Cost of Electric Cars

At a time when it costs up to $100 to fill a gas tank, but as little as $10 to charge an electric car, buying an EV may seem like an obvious choice. But EV economics are complicated and you need to be savvy about a lot of unfamiliar factors before you can stick it to the oil companies.

Buying a new car
To drive an EV you have to buy an EV, an often pricey proposition. Even after you sell or trade your current, conventional car you could easily be in the hole $10,000 or more. 

It'll take you several years to just break even, as my CNET Cars colleague Craig Cole calculates here, even assuming a scenario where you buy a very cheap EV, live in a place with cheap electricity and always charge at home. That's a lot of "ifs" to make the purchase of a new EV an economic slam dunk.

This is not a new concern: I can't count the number of people I know who bought a hybrid or other fuel-efficient car at a net cost far higher than they could ever save on fuel with it. 

One friend insisted on trading in their Porsche Cayenne for a Cayenne Hybrid, even after I penciled out that it would take them 111 years to break even.  READ MORE...

The Colonial Pipline

This pipeline stretches from Texas and curves around and through the south on it way to New Jersey... and, because it was secured properly was the victim of a hacker attack from a group located in Russia (but not necessarily sponsored by the Russian Government) which shut down oil transportation services to several southern States, including the on that I am living in, Tennessee.

While being online has its advantages, it also has its disadvantages and this is one of those disadvantages which is incidentally impacting millions of Americans.

This afternoon, my wife and I went to a local grocery store that sells gasoline on the side and filled up one of our vehicles along with a contain for our lawn mowers.  Each pump and there were 5 of them had vehicles beside them with 1-2 other vehicles waiting.  In less than 20 minutes, we had gasoline and were on our way.

Returning home, we passed our regular gasoline station, Weigle's and each of the 20 pumps had yellow bags covering the delivery pumps indicating that the entire station was out of gasoline...  this was completely unexpected since a local grocery store was still pumping gasoline.

It is unsure how long this gasoline shortage will last but one thing is for certain, it will cause gasoline prices to increase and that increase will not be reduced anytime soon...  and, because of that increase, the entire US Economy could be headed towards inflation which has not been a problem for almost a decade.

Interestingly, electric cars will be operating off of some kind of an online grid as will all the recharging stations and as the country moves closer and closer to the end of gasoline vehicles we might opened Pandora's Box as we transition from gasoline to electric.

Sometimes life is just a BITCH...