There’s a tweet that is currently going somewhat viral, all about a long road trip taken in a Tesla Model Y. It’s a 3,605 mile road trip, which is absolutely no joke by any standards of a road trip. What’s notable about this trip is that the taker of this trip, Alex Gayer, kept some nicely meticulous records and did some math to figure out how much time was spent charging, how much money was spent, and what the equivalent would be in miles per gallon. One gets the sense that this was all done to brag about his Tesla, which is fine since we don’t kink-shame here, but interestingly, I think the end result of this is not an aggrandizement of Tesla, but actually a pretty solid argument in favor of plug-in hybrids!
As I think we’ve made pretty clear, we’re very pro hybrids, especially plug-in hybrids. They may not be the absolute platonic ideal of perfect efficiency, but they make a lot of sense for the flawed, messy reality we all actually live in. There’s a pragmatic beauty to hybrids. Yes, you’re dragging around two entire types of drivetrains, but the capabilities of those drivetrains dovetail so well with each other, with each one’s strengths filling in the weaknesses of the other – electric motors’ instant torque helping the combustion engine, the reclamation of normally lost kinetic energy from braking, the energy density of gasoline, all of these traits combine to make a system that’s more than the sum of its parts.
Let’s take a look at this proud Tesla owner’s math and see what we think of all this. First, let’s look at the overall trip:
Just took Model Y on a 3,605 mi road trip. Wanted to see what the worst case might look like for charging costs. 5 passengers total, fully loaded frunk and trunk, we drove as fast as conditions allowed and hit several rain storms, used heavy A/C, kids playing video games from the pic.twitter.com/amcO0lhpbc
— Alex Gayer (@alex_gayer) June 18, 2024
Damn, that’s a long trip! Based on that map, it looks like it took, what, 24 recharging stops? Alex breaks down some of the math for us, helpfully:
Here are my statistics:
Trip Miles: 3,605
Total kWh: 1310.58
Wh/mi: 363.55
Total spent charging: $421.84
Avg. Cost per mile: $0.12
Avg. Cost per kWh: $0.32
Total Time Spent Supercharging: 10 hours 58 minutes (did not include destination charges)— Alex Gayer (@alex_gayer) June 18, 2024
So, we have 3,605 miles, with an average cost per mile of 12 cents, and just under 11 hours of charging time for the trip. Oh, and that doesn’t count “destination charges” which is charging done once they reached their destination for that leg of the journey. The total spent on electrons to feed into those big lithium batteries came to $421.84. Okay, all that seems in order. But it was this next tweet that I really think got everyone wondering:
The average price of gas at the time was about $3.516 per gallon. The money spent charging could have purchased 119.98 gallons of gas. This means that to have made the same trip in a gas-powered car for the same cost, I would have had to achieve an average of 30.0 MPG.
— Alex Gayer (@alex_gayer) June 18, 2024
Okay, so I suspect everyone here is thinking the same thing: 30 mpg? That’s, um, normal? Like, almost anything can hit 30 mpg on the highway now, right? And the way this is phrased – “I would have had to achieve an average of 30.0 MPG” – makes it sound like this is some incredible feat? Big-ass modern SUVs can pull off about 30 MPG now. I just had a press V8 Mustang that was hitting about 30 mpg on the highway recently, too. This isn’t nuclear fusion here.
Okay, so using Alex’ numbers here, let’s figure out what an equivalent trip in a combustion car that gets 30 mpg highway would be like. Let’s say we’re taking an Acura Integra, why not, which gets a combined 30-33 mpg (city 30/highway 37, if you’re curious) and that car has a 12.4 gallon gas tank.
So, the range of that car at a conservative 30 mpg would be 372 miles, so if we divide 3,605 miles by 372 that means we’d have to stop for gas 9.69 times, which we’ll round up to 10 because we probably want more Nutter Butters and Munchos and pee breaks, anyway.
Each tank of 12.4 gallons at $3.516 is $43.60 to fill the tank (completely, which is unlikely, but whatever so that comes to $436.00 for all the gas, a bit more than the electricity, but effectively the same, since it’s unlikely you’ll be draining that tank to bone-dry each time.
Now let’s think about time. Let’s err on the side of slowness and say each fill-up takes 15 minutes, so we have 10 stops, which means 150 minutes, or two and a half hours total. That’s a hell of a lot less than 11 hours. It’s eight and a half hours less, in fact.
And, keep in mind, 30 mpg is just a baseline here – it’s not hard to find all sorts of cars, like Toyota Priuses or Honda Civics or Volkswagen Jettas or Toyota RAV4s or any number of other cars that get well over 30 mpg, 35 and up, even 40 mpg for highway mileage is not uncommon. So the reality is likely to be less fuel needed and less fill-ups than we calculated here.
Of course, people on eX-Twitter pointed out these facts, Alex pointed out that in non-highway use, his Tesla gets well over 30 mpg, often up to an EV equivalent of 90 mpg. And that’s true! But it’s also true that plug-in hybrids can get similar equivalent mpg numbers when running on battery power in-town, and can also take advantage of having a combustion engine that quickly refuels when being used on a long road trip.
If we look at the electric-only ranges of PHEVs, we can see that most of them can cover the average American daily commute distance of 12 miles just on battery power:
- Jeep Wrangler 4xe: 22 miles
- Ford Escape plug-in: 37 miles
- Chrysler Pacifica PHEV: 32 miles
- Jeep Grand Cherokee 4xe: 26 miles
- Hyundai Tucson PHEV: 33 miles
- Mazda CX-90 PHEV: 26 miles
- BMW X5 xDrive50e: 38 miles
- BMW 330e: 23 miles
- Toyota Prius Prime: 44 miles
- Toyota RAV4 Prime: 42 miles
- Lexus RX450h+: 37 miles
Hell, even the worst of these can pull off almost the whole back-and-forth commute without needing to start the combustion motor at all:
I know Alex Gayer didn’t really intend it to be this way, but I think his carefully-tracked road trip tweets will actually do a lot of good, just not in the everyone-should-get-a-Tesla sense. I think it’ll do good in the we-should-all-seriously-consider-plug-in-hybrids sense. Sure, they’re conceptually a clunky compromise, but in reality, in actual practice, they really do seem to offer the best of both worlds.
Had Alex and his four companions and all their luggage been in a plug-in hybrid, they could have spent the same amount of money and finished their trip an entire eight and a half hours earlier, which perhaps could have spared them seven or so hours of listening to Alex talk about how awesome his Tesla is.
I kid, Alex, I kid! I’m delighted you love your car! We should all be so lucky! But if we’re talking hard numbers, I think this whole thing has been a win for the plug-in hybrids.
I hope you had a fun trip, though!
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Earlier this year I did a trip from the Poconos to Indianapolis to see my sister. The vehicle we used was a 2022 Toyota Sienna Hybrid. Going cross country we averaged 35.2 MPG with 5 people, car seats and luggage.
Thank you for the great comparison! That’s awesome mileage.
My A6 Allroad has a mild hybrid setup and it gets about 34MPG if I drive sensibly on highways.
Toyota Hybrid technology is unmatched.
Pretty amazing for such a people & stuff hauler.
A 3600mile roadtrip sounds awful to me regardless of what vehicle I’m in, but then I’m on the west coast where a trip that long would involve empty desert stretches with barely any gas stations, let alone charging facilities.
I did Seattle to LA during the pandemic which I think is ~2,200 miles roundtrip and yep – that amount of driving just sucks so much.
The Tesla numbers sound pretty good to me considering that where I live the gas costs twice as much, so you would need to get about 60 miles per gallon to beat it. Of course, I do agree that hybrids are pretty amazing and I really like PHEV’s as we’ll. I rented a Tesla on a trip to Washington and I absolutely fell in love with the technology. My dream car would be my car as an electric with Tesla’s technology. I rented a Model 3. The car just wasn’t as comfortable as my car and it was too low to the ground for my taste. My passengers complained about the back seat being too small and uncomfortable. In my car, they can cross their legs in the back seat. I have a Ford Flex.
My wife and I did a road trip to see the eclipse in April. We drove 800 miles (almost exactly) total trip. We drove our 2019 Honda Insight Hybrid. I did not hypermile, but did drive conservatively. We got 53 mpg.
I have been app tracking my mileage since day one with this car. Here are the totals –
29890 miles. 588.783 gal. total fuel cost $1532.11. — MPG ave. 50.77.
And, let’s look at some more numbers; your Honda probably cost $23k when the MY was $45k, your insurance each month is around $128 vs $329 for the Tesla, your tires with mounting and balancing comes out to around $800 every 50,000 miles and the Tesla comes out to around $2,000 every 25,000… tables are turned when you consider maintenance; you will be paying $432/year where as the Tesla is only $380/year. However, the likelihood of needing a major repair is pretty high on both (11-15% likelihood) your Honda is likely to incur a $820 bill but the Tesla is likely to incur a $8,250-15,000 repair bill…
How timely! 3 days ago I went to New Hampshire for my house 135 mi one way, 270, rnd trp. I left with a half tank, against my better judgment I figured that maybe I’d have to splash some gas on the way back. I got back, I was on empty but not on fumes as we all have been in the past, they was a comfortable empty! Lol! So this is a four cylinder 2016 Acura TLX non turbo. I guess, I should be happy with my 36-37 miles to the gallon! I figured I’d use about 7.5 gallons total. For the sake of simplicity will use your average gas prices that you have in the article but just to be clear, I paid a lot less because we get points from our grocery store for gas… I actually price per gallon was 2.59.
Wow! I have not seen gas for $2.59 in probably over 20 years. I recently paid almost $6/gallon. Gas has been over $5/gallon for years now. The last time I filled up it was $90. This is why I see a lot of electric and hybrid vehicles where I live.
I remember paying $1.90/gallon in California in 2016 and thinking I would never see gas that cheap again! It was when the Saudis were in an oil price war with US producers.
It’s a Stop & Shop gas station. You get points when you buy their groceries, and if you accumulate at least 100 points it’s 10 cents off a gallon. At 600 points that would be 60 cents off, which is why I came up to 2.59….right now we have 800 points. So my case is not your usual price of gas simply because I’m using a point system to reduce that dollar amount. But, to address your comment about the price of gas being under $2 a gallon, we only have to look at the covid period, and I was getting gas at $1.49 without discounts!
My wife drove a mark II Volt for 6 years, that thing was amazing! 50ish miles battery, then 40mpg hybrid no matter how hard I flogged it. It was a peppy, comfortable road trip car that we only had to fill up with gas every couple of months if we kept it in town. That car was ahead of its time, with an unfortunate battery lay out that led to its demise and us getting rid of it. 10 year life cycle, and insane money to replace.
We just went on a trip to the Ozarks in her 2023 Civic, 4 people, full trunk, and still 35mpg, Plus, no giant battery to worry about
But the key bit of info is his statement “Wanted to see what the worst case might look like for charging costs. ”
In reality, only an idiot or someone looking to figure out the “worst case” will spend that.
In reality, you’ll charging at home overnight at a much lower rate… OR you’ll be charging for free or at much a lower rate overnight at the Hotel/motel/camp ground you’re staying at.
So in reality, you’ll still spend less on fuel/energy with a BEV as long as you’ve done some homework and have some smarts.
What this guy is doing would be like having a gas car and looking for the most expensive places to fill up and when driving, locking out overdrive and keeping the AC cranked.
Or it would be like using a plug in hybrid and NOT plugging it in.
Given that when listing charging time he explicitly called out that it excluded destination charging, it would seem he was also taking advantage of overnight charging at hotels and the like.
I took that to mean that his trip didn’t include destination charges, given the rest of the context. And his price per kwh seems high if it includes overnight charging at hotels and such.
Yeah, reading it again, your interpretation is valid. Really need a full rundown of what he did instead of a bullet point list.
Yeah, I’d really like to see the data behind his conclusions. It doesn’t sound good, but there’s a lot missing here. If we look at 11 hours of supercharging added to about 60 hours of driving (assuming an avg speed of 60), divided up over 24 charging stops, we’re looking at less than half an hour per stop on average. If you’re also stopping and having a bite to eat and such at some of those stops, it doesn’t really tell us 11 hours were added to the trip, depending on how these folks normally travel. It could also mean some really brief stops and some long stops that didn’t accomplish much, which might feel even worse than it sounds. We just don’t know. I suspect the former is more likely, but who knows.
Similarly, if the pricing was that bad including some destination charging, that tells us that it could be much worse if you are stuck on just DC fast charging.
Yeah, since he’s looking for worst case, I think the “did not include destination charges” means his trip didn’t include any destination charging, not that he just left it out of the math.
Basically, this guy seems to have decided to see what someone who does mostly highway driving, has nowhere to charge except DC fast chargers, and hauls a lot of people or stuff.
My road trips mostly involve Florida and back (NH) to visit my dad. My ride a 2016 Mazda 3 with the 2.5 the big 4 in that car always made it feel a little bit hot hatchish with better day to day mileage. I still got at least 32-33 mpg on those trips despite the fact that you have to do at least 80 through the south otherwise you become a speed bump for a semi. Recently my girlfriend and I acquired a 2022 RAV4 hybrid. Not my cup of tea dynamically but more room and an even better 36 mpg on the trip. Occasionally we would do a leg either up or down in one go something you could not do with the electric. 30 mpg highway is not a great milestone today.
Hey, I know you didn’t endorse the argument, but you weren’t nearly hard enough on the “dragging two drivetrains around” BS argument. The Tesla model Y battery weighs 1700 lbs. You could easy have 3 ICEs and still be under that weight. Anybody who had ever argued “dragging two drivetrains around” needs to be permanently removed from the discussion so that the adults can speak.
Correct and, technically, you are only dragging two half drivetrains around. It’s not like the car has two motors AND two transmissions and double the number of axles.
I do like 2-3 round trips Florida to Pennsylvania a year, I had a Fusion Hybrid, mild not plug in, I’d have to stop for gas twice on the trip. I just bought a Tesla model Y, but did consider this beforehand. I’m actually departing for Pennsylvania this Thursday. I realize these trips will take slightly longer and cost slightly more than before, but I weighed that against the costs of operating it for my normal commute. Also it’s hard to quantify the amount of fatigue one feels while driving on a road trip. I had previously done 900 miles in a rented Tesla and man was it noticeably less. Especially on the highway, Autopilot does like 90% of the work. I am not saying you don’t have to pay attention or be engaged, but it drastically reduces the mental load.
Until it drives you into an oncoming train, anyway.
Man you people are rubes.
Just finished a 2425 mile trip (coast-ish to coast-ish) in a RAV4 Hybrid. Average fuel economy was about 29 MPG. However we got that figure with under just about the worst conditions for maximizing fuel efficiency:
So yeah I imagine that any newish hybrid could do as good or better than 30mpg in real world conditions.
I couldn’t imagine doing a trip like this with more than 2 people and everyone being OK with stopping so much, nobody would want to travel again. I just did KS to VA 1330 miles in a 2021 Yukon xl diesel stopped to fill up before we left and once on the way cost $140 and averaged 29 mpg with 6 people, 2 dogs, and luggage.
I think we’re all discounting how long it takes for kids to go inside a gas station, fart around, complain, go to the bathroom, eat, complain, etc.. We road trip in Teslas often, and we find that we drive 2-2.5 hrs then charge for 35 min. With 5th and 7th graders, that’s how long we stretch and putz around when driving gas cars, but that may be unique to our family. Usually our kids are the bottleneck, not the charging. Tesla Superchargers always have bathrooms, food/coffee, etc.. so the experience is similar to our gas fill ups with ICE.
The outlier cost of charging on road trip is around $15 for a “fillup” which is ~225-250 miles. We’ll say 225 miles for these numbers. If you drive 30 mpg in a gas car thats 7.5 gallons @$3.5 is $26.25. I dont know about that dude’s math.. or maybe he’s driving 80mph and leaving the AC on while he eats. No idea. I drive 70-72mph (my normal gas driving speed), 4 people, AC, no external racks/mounts.
I’m guessing this guy’s numbers are at the very extreme end of the spectrum and shouldn’t be cherry-picked to make an argument. His average wh/m @ 363 is high, but not unusual for hilly areas. Your 30mpg hybrid will get way less with those same hills. 280-300 wh/mi is way more typical for the flats in my world.
That said, PHEVs are awesome too.
My experience with travelling with kids is much different, so tough to say who the outlier is. I have a 13 and 11 year old and we just went on a trip a couple weeks ago. Our fill ups for gas and restroom breaks are quick, we are out of there in 10-15 minutes, and usually towards the lower end of that. If we stop for a meal, that can be much longer, but that would typically only be once per day.
By “outlier” I meant road trips in general. 99% of my EV’s useage is in town fractions of pennies per mile with solar charging. Its not a great metric for judging an EV’s worthwhile, its just a few thousand miles a year. I find the overall experience of Tesla charging to be very close to ICE for me personally. We’re slow, hit up the local antique store and soak up the downtown diner kind of road trippers.
For my entire childhood, my parents twice a year took us on 1000 mile one way road trips to see family. Every gas stop was understood to be a coordinated, absolute minimum of time event. One kid walks the dog, one adult fuels the car. The other kid and adult go to the bathroom. Trade off responsibilities ASAP. Get in, go. Want to buy snacks? They’re already packed, get back in the car we’ve got 14 more hours of this.
The thought of Dad looking at his watch on one hand and twirling the other hand shouting, “Let’s go people, we’re making good time, keep it up!”….it brings a nostalgic tear to my eye.
And that was back before we had Google Maps to tell us the the time we had to beat.
Yeah.. thats not us. We tried it and its stressful and no one’s happy. We’re a pretty chill, take your time, try on sunglasses, look at magnets kind of road trippers. Without fail, after we’re all buckled up my youngest always has to pee after stopping for 20 min. No judgement for any other families, we all more at our own pace.
I totally agree with this. I personally can’t go more than 3 hours maximum without stopping to stretch. Instead of stopping at a rest area or gas station, you stop at a super charging station. Doing it this way, there wouldn’t be any more time spent than when driving a gas vehicle. Also, those gas prices are insanely low. I haven’t seen gas that low in about 20 years. So, on the West coast, the Tesla wins, hands down….unless your hybrid is getting at least 60 miles per gallon.
We have a truck and a Tesla, so which vehicle we take on road trips is an easy choice as far as gas savings. The truck is for towing the camper and sports activities and the Tesla for everything else. I do a TON of 3 hr round trip work drives and the 10 min at a Supercharger is no big deal, but the gas savings is HUGE. I leave with a full tank charged at home and I only use maybe $4-5 in Supercharger electricity. Not bad for a 200-250 mile drive. I arrive at home with 20% and charge back up for nothing. Lots of one way 3 hr drives as well with free charging at hotels.
My wife’s non-hybrid Elantra averages 38-42 mpg just driving around locally, and on the highway, I have seen numbers in the 47-50mpg range, all above the EPA numbers. So, for about $300.42, I could have done the same trip on gas, and likely saved 9-10 hours of hearing my kid say “are we there yet?”
My 2019 WRX has returned 29.4 mpg over its lifetime. I can regularly get 33 mpg highway and under ideal conditions (steady state cruising, no hills or stoplights) hit 36 mpg for a trip.
Just ask yourself: “would I rather be charged up or gassed?”
My 15-year-old Prius gets 46 MPG if I don’t work at it at all – I mean, that’s what it gets with the windows down at 70mph. If I assume gas costs $4/gal (a more pessimistic assumption than Gayer’s but also allows for other consumables like oil), I could cover over 4800 miles for the same money.
For the record, my old pickup also gets over 30 miles per gallon. While the road trip itself is impressive I think the most important part to note is that the miles/kW-h equation shows that electric mobility is FAR more efficient than burning ancient peat bogs. And when you pay for charging, you get hit hard in the wallet for the privilege of that big pipe pumping all those kilowatts so fast. Charging at home is cheap and fast chargers are demonstrably expensive.
PG&E charges 42 cents per kWh in Northern California. That number definitely affects the cheapness of charging at home!
That’s another 30% higher than Gayer paid at fast chargers. I can’t think of a much better incentive to install as much solar as you can fit onto every sky-facing surface you own.
If all you’re doing is roads trips get a hybrid. A HEV turns in better fuel economy than a PHEV operating in hybrid mode and costs thousands less. Why charge a PHEV on a road trip and overpay for electricity that will only get you 30± of range?
Yeah, I came here to post the same. If you’re mostly going to be on the highway you’re not going to benefit from the extra cost, weight, and materials that go into a PHEV.
Yup. I’ve got a PHEV and my wife’s gas only Tiguan gets better highway MPG. The PHEV is of little benefit to us on a road trip.
I think the argument is that you don’t *have* to plug in your PHEV on a road trip. You can ignore the plug-in aspect, get great mileage, and return to plugging it in for your daily commute needs.
Because the slightly increased per-mile cost of the PHEV’s slightly-poorer energy efficiency on a road trip is far, far outweighed by its vastly better energy efficiency on daily drives. “If all you’re doing is road trips” is the kind of scenario that only applies to inner-city folks who don’t need cars day to day; over 90% of American households own at least one car. As of the latest info I can find, 76% of American workers commute every day and of those, nearly 68% commute alone. That’s just over 50% of all American workers racking up miles who could, on average, cover every last inch of their daily distance on EV miles with a Prius Prime.
The hybrid does better on distance, true. But the PHEV does better in general. I say this owning and loving a Prius; my son owns a Volt and I envy his EV capability, even though my own commute is beyond his EV range. It could cut my already small mobility expense in half.
Okay, so the price is about comparable on a road trip between an HEV and a BEV.
What about the gas price for the other 95% of his miles, locally around town? When he’s charging at home rather than at public chargers?
The same, with a plug-in hybrid.
Besides, the money isn’t the takeaway here, it’s the trip being 8 hours shorter with gas.
Few years ago we did almost 1400 mile trip from Chicago to Fort Myers, FL in less than 16 hours in BMW 535d averaging over 30MPG. Would’ve been faster but roads in Illinois were covered in snow. I would love to hear how long it takes to make that trip in an EV ????
So…. yeah this kind of road trip is why we own a BEV.
We take long road trips (read: require DC Fast charging) maybe 6 times a year tops which is more than most people I suspect. The entire rest of the year our 300 mile real world range covers us 100% of the time, including the many, many intermediate range drives that would require gas in a plug in hybrid. On those road trips our cost washes with using gas, and we plan charging stops with meal breaks so while the fueling process takes longer the actual added time on the road is maybe a half hour a day, max.
The rest of the year we pay way less to fuel our car and don’t have to haul a second powertrain around. Plus EV packaging means we can own a much smaller BEV than we could PHEV for the equivalent passenger and cargo space.
PHEVs also have some major drawbacks – I hated driving our Pacifica Hybrid in the winter because the battery had no thermal management so our efficiency tanked and the range halved (at best) once it hit about 45. Plus it ran the gas engine constantly to heat the cabin.
TL;DR this post isn’t the dunk Torch thinks it is, and PHEVS come with some real drawbacks, a thing he’d know if he lived with one.
Everyone telling their car can do 30 mpg ; but not on a road trip with 5 people and cargo.
Not on a trip where you don’t just sit 3000 miles on a highway but actually drive around .. real roads with traffic lights and what not.
I manage to do 21 mpg with my 500 hp German V8 but in **reality** I see a lot of 10-12 mpg while not driving 55 mph on a straight non-congested highway.
I’m not sure what you are getting at. A RAV4 hybrid, Sienna hybrid, and many other cars will do better than 30mpg while barreling down the highway at 75mph, fully loaded with the AC on.
You are missing the point. Cannot compare. Weaker engine. And a roadtrip isn’t only about the highway doing 75 mph. I doubt the guy drove 3000 miles at 75 mph.
I recently did the mileage calculation on my 1986 Mercedes 300SDL. Over one tank (503 miles) of mixed use driving (65/35ish city/hwy) I averaged 25mpg on the nose (9.4L/100km).
This is a nearly 40 year old, 17 foot long, 4000lb sedan with no lockup converter. 30MPG is not hard to achieve and with a largely highway trip, even my old boat may almost make the cut. Plus I have 90 liters of fuel on board, so far fewer stops.
Diesel. Engine barely half the power of a Model Y. Emitting enough soot during 3000 miles to fill a bathtub. Next.
I fail to see where power is part of the equation here. You also seem to have very little knowledge of diesels if you think they’d fill a bathtub with soot over it’s lifetime, let alone 3000 miles. If ignorance drives your buying decisions, it makes sense that you’d gravitate to Tesla.
You want to compare how clean a diesel is vs an EV? Right.
I mean, I’m 20 years into the commercial diesel industry and have data, so we can do that. But from your tone it feels like you’re arguing in bad faith.
Just did a trip in my 2021 Yukon xl diesel from KS to Va 1330 miles filled up before we left and once on the way spent $140 averaged 29 mpg loaded with 6 people, 2 dogs and luggage.
Diesel. Cannot compare. You’re also emitting enough soot to make a few miles of new tarmac.
Why does diesel not compare but gas does? Is it because it collapses your argument?
Dude you’re comparing the dirtiest possible solution with a full electric car. Do you really want to go that route?
Congrats that your car was able do do 29 mpg. If you’re proud of that (you need to comment to tell it) then can you also understand that the guy’s 30 mpg was more or less the worst of the worst? Because Model Ys (and a lot of other EVs) often reach as much as 100 mpge.
There’s several ways to look at this. One is, the car has been on the road for 38 years. It’s debt to manufacturing emissions is long paid. The other is that it doesn’t require new infrastructure. Finally, scrapping a running vehicle to replace it with an EV brings in the argument of how long I have to drive that EV to offset the environmental cost of scrapping an old vehicle and manufacturing a new one.
There is a chance, I didn’t do the calculations, that your diesel is doing more environmental damage than 10 modern cars, in a year. So if you keep driving for say another 5 years … That’s 50 years of modern car emissions. And the emissions of a modern car are mostly CO2, not NO and diesel particulates. How about brake dust (no regen) and we have to consider burning oil through old oil scrap rings – unless you’ve rebuild your engine every decade.
Again I am not blaming anyone for driving old cars even or especially ones that aren’t eco friendly ; I have 2 of those, just 15 years old each, but a 6.2L V8 and a 5.4L V8 aren’t going to win any prizes compared to modern cars regarding emissions. But I don’t say that my ICE cars are -anywhere- near as efficient or environmental friendly as the Tesla above.
So my point still is ; even though the Tesla fared pretty poor with ’30 mpg’ due to high supercharging costs – a regular ‘efficient’ ICE car will barely come close to 30 mpg using all tricks of the book; driving slowly, driving only highway (vs a real roadtrip which isn’t just highways – who does that; only measuring highway mpg and conveniently leaving out urban/city driving).
If the Tesla would be charging mainly at home and not run over 3000 miles in a short time, then he’d be close to 100 MPGe. That’s 300% better than someone doing 30 MPG and close to 400% better than for example my BEST MPG.
Anyways, TL;DR; I think everyone is bashing the guy for the wrong reasons. If he had paid less for the supercharging his ‘mpg’ would easily be closer to 40 or even 50 MPGe and then nobody would have commented like “my car can do that too – see, EVs suck!”.
I like classics as well btw, so I’m not against a 50 year old car going well over any emission limits because I know there are just a few of them on the road. It’s the “common ICE car” which sees 30-80 miles a day which is the big problem regarding emissions.
Besides cars we have to check trucks, planes, ships, coal plants, gas stoves and what not to reduce emissions to avoid a catastrophic runaway rise in the average global temperature which is already causing problems for everyone. We might already be too late reversing it.
I mean, in my case it’s a classic that sees about 2500-3000 miles a year.
One of the unforseen environmental consequences of EVs as well is the weight. From shredding tires (adding the emissions of that rubber to the environment) to the increased intervals of repaving roads, adding between 25% to 50% of the curb weight is having an effect.
And for what it’s worth, NOx emissions are an issue with modern diesels. When they increased the efficiency of the burn through higher compression and injection pressures, cylinder temps increased and NOx was an issue. My 80s mechanical injection with a whopping 1958psi (135 bar) injection pressure is not creating much in the way of NOx.
I’ll add (again) that I’m not at all anti-EV. I’m still mostly PHEV camp because it’s the quickest route to tge maximum amount of emissions reduction from commuting. Who cares if an HEV burns 20 gallons of gas twice a month hauling a trailer if the other 28 days were spent commuting on electric?
I hear you. I don’t think PHEVs are bad, it is just that is less efficient than just having a simple battery and 1 or 2 electric motors. But if you need more range and instant recharging or something like that then sure PHEVs are fine.
I honestly do think that even current EVs are good enough for 90% of the current car audience. The remaining 10% can either stick with the ICEs they have or get a PHEV. Few people actually tow a boat or horses, especially those living in the cities. For them a 2+2 seater would be enough, light, nimble, small, easy to park and could probably last nearly a month on one charge if you only drive 20-30 miles a day in stop-go traffic.
I am not against ICE cars, I have two V8s drinking more gasoline than half a block of neighbors, but that’s because I’m a petrol head and I’m also not driving a lot in them, if it’s 5000 miles a year per car then it’s a lot.
That’s food for thought. My Cruze Eco would have probably achieved 38-40 mpg. Albeit on premium.
5 people in a MY sounds like a 7 seater. How in the world did he convince someone to occupy the third row for that long?!? iPad and Benadryl? Anyone much over 48 inches would be a pretzel back there.
I recently did a trip from PA to Hilton Head SC in my wife’s Palisade we averaged 25-28mpg the entire time and I was doing 70+ majority of the time on the highway with a bike rack. We also did a trip to Tennessee last year and same thing. If I tried to hypermile I probably could have done an average of 30mpg.
Had we done these in my Accord hybrid it probably would’ve been 40mpg, but I wanted to take my bike both times.
tldr, but:
If all you are doing is road trips -> PHEV.
Everyone else -> BEV.
If all you’re doing is roads trips get a hybrid. A HEV turns in better fuel economy than a PHEV operating in hybrid mode and costs thousands less. Why charge a PHEV on a road trip and overpay for electricity that will only get you 30± of range?
You are right, my main point is just that for most people, that can charge at home, a BEV is more than sufficient. Unless they are doing 150+ miles a day, year round.
My logic:
First day of forgetting to charge, I feel like an idiot.
Second day, in a row, I forget to charge, I have to call my boss and let her know I am an idiot.
I mean, I visit family regularly that live rural, and the range would be stretched during the summer. Winter would have me guessing if I can make it round trip. They do not have the means to charge more than 110v, and then I’d have to inconvenience them with it.
I would like you to take a deep dive into your argument.
On one hand, your main argument is that you have to inconvenience your family, by paying them a little to charge your car while you visit them and potentially having to do a 25 min pitstop while travelling to charge as well.
On the other hand…Let us continiue this death spiral towards making this planet a living hell, while producing massive local pollution while doing it.
I had this long argument planned, actually started typing, but realized i simply cannot be bothered. Last thing I read before I wet to bed was a brief article on how photovoltaic celle (solar panels) cause cancer.
Keep voting republican, do whatever you feel like, but at least man up and wear the fucking armband.
There are no charging stations between my place and theirs. I live in Canada, where infrastructure is…lacking.
Alternatively, to charge at my sister-in-law’s (whom is so tight on budget that she doesn’t use her A/C) I’d need a 200ft extension cable. Again, these are rural properties.
I missed the last line of what you wrote, boy howdy did you ever take a giant leap of assumption. I’ve never voted republican in my life, as I’m not an American. Nor would I ever vote for the party of anti-women’s rights and deregulation of things like the EPA.
My understanding of the realities around EV does not make me anti-EV, it simply means that currently they are not a solution for ME. Just cause I don’t like eating coconut doesn’t make me anti-coconut, everyone else is still allowed to eat as they please.
Of course, none of those EVs or PHEVs come with the best fuel saving device we’ve seen, the Jatco Xtronic CVT. Maybe Alex’s trip would have been better had his car been properly equipped…
I appreciate this comment because the most fun rental car I’ve ever had in the US was a Nissan Cube with the CVT. For being a box it also achieved 33mpg going 65-70mph. That CVT was fun to drive and just gave the Cube drivetrain some real character.
LOL, you’re definitely one of my favorite commenters. 🙂
Shit, our TDI Sportwagen get’s 50 MPG on the highway loaded to the hilt. This why I fantasize about carbon neutral liquid fuels like bio diesel. There’s a lot of existing infrastructure out there and having such would allow us to comfortably build up the electric grid to handle the inevitable use of more electrons in the future. Plus it would make towing a snap. I continue to dream.
As an aside to this article, remember, Elon just got approved for a $45B payday. WTF!
Your wagon is probably one of the best cars for road trips. I had a MKIII TDi and I’d throw $5 at it each week for school and work committing. Miss that little guy.