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Benefits of Electric Cars
That estimation, done by William Baumgartner and Andrew Goss, for Business Economics (October 2000) takes into account that electric vehicle, with a range of one hundred miles, requires about $3 worth of electricity in the U.S. to recharge fully (with electricity prices of eight cents per kilowatt-hour) which translates to a cost of about three cents per mile. This compares to about 15 cents per mile (or 5 times the electric cars cost to operate) for an internal combustion vehicle that gets twenty miles per gallon on the average, with a price of $3 per gallon in the U.S., according to figures by Baumgartner and Goss. As oil prices rise, the price advantage of electric cars over traditional gasoline cars increases, all else being equal. It's good to keep in mind that electricity prices differ from one place to the other nationally. For example, one Los Angeles writer (Alison Cohen, LA Times, 4/11/99) put the cost of operating an electric car at about 1 cent per mile. You may be concerned that the power plants just use oil to convert into electricity, which does not take the problem of oil dependency away. Some writers have thought about that. In 1998, in his piece "The Electric Home-Drive Acid Test", by Mathew L. Wald, Ny Times, 12/18/98, Wald estimated that a power plant can turn oil into electricity at the rate of about 13 kilowatt-hours a gallon. That rate would means, according to him that cars that have both an electric version and a gasoline one (RAV4 was his example) can be compared in miles per gallon, and at 45 miles a gallon, about double the mileage of the gasoline version, RAV4 electric version does much better if the power plant does in fact use oil to produce the electricity. However, when making these benefits of electric cars comparisons, it is important to note that the cost of operation and fuel costs for both traditional and electric vehicles vary according to age and condition of the car or truck, driving habits, distance driven and location (urban vs. highway), and the price of gas and electricity in any give moment.
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