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Bad idea for 2 reasons. First the avg amount paid in gas taxes for a person is about $100 a year, so you are penalized for a hybrid or EV. Second, if you are someone who doesn't drive much, or has a couple cars, maybe a fixed income senior with a Chevy Bolt that drives 4,000 miles a year, now you are paying $250 to drive 4,000 miles vs about $20 in gas tax.

Yeah I think the key there is that those are all level 2. These aren’t fast chargers you use on a road trip, and that’s okay.

I didn't realize Hyundai ICEs are not reliable. I thought they were in it for the long haul. I have trouble with the desert aesthetic for long periods of time. I have friends in the urban area near PSP and also in the High Desert. It's sunny and dry, but driving across all the emptiness can become depressing after a while. The southern part of South America was to my liking. Chile's capital of Santiago was very, very safe and I've heard it has more crime now. Its seaside town of Vina del Mar was something. The south of Chile begins to look like Scandinavia. Uruguay was my favorite country.

@smk4565with all the good points lately! I also think that $50b over 10 years in new funding isn’t enough to cover the deficit the Highway dept is facing. If they’ve had to do $275b over 18 years, the math doesn’t add up.

A Deville Concours. These were rare when new and rarer now. These were the high end version that came with the more powerful northstar and magnaride. Concours got all the new suspension tech through this generation as it came out.

Absolutely, but I'm talking about like verse like. You're sorta in the same situation I am in. I have a nearly paid off Avalanche with only 63k miles on it, so buying a Silverado EV to save on gas doesn't math. It sounds like you're not putting a lot of miles on it then, which is also valid. Differing driving habits change the math. @G. David Felt sounds like he's on the road a lot. My mileage usage varies significantly each month so its difficult to make the case for an EV unless I bought one solely to put business miles on and save the Avalanche for personal driving. For April, I claimed over $1600 in mileage. May will probably be around $400. As I said... it depends. In this image, the chart is set to 15,000 miles a year, $3.50/g for gas, and 25c/kW for electricity.

Eh, as with all things, it depends. If you live in an apartment and your goal is simply the lowest cost per mile, buy a Pruis and we'll see you again in 250k miles. But comparing the most popular EV sedans today to a Pruis isn't really a fair comparison. The EVs have more features, tech, and performance. A Model-3 or Ioniq 6 will vastly out perform a Pruis, and the Ioniq 6, especially after the update, has a nicer interior and more compliant ride. Both of those EVs are more comparable in performance to something like an Acura TLX 3.0 Turbo or BMW M340i, both of which prefer premium. Now, if you're in an area with few chargers, then you'll need to do research. In my area, there are lots of chargers and they all have different rates, often at different times of the day. One advantage that charger operators have is that they can vary their rates based on time of day. So if everything in my life were the same except I was living in an apartment instead of a house, I would look at which chargers had the lowest rates. The slow-ish 6KW chargers across from the office I'm in today are 11/c/kWh right now. That's cheaper than I can get at home. A lot of the mid-speed chargers around me are 25/c/kWh, still quite reasonable and would make a Model-3 about the same cost per mile as a Pruis. The other thing to consider is vehicle size. Because of the non-liner way we calculate fuel economy in this country, bigger gas vehicles do worse than their numbers seem. A Tesla Model-3 will cost between 8c and 13c per mile to fuel at normal Supercharger rates. Fuel Cost $3.50 MPG Cost Per Mile Cost per 100 miles 15 $0.23 $23.33 20 $0.18 $17.50 25 $0.14 $14.00 30 $0.12 $11.67 35 $0.10 $10.00 40 $0.09 $8.75 45 $0.08 $7.78 You can see why I picked the Pruis as the comparison model. At 45 mpg, it's the only vehicle that comes close to the cost per mile of a Tesla at cheap supercharging. Now, comparing your Navigator to David's EV9, the savings start to stack up. The EV9 does 99 MPGe City and 88 MPGe highway, burning on average 46kw per 100 miles. Even at 60c/kw charging which is the most expensive I can find in my area, David is looking at $24.60 to go 100 miles, basically the same you and I would pay to fill our trucks. But David can almost certainly find cheaper charging than that. If he charged at the building across from where I am today for 11c/kw, he'd pay $4.51/100 miles. At a more common 25c/kW, he'd pay $10.25/100 miles. If he charges at the 25c place and commutes 300 miles a week, he's looking at $30.75 a week. You in your Navigator and me in my Avalanche aren't getting anywhere for $30.75 a week. The efficiency king (in affordable EVs) right now by a long way is the Ioniq 6 with 135 MPGe, large battery, and some of the fastest charging. Except for the Lexus RZ which has a low range, all the rest of the top MPGe players are around 115MPGe or less.

To me, the fill-up time argument is becoming rather pointless. We are rapidly approaching the time where you're going to be able to charge while you're out and about doing other things, so even if you live in an apartment, you can charge in your daily routine. The major grocery stores in my area are getting charging stations. Walmart is putting in charging stations everywhere. The office complex where one of my clients is has two separate charging stations, 14 plugs total. There's a charging station at the YMCA I go to. There's two, a small one and a big Tesla one at the IKEA. Costco is rolling them out. One of our gas chains, Sheetz, is partnered with Tesla and their larger locations have them. I know that I can drive from my house in Pittsburgh to my relative's house in Manassas Virginia 200 miles away with several chargers on route. I'm probably going to be converting my dryer outlet to the correct plug here soon so I can get test vehicles from the manufacturers, so I'll just charge at home. Is that the case everywhere? Of course not. It will be the case in the areas of higher population though. Can you put gas in faster? Sure. Will it matter? Only once in a while on road trips if you're trying to Cannonball Run it. Most of the time you'll plug in at home and go inside and sleep/eat/watch tv. If you live in an apartment, you'll fill up while you're getting groceries or at work or out with friend in the hip part of town. I can be inside, have my hot pocket microwaved, and on my couch in a lot less time than 6 minutes and 31 seconds.

Impressive recovery work. IMG_4778.HEIC

Electric yes, gasser no, Hyundai can't seem to build reliable gasser engines. South America is so on my bucket list....

Some songs are timeless and some of the older ones are so honest in their lyrics: "L.A. is a great big freeway Put a hundred down and buy a car In a week, maybe two, they'll make you a star Weeks turn into years, how quick they pass And all the stars that never were Are parking cars and pumping gas" Classic!

Buona domenica! Beach of the small town of Donnalucata, Sicily

This is not good for them and continues to show how terribly run Tesla is. Oil and gas supplier says Tesla is ‘refusing to pay’ $2 million in past-due bills – and that chaotic staffing has only made it worse

Very interesting, but shows how good BYD packages their EV components compared to American, Japan, Europe and Korea. BYD's Five-Minute Fast-Charging EV Also Has An Enormous Frunk I will say that My EV9 frunk is big in comparison to GM, all of Japan and Europe EVs, but small in comparison to the packaging by Chinese auto companies and BYD clearly took the frunk approach to our U.S. EV Trucks and applied it to their cars and SUVs. HUGE BYD SUV Frunk BYD Car Frunk, Tesla has nothing on this, except to say Tesla is very tiny in comparison.

Today I'm deep fried in "trinacria" ... Three days of this. I didn't want to leave and go to a more rural place with no view in another area. The outline across is the Italian mainland, so I'm about 30 miles south of Messina, where the distance across the strait is about a mere 1.5 miles. As I'm traveling south on the autostrada after checking out, this pullout with an Autogrill has a nice view of Mt. Etna. I went into a store to pick up some groceries and saw this: Fonzies and Cipster! Cipster is spelled for Italian phonetics because Chipster would be pronounced "Keep-stare." While going for a haircut based on Google reviews, I passed by this place. I had to take a photo showing the "team spirit."

He's reduced his stake in BYD from 10% to less than 5%. https://fortune.com/asia/2024/07/23/warren-buffett-berkshire-hathaway-cuts-byd-stake-china-ev/