In this Week in Insights, I vainly attempt to wave the yellow flag (I'm made to understand this means caution) on the coming April 2024 #electricvehicle tax credit cliff.
"The landscape is shifting once more for electric vehicle incentives. We’ve been sounding the alarm on this for more than a year, and now the deadline is upon us—on April 18, 2024, only a handful of EVs will still qualify for the full $7,500 federal EV tax credit.”
The #Fiat 500e has a built in WiFi hotspot. You need a Ubigi subscription for that. I wanted to know the rates (out of curiosity, not because I need it).
Guess what: you need to open up a fucking account with them just to see the rates! 🤬 #ev#electricvehicle
Visited the Mini dealership in Marin today to do a test drive of one of the electric models. It was a smooth ride on those curvy roads along the bay. It is a fun ride. Soon the official specs for the 2025 model will be out. I’ve already read the range should be up from 120 to 200 miles. #MiniCooper#ElectricVehicle#EV
The BYD Seal "launched" in Australia this evening. The prices turned out to be very competitive so we put down a deposit for the base model. The NSW EV stamp duty exemption and rebate are still in force for electric car orders placed up until the end of the year so that helps reduce the effective cost even further.
The pricing on these is really aggressive. There are only a few electric sedans currently available in Australia but BYD are significantly undercutting them all here.
The cheapest Seal variant is AUD $49,888 while the Tesla Model 3, Polestar 2 and Hyundai Ioniq 6 start at $63,700, $69,900 and $75,430 respectively (inc. GST + delivery fees but not state fees & charges). The other cars all beat the base model Seal in some way (max range, or acceleration, or max charging speed) but unless you're playing EV Top Trumps the $14-25k lower price may make up for that.
If you do want higher specs then the mid range Seal ($58,798) is still cheaper than all of the competition and even the top of the range Seal ($68,798) is cheaper than everything but the base model Model 3.
We're considering upgrading our order from the base model to the mid-range one. This would mainly be for the bigger battery (83 vs 61 kWh) and faster maximum charging speed (150 vs 110 kW), which would mean fewer and/or shorter recharging stops when on long road trips. There are also a number of other nice-to-haves in the mid range model that the base model doesn't have, none of which are particularly compelling individually but taken together along with the power system differences we might be swayed.
With our current car we've pretty consistently averaged about 10,000 km per year, i.e. roughly 200 km per week.
To get a very rough energy consumption estimate for the BYD Seal I can divide the WLTP range by the battery capacity and get 13.4 kWh / 100 km and 14.5 kWh / 100 km for the base model and mid range model respectively.
Those WLTP based numbers are almost certainly optimistic for real world driving through Sydney traffic, so I round up slightly before multiplying by 200 km and estimate that we might get through somewhere in the vicinity of 30 kWh in a good week. Big uncertainties on that, but it should be within a factor of two of the real number for any week that we don't make any out of town trips (which is most weeks).
If we did all our charging at home, in the evenings, with electricity from the grid then that 30 kWh would cost us about $10 in electricity. If we manage to do all the charging from excess solar power that we'd otherwise export back to the grid then it would only cost us about $3.30.
Depending on time of year our solar panels typically generate somewhere between 120 and 320 kWh per week so taking 30-60 kWh per week out of that to top up the car would not make a huge difference, apart from in winter. For most of the year we should be able to charge almost entirely from excess solar, as long as the car spends enough time at home during the day.
It'll be interesting to see how it actually pans out.