How Much Does It Cost to Charge an Electric Vehicle? (A comparison at home and on the road, with gasoline)::Few people know what a kilowatt-hour costs them, so they don’t realize how cheap EV home charging is versus gasoline. On the road, it’s more complicated.
Now that almost everyone in the US has coalesced around NACS, I’m hoping this leads to more aggressive pricing competition with fast charging.
As far as most of my driving, the cost has been great since it’s mostly local. I eliminated a gas bill for a marginal bump in power bill.
When I go on trips I save a little bit by finding hotels with charging or have been known to let people use power outlets. By time I leave the hotel I have a “filled tank” for only a couple dollars at most. Plugshare has been wonderful for finding hotels with this in mind.
This should happen, as in, I expect it to.
Similarly how nearly all gas stations in a given region obtain gas at similar costs from, often, the same distributors, they really only profit from the higher margins on food, etc. in the attached store. If we don’t end up with many more dedicated charging locations like Buccees in the next decade, I’ll be very surprised.
In Europe we’ve had the CCS2 standard for ages, yet charging at different brands is still a fucking jungle when it comes to pricing. Every company seems to insist that charging your EV should be a subscription service, and if you want to use their chargers without a subscription they screw you over with insane pricing like 1.5€/kWh. This trend of everything “as a service” is the bane of modern existence and should be banned.
There are a few similar things with “subscription discounts” on the CCS companies trying to stabilize income in the states.
Granted, charging installations are expensive as hell, and simple prices per kWh with regional electricity rates being all over the place truly isn’t a sustainable model.
Tesla’s infrastructure rollouts were certainly working as a loss leader because they had the cash to get it done, and subsequently ‘won’ in North America because any other charging experience outside of Tesla is awful. Other private startups just don’t have the resources to eat up-front costs, and I guess subscriptions are the easy way out, but just as you saying, they utterly suck for the consumer.
That’s why I think gigantic installs with mall-like facilities with higher-margin food/drinks and other amenities to kill time ala Buccees is where most will end up in the states. There is a similar, and much more elegant, setup in Germany with the “Sortimo Innovationspark” between Stuttgart and Munich I’ve seen in some videos.