{"id":479,"date":"2009-03-14T08:46:38","date_gmt":"2009-03-14T13:46:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.grebfamily.us\/jasongreb.com\/?p=479"},"modified":"2009-03-14T08:49:45","modified_gmt":"2009-03-14T13:49:45","slug":"electric-car","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blog.jasongreb.com\/?p=479","title":{"rendered":"Electric Car"},"content":{"rendered":"

I was driving (yeah, like I’d never be doing that) along side a Smart car<\/a> the other day and was curious if it was electric or gas. It turns out it is fuel. However, the price starts at $12K. I’ve heard about Chevy coming out with an electric car (the Volt<\/a>) that you can plug into a standard outlet to charge it up instead of relying on a fuel engine that charges the batteries (which apparently, it still has a fuel engine, but different from a hybrid). I found out that Chevy plans on releasing this car starting at $40K or so. Really? I did the math. You can buy a Kia<\/a> for about $12K these days. So to get the Chevy Volt, you’d have to spend an extra $28K. One of the selling points of an electric\/hybrid vehicle is the “mpg” fuel savings. Gas it currently going for $2 a gallon. Do you know how many fill ups $28K (how much more you’d be spending to get the Volt) translates into? At $2 a gallon, that is 14,000 gallons. Let’s assume the Kia has a 12 gallon tank. That is 1166 fillups. Let’s assume you fill up once a week (you don’t go far to work or something). That is 22 years (longer than the Kia OR the Volt would last) of fill ups at $2 a gallon. If it were up to $4 a gallon, well, just half everything, so 11 years of fillups at $4 a gallon.<\/p>\n

So where am I saving on fuel? My electric car still needs fuel. It needs expensive batteries. I can’t just go about anywhere to get it serviced (in fact, is there even a place in Polk County that will service, or carry parts for the internals of a hybrid). I’ve heard there are subsidies, but only $7,500. Ok, so 16 years of fillups at $2 a gallon.<\/p>\n

So in conclusion, I will not be spending anywhere near<\/em> $40,000 for an electric vehicle. A $12,000 Kia would be fine for me. If you’d like to play with the numbers, here is the spreadsheet (Excel XLS<\/a>\/OpenOffice ODS<\/a>) I created to do the math.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I was driving (yeah, like I’d never be doing that) along side a Smart car the other day and was curious if it was electric or gas. It turns out it is fuel. However, the price starts at $12K. I’ve heard about Chevy coming out with an electric car (the Volt) that you can plug […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-479","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.jasongreb.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/479","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.jasongreb.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.jasongreb.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.jasongreb.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.jasongreb.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=479"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/blog.jasongreb.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/479\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.jasongreb.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=479"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.jasongreb.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=479"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.jasongreb.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=479"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}