Electric cars are becoming more and more popular as the years go on. There is an electric car for just about everyone out there now, whether they want to spend $10,000 or $100,000!
However, with every purchase comes the dreaded question of cost. How much money will you save with your new electric car? Well let’s take a look at some examples…
Let us compare three similar cars; one gas engine, one hybrid engine (gas/electric), and one electric vehicle.
The first is a 2006 Nissan Maxima 3.5 SL with 191 Hp (horse power) that gets 22 MPG in the city and 30 MPG on the highway (both numbers according to fueleconomy.gov). That’s about 9.37 miles per gallon.
The second is a 2006 Toyota Prius with 134 Hp (horse power) that gets 45 MPG in the city and 40 MPG on the highway, so including all of these estimates you’d be looking at 3.62 miles per gallon – Much better than the Maxima!
The third car will be an electric vehicle, let’s say a Nissan Leaf with 110 kW (kilowatts), which should yield around .34 kWh/mile, giving it an average total of 4 miles per kilowatt-hour or 16 kWh/100 mile.
The Nissan Maxima using 87 octane gas would cost $3.29 to drive 10 miles, the same distance as 100 miles for our first comparison.
The Prius would cost $1.93 to do the same 100 miles, so there’s a pretty big difference in price for how much fuel is being used. And now let us compare these prices to our electric vehicle. The Nissan Leaf will only cost the driver 36 cents per 100 miles or 33 dollars for that 10 mile distance!
I think it can be clearly seen that owning an electric car will save you money over time, but what about other costs? Well, first off gas engines are extremely unhealthy due to their pollution levels.
Electric cars have no exhaust fumes and are not harmful at all to the environment since they run on clean electricity supplied by local power plants. Also gas engines require regular oil changes, spark plugs, tune-ups, etc. whereas electric cars don’t! While there can still be some maintenance costs (tires and brakes for example), these costs are much less than those of a gas engine vehicle.
Another factor is what you do with the car once it’s out of commission. Gas engines will eventually need to go to the scrap yard where they will end up as scrap metal… but what about an electric car? Well they can actually still function as normal cars without their motors, so most people keep them around as second or third vehicles and they’re used just like any other car – no harm done! Or if you wish, you could sell it back to the dealer since your new electric car came with a warranty and they would buy your old car from you.
There are many benefits to being an electric car owner, and getting a great deal on your new car is definitely one of them! A simple online search will turn up hundreds of deals available for any specific make/model number you can think of. So be sure to use this knowledge the next time you go out shopping for a new vehicle!
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