase a car we cannot afford (even if we could afford one, no way).