It's 8 times more expensive to get to the shore and back with gasoline vs. electric

Peter Rukavina

L.’s place by the shore–she insists I should say by the beach, but my patrician tendencies won’t allow that–is 50 km from town, meaning a round trip is a nice even 100 km.

Her gasoline-powered SUV has fuel economy of 9 litres per 100 km, meaning that, at today’s $2.18/litre price for gasoline, a roundtrip costs $19.62.

My electric-powered Kia Soul EV reports using 15 kWh per 100 km, meaning that, at today’s price of 15.32 cents/kWh, a roundtrip costs $2.29.

I had to do the math on that several times, and have a friend double-check it, as the difference was so stark.

Comments

Submitted by Jarek on

Permalink

A gasoline-powered Kia Soul might be somewhat more efficient than the SUV.

In terms of energy efficiency, 1 litre of gasoline is roughly 32 MJ which is around 8.9 kWh, so 9 litres is about 288 MJ = 80 kWh. The SUV is using 5 times more energy to make the same trip. The 20% to 35% real-world efficiency of gasoline engines seems likely to be playing a big role in this.

If the gasoline car had excellent fuel economy of around 4.5 L/100 km, it would still be using 2.5 times more energy to make the same trip.

Add new comment

Plain text

  • Allowed HTML tags: <b> <i> <em> <strong> <blockquote> <code> <ul> <ol> <li>
  • Lines and paragraphs break automatically.

About This Blog

Photo of Peter RukavinaI am . I am a writer, letterpress printer, and a curious person.

To learn more about me, read my /nowlook at my bio, listen to audio I’ve posted, read presentations and speeches I’ve written, or get in touch (peter@rukavina.net is the quickest way). 

You can subscribe to an RSS feed of posts, an RSS feed of comments, or a podcast RSS feed that just contains audio posts. You can also receive a daily digests of posts by email.

Search