Consider an efficient sedan getting 38 mpg (granted that’s an efficient car, but not unreasonable for a conventional engine). With gas costing $3.50 a gallon, that comes to $0.12 per mile. In Maryland, I currently pay about $0.117 per kWh for electricity. If I assume it takes 57.6 kWh (9.6 kW x 6 hr) to charge the Rav4 and I can drive for 100 miles, that comes to $0.07 per mile. Yes, it’s cheaper but after 100,000 miles I’ve only saved $5k. Hard to justify the $50k price tag.

Now for the real eye-opener. Burning a gallon of gas releases about 20 lbs (9072 g) of CO2. A sedan getting 38 mpg releases 239 g CO2 per mile driven. Producing a kWh of electricity from a coal-fired power plant (about 50% of my power supply in MD), releases about 1000 g CO2. So driving the RAV4 would release about 576 g CO2 per mile if you charged it with coal-based electricity!?! A natural gas power plant releases about 440 g CO2 per kWh. That would result in a release of 255 g CO2 per mile – still more than the efficient sedan!

As an engineer, I am really bummed. I figured there wouldn’t be an financial incentive for such a car. But it looks like there might not even be a good environmental incentive. I’m sure there are some flaws in my analysis (hopefully no gross miscalculations), but to a first order things don’t look good.

The range seems suspect, even at 2.7 Miles per KWh, the range would figure to be 113 Miles. But if it managed the same EV mileage as a Leaf, Volt or PHV, (3.5) it would have a range over 140 miles.

It seems clear that we need the second generation battery before we can really sell hybrids, and we need the third generation battery, i.e 4 times the specific energy of the first generation lithium car batteries, for EV’s to rise above a status symbol for the rich.