We recently bought a used Nissan Leaf. I am still waiting to see what charging it will cost, but I have a hard time believing it will be more expensive to run than the overly complex machinery built into the average internal combustion engine. Hopefully this story is correct.
I had no idea that I would need a postscript to this post, but I really didn’t know that the Koch’s were this stupid. They’ve decided to go to war with Elon Musk over the future of the electric car.
The oil and gas industry may have thought it had killed the electric car, but sales — boosted by generous government subsidies — rose dramatically between 2010 and 2014, and energy giants are worried the thing may have come back to life.
Time to kill it again.
A new group that’s being cobbled together with fossil fuel backing hopes to spend about $10 million dollars per year to boost petroleum-based transportation fuels and attack government subsidies for electric vehicles, according to refining industry sources familiar with the plan. A Koch Industries board member and a veteran Washington energy lobbyist are working quietly to fund and launch the new advocacy outfit.
Huffington Post
Elon Musk, of course, wasted no time and no snark when it came to responding to this threat. As the linked article rightly notes, electric vehicles are not the only vehicles that receive subsidies. Oil fueled vehicles, plastics (everything) is enabled by heavy subsidies to the oil and gas industry.
As the Tweeting Elon Musk linked article at The Guardian explains:
Fossil fuel companies are benefiting from global subsidies of $5.3tn (£3.4tn) a year, equivalent to $10m a minute every day, according to a startling new estimate by the International Monetary Fund.
The Guardian
The IMF calls the revelation “shocking” and says the figure is an “extremely robust” estimate of the true cost of fossil fuels. The $5.3tn subsidy estimated for 2015 is greater than the total health spending of all the world’s governments.
The Koch’s may object to subsidies for all industries, but I don’t see them rejecting them personally. They are more than happy to cash those government checks themselves in spite of their ideological opposition to them. Nothing cures the hurt of grave violations of your personal beliefs quite as well as millions of dollars of infused cash.
The October electric bill has arrived and, given the difference between last October and this October temperature-wise, the increase in electric consumption for last month was > 300 KWH which amounts to just over $80 in additional electricity.
Given the fact that in regular drive mode I can beat any sports car off the line, and that maintenance costs are near zero for the vehicle aside from replacing batteries and maintaining the moving parts in the front-end, I consider this car to be an excellent enhancement in city mobility. I think I’d like to have two of them, one for each child.
Postscript
In 2019 we bit the bullet and replaced the batteries in the Leaf with new batteries from Nissan. This should have been done as warranty work but the Nissan dealership we had been going to didn’t want to have to pay for that work or do the work for free, or however that works out between Nissan and the local dealership; but in the end it added up to us having to foot the bill and replace batteries that Nissan acknowledged had been faulty during the warranty period.
We basically have a new Nissan Leaf now, but at a price quite a bit lower than what a new Leaf would sell for. If only the maps and guidance had been upgraded at the same time as the batteries, then I’d have no complaints with the thing. As for Nissan and it’s Maxwell dealerships here in Austin, I will not be doing business with them any longer. Hopefully the next car will be from someone other than Nissan.
