Comparing commuting costs - Tool for UC Davis

cros13

So... I'm looking at a new commute and I found this great tool for comparing costs.

Now it's american so it uses US mpg instead of proper L/100km. On the plus side they let you edit the figures and it supports commutes in Ireland because it uses google maps.

http://gis.its.ucdavis.edu/evexplorer/

So the correct values for fuel prices (in US mpg, averaged over the last month) in Ireland are:

Petrol - €5.90
Diesel - €6.30
Electricity - €0.08 (which is the average night rate in Ireland per kWh (EVs normally charge at night on timer))

The EPA estimated mileage for vehicles is much more realistic than the european numbers, but some of the mileages for vehicles is off.
So I took a known "good" vehicle (volkswagen golf tdi which we know uses the same engine and similar control software in the US and EU) and used the ratio between their advertised L/100km in ireland to adjust the US EPA mileage figure for the vehicle I considered suspect.

Another issue is that it does not compare servicing costs (which of course are much much lower for the EV). And it would be nice to have a comparison of the capital costs + 5 years operation. Another nice to have would be price/performance in the form of (Annualised capital cost + annual fuel + annual maintenance) / KW peak motor power.

In this example I compared my BMW i3 REx with a Toyota Prius, Volkswagen Golf and BMW 320d (which is listed as 328d in the images... I adjusted the mpg to the 320d number) for a commute I'm considering from Portlaoise to Dublin.

Dollars are equal to euros in this example because all the inputted figures are in euro.

So here's the costs with the free electricity from either my work charger or a rapid charge on the way home at an ESB charger:

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And here's the costs if work introduce charging for electricity at the industrial rate (0.12/kWh) like IBM did:

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And here's the costs if ESB start charging 30c/kWh when they introduce charging fees at the end of 2016:

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And here's the costs if for some reason the chargers at work are down and I need to use the 650cc petrol range extender to charge my battery on the trip home:

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My 20,000 Kms would have cost me about 300 Euro's if I had to charge all on night rate, I had to charge a lot on day rate when on nights but use a lot of public charging, now I got the work charger.

Gotta love electric motoring.