Hello Vital MTB Visitor,
We’re conducting a survey and would appreciate your input. Your answers will help Vital and the MTB industry better understand what riders like you want. Survey results will be used to recognize top brands. Make your voice heard!
Five lucky people will be selected at random to win a Vital MTB t-shirt.
Thanks in advance,
The Vital MTB Crew
Yes, electricity is cheaper than a gallon of gas but the difference, in the end, still tips you towards there being some time before you 'break even' on the new car. Once you hit that break even point, it will rapidly be a saver for you. In the end, will it be cheaper? More than likely. You had higher mileage and at some point, the repairs on a car become too much and it is worth moving on to the next thing. That next thing might be more upfront (negotiated sticker + loan costs) but in the end, it is a smarter financial move.
I am lucky to have a decent trail network I can get to in 10 minutes by bike, but any plans I had to go to other fun trail networks/parks are dependent on finding a friend with space to go with.
Like most people, I plan on holding the car for 2-4 years (or keeping it for like...20, more on that later). If I sell the car at year 2, here is the math.
After two years I will have paid $19,000 in principal and $2500 in interest. The million dollar question (or $54,000 question) is how much will the car be worth in 2 years? Considering supply constraints of rare earths, demand for this particular car, the used market right now and inflation, I'd guess "a good amount". I'm modeling 10% depreciation (overall) so for rounding, lets just say $60K. (before you flip out on this, quickly google search it, I'm right - for now - in this case).
I owe $50K (original loan) less principal I've paid in ($19K). This means I owe $31K. If I sell it for $60, I get to TAKE HOME $29,000 (or put that to a new vehicle). Unlike the assumption in your above diatribe, the money doesn't evaporate.
Obviously, I paid a certain amount in interest over this period, which was $2500. That is poof, gone, burned. Just like gasoline! Except over this same period of time I would have burned roughly $9-11K in gas/oil, have a truck that would have also suffered depreciation (though less total - this is what I'm not totally accounting for; probably around $5K), and has a much higher likelihood of a catastrophic failure (no warranty- this too I'm not accounting for; washing these two factors out).
Again, the smart people reading this will go "yes jeff, this math is correct but run it again with a $28K subaru that gets 29mpg." (Smartest option) or "what if the bottom falls out of the EV market" (a risk, unlikely, but a risk). I'm also ignoring the fact that the amount in principal less gasoline **could be invested** at some overall return if I kept the truck. EG, the fact I'm putting my cash 'to work" in a depreciating asset as opposed to one that is supposed to go up is the real finance-brain death-point to my argument. (except markets are trash right now so whatever)
As a side note, everything I'm suggesting here is the result of the weirdest macroeconomic backdrop I've ever seen. High inflation, low interest on certain loans (like this - which is rapidly changing - but I'm still borrowing negative rates), supply constrains that likely wont ease (for rare earths), and an entirely new classification of vehicle (that has like 1/10th the moving parts) creates a very different paradigm.
Anyone else have any Harvard MBA Case Study Questions for me???
EDIT: Seriously, if anyone needs some help understanding their mortgage, financing instrument etc dm me. Most people rightfully hate this shit, and I'm always willing to help. Btw, I really did a good job showing the ways I'm *actually* being an idiot with the purchase(outside of writing these posts in the first place)
Just ribbing ya, I wish I had an electric car. I was fortunate to be a position to buy a car early in the pandemic when dealers were virtually giving them away. I snagged a fully loaded 2017 Passat with low miles for $18k with 0% financing. It gets 30-40mpg, which is more than double what my well-loved 2006 Tacoma gets.
Even still, yes, we will be trying to minimize the frequency of long road trips this summer. I'll probably start commuting by bike to work too (~15 miles each way) –– not everyday, but a couple times per week.
mine is the 4L V6 so she thirsty, I mostly ride from home anyway so no problem.
But personal responsibility is for other people.
There is a big part of me however that would go out and buy something like a 1998 E36 M3 or something if I could (and had a shop to store it in). Not a fast car, but a car that is "fun to drive". We are 100% going to lose the "driving experience" when everything goes to electric. I've only driven the Tesla hard on a mountain road once, and it was insane, but there was no matching revs, working through the gears, heel toe (not that I can do that) etc.
Like others have noted, fit/finish of the car needs work. Its not awful, but one of the doors gives the exact opposite feeling of quality when you shut it....little stuff like that.
Last point I'll make on the car, one thing I can't shake about EVs is my feeling they *should* be a LOT cheaper than ICE cars/trucks. Yes, batteries are expensive, but when you look at all the parts that go into an ICE vehicle, and all the systems that need to work, its just so much...less. Just look at the driveline and the number of expensive parts that go into a diesel truck (for instance...same price) its incredibly complex, and frankly an incredible feat of humanity. Electric? Very few parts. If you strip down an EV to the minimum (get rid of all the "tesla software/computer hardware stuff") I feel we should be able to make 300 mile Subaru WRX Hatch style cars for sub $40K. The big issue between here and there will be the rare earths that go into the equation and manufacturers completely re-tooling.
One question I was also wondering - will e-bike sales/popularity increase with gas prices? I drive to the trails near my house, but if I had an e-bike I'd ride. I'm probably an outlier being all the trails are e-bike friendly and within 5 miles (easily could pedal too).
I don’t expect prices to go back to where they were. I assume the current administration will do whatever it can to get prices down by November. As someone who doesn’t drive that much I honestly would be fine if prices where were they were at now if I wasn’t making some guy rich but instead was paying a gas tax like in most of Europe.
I pedal to the trails that we got in my vicinity or alternatively take my bike on a 30 min train ride if I want to get to a location with more elevation.
And moving from previous work to my current, I've gone from 60,000km per year to about 8,000. Fuel price isnt a decider anymore. Although electricity is a killer. About $500nzd ($320 USD) per month in winter.
swings an round'a'boots......
The fact is the US Govt is now at war with its on middle and lower class. The people who mow our yards (who drive big trucks with big trailers) are being hurt the most - and raising their prices. I ride with two guys who own big lawn companies, both are hurting as people are cutting back on lawn care (fact is "Trickle-down" is real, as is "Trickle up").
It is only going to get worse. We can not even get a freaking driveway as the asphalt plants are not bringing in stone (via train) due to the price of fuel (surcharges).
Even if the cost of gas does not change your travel plans, it will change plans when you can not get the products needed to ride your bike (tires, chains, lubes, new bikes).
As for folks in big cities with public trans or in Euro nations - no comparison to 90% + of the US. Simply, most people have no good access to or want public trans.
My Gas price has risen 189%!!!! in the same time my pay has moved 15.55%
I honestly just cant understand how people, especially a family can live on a middle single income while eating healthy, living in a healthy home etc.
are we at the point of less businesses biting the same apple and using the less is more option? ie bigger single businesses create less costs but able to provide higher wages? im also a big believer in no middle men.
bikes are terriable for this, theres about 2 extra steps of costs for any bike sold at a bike shop.
Procurement and Supply Chain Management Tenders for large manufacturers have already been negotiated at least half a year before and that recent fuel price hikes won't take an effect just yet because of pre-orders and fuel hedging.
So if a retailer or importer says that fuel prices have caused logistics costs to soar in 2022, they are definitely BS-ing.
Note that all bets are off for January 2023 onwards. So, in theory, a bike/car/big-ticket purchase bought now may potentially be cheaper than next year.
@Jeff that warrantied Tesla vs. the out of warranty truck of yours, how often does an out of warranty truck go wrong, vs an in-warranty Tesla?
In all seriousness, regarding the ICE vs. EV comparison, it's mostly the same. What you're losing with an EV compared to an ICE is:
-the engine (including fuel delivery, so tank and low and high pressure pumps)
-the gearbox
-the emissions system: the exhaust, catalytic converter, DPF, in the case of diesels AdBlue container, dosing and injector.
The brakes stay the same (including parking brake actuator), the suspension, the wheels, the interior (so window lifters, powered seats, HVAC system as far as flaps and the like goes, satnav, etc.), tailgate lifter, lighting, window wipers and washing, etc.
What you gain with an EV is a vacuum pump for the brake booster (vacuum taken off the plenum in an ICE), the big electric motor, though simple in principle, has to be cooled, sealed, etc., you still have a single stage reduction transfer box containing some oil and a differential (with a Taycan, e-Tron GT or a Rimac One you even have a 2-gear gearbox in the rear), you get a more complex cooling system (electric water pump as opposed to a pump driven off the crank), a smart cooling system (actuator driving valves) as opposed to a wax filled passive thermostat, a heat pump or an electric HVAC compressor and electric heaters for HVAC as opposed to some water diverted to the heater core and an A/C compressor driven off the crank, the charger and inverter (jolly expensive PCBs with a LOT of power going through them, not a simple thing compared to some cranks and cogs that are well understood) and the battery.
Besides all of that, most companies are at the beginning of all of this and are still learning. While I can't wait the electric future, I'm not buying one for the next ~5 years, waiting for LiFePO batteries, new generations designed with input from current products being on the market, etc. Q.E.D., Tesla has likely the most efficient battery-drivetrain platform, but the build quality is shitte. Classic car makers know how to make a car, but are large rigid companies with development frameworks and bureaucracies that require things don't break (and they don't have a cult following of Tesla - a VW going wrong the way Teslas are going wrong would be in the national news, with Tesla it's just beta testing in public apparently), so development is slow. The i3 was a learning effort for BMW, learning to do an electric car and a mass produced carbon chassis. The e-Golf was a 'take a working chassis and stuff it with the unknown - the electric drivetrain'. Same goes for the old electric 1 series of BMW.
Now, to go back on topic, I'm 'lucky' that I've barely been riding this year for a multitude of reasons. If it was a normal year, it wouldn't affect me. I'm driving an old Subaru (hah!) bought with an LPG conversion. Though the normal work commute means 10 l/100 km of fuel usage (plus some gasoline before the engine heats up, roughly 0,5 l/100 km), with bikes it uses quite a bit more (15+ l/100 km when traversing Italy to and from France). Still, with LPG costing 1 € per litre and gasoline costing ~1,8 €/l, it's like driving a fuel sipping diesel Passat. With the car costing 4k to buy 2 years ago and not being worth anything, so I don't care if anything happens to it.
Another factor to not worry about prices affecting my riding is that I can reach over 10k vertical meters of descent by just riding the bike from home. And the usual daily roundtrip to go riding in the winter (when we have to go all the way to the coast from the Alps) is just over 200 km with 4 people in the car, so not a deal breaker as well. Summer daytrips are usually under 100km there and back anyway.
Not saying we have EVs totally figured out, Tesla is akin to a well built Toyota with respect to fit and finish or nothing will break, but the driveline & motor simplicities was actually a huge selling point for me, and something that makes me feel really good about buying the vehicle.
For the topic at hand, a lot of my riding is within ~5 miles. Those trips are hard as fuck on a normal ICE vehicle (oil barely even gets to temp). Its even worse in the winter. This is another part of an EV that makes me feel less-bad about driving to ride, and often gets me back out on the trail a second time (or third time) during a day.
That silly statement was backed up by a wall of text, explaining why EVs and ICE cars are 'almost the same' or very much alike. Yes, brake usage is lower. Because regenerative braking. But it's not like EVs are hovercrafts with zero moving parts. We are talking about vehicles traveling on beat up roads in rain, shine, hail, snow, wind in ambient temperatures regularly ranging from -40°C (yeah, actually, the lowest temperature in Slovenia, measured just a few years ago, was between -35 and -40°C) to well over 40, the surfaces and the insides of a car heat up to 80+°C, they have to run for 15+ years over a few 100.000 kilometers, etc. The suspension, interior, HVAC, doors, etc., will get just as beat up as with an ICE.
Yes, there is 'one moving part' with an electric motor compared to an ICE. But an EV still has a transfer box (a simplified gearbox), that motor still has bearings (which can go bad), they are mostly trending towards brushes (as more and more manufacturers are moving away from permanent magnet motors, but don't want to go asynchronous way, so they need to excite the rotor, which means brushes, which could be a replaceable part in the future), they are made from steel sheets (laminates), usually overmoulded, wound with the wire, magnets are inserted into the rotor laminate pack if it's a permanent magnet motor (otherwise it's wound as well), you need to protect it from corrosion, vibrations, while you don't have the effects of an ICE shaking away, are still present, rotational speeds are higher (20+k rpm) etc.
But like I mentioned, I suspect the electronics will be more of an issue and the challenges the industry faced at the beginning (speaking with people designing power electronics for EVs actually driving around) were mind boggling.
I'm not saying ICE >> EV, FAR from that. What I'm saying is that EVs aren't the greatest thing ever because they have less moving parts in the powertrain. Because that represents just a small part of what is a whole car. And only the powertrain has substantially changed going from an ICE car to an EV. A few things have changed as well (the way the chassis is laid out, how much space you have inside, etc.), but it's not as drastic a change like going from a body-on-frame to a unibody construction was for the stiffness and safety of cars.
As for the weight penalty, it's not as bad as some people make it seem. A lot of the cars offered in ICE, hybrid and EV variants have a ~500 kg or less of a penalty going from an ICE to an EV. It's not that EVs are heavy, cars are heavy on their own. EVs just make them a bit heavier.
EDIT: food for thought: how many people have problems with worn out suspension, worn out wheelhub bearings, broken window lifters, problems with the HVAC flaps and/or HVAC fan, etc., vs. how many people blow an engine in the lifetime of the average car? The engine does require a lot of preventive maintenance, that is a fact, but the rest of the car usually goes wrong more than the ICE. And it's that rest of the car that is the same on an EV.
Heck, you can take a bike from a major city to a bike park in the mountains without needing a car! Zurich to Lenzerheide on mass transport is about 2 hours which is pretty good (high-speed train and then a bus). You'll probably need a backpack for a change of clothes but at least you don't have to drive all the way and pay a hundred miles worth of gas (not to mention toll fees, incidentals and depreciation cost over the mileage driven).
I love the freedom of having a car but a modern civilization should prioritize mass transport more than roads and highways; integrate bike use within the strategy and you've created a golden age for a generation of bikers.
Post a reply to: Will gas prices impact your mountain biking?