smkettner said:
Did you let her drive your LEAF a few days?
No. Wouldn't have been practical. (she lives 150 miles away, either my wife or I use the Leaf everyday for work, and I was out of town on work travel during the time my mom was shopping for cars anyway).
She has ridden in my Leaf though, and thought it was nice. She commented that it was a smooth ride and that she liked the rear-view camera, but she'd like something a bit bigger. (She's used to Camry-size cars.)
smkettner said:
No money for a car but plenty to spend on fuel :|
I thought a bit about this, and I'm convinced her lifetime cost buying the Honda Accord ICE is most likely going to be less than if she had bought a Ford Fusion Energi or Honda Accord Plugin; or, at least, that any cost savings she would get from going the plugin route would be minimal. This is mainly because she is retired and doesn't drive anywhere near as much as the average commuter.
Some numbers:
1.
The ~$5k higher up-front costs of the plug-in hybrids.
The Ford Fusion Energi would be a minimum net cost of ~$31k (taking the Edmunds.com "true" price, subtracting the $4007 federal tax credit, the $1500 CA rebate, and then adding sales tax.) compared with the $26k (including sales tax) she paid for the ICE Accord. (The Accord Plug-in is another ~$6k more expensive than the Ford Fusion Energi, for some reason, so I didn't look further at that one). So that means she'd have been paying at least $5k more up-front to get a plugin vehicle that met her size spec. ($31k for the Ford minus $26k for the ICE Accord)
2.
She drives so little that the savings of driving mostly electric is probably not enough to make up the up-front cost premium of a plug-in vehicle over an ICE.
Making the extreme assumption that she would drive a plugin (let's say the Ford Fusion Energi) in an "electric only" mode, that means we'd assume a generous ~4mile/kWh rate for that vehicle (I get ~4.8 in my Leaf, according to my dash display). And with tier 1 electricity rates in her town ~14 cents/kWh, that's a cost of at least 3.5 cents/mile. (Any gas usage would just add on to that cost per mile, so I'll use 3.5 cents/mile as a minimum.)
Her ICE Accord is rated 27 mpg city, 36 Hwy. So let's be a bit harsh and say it gets only 30 mpg average. With gas at $2.65/gallon, that's a cost of 8.8 cents per mile. (Gas at $3/gallon, that's 10 cents/mile. $4/gallon, that's 13.3 cents/mile.)
Even taking the extreme case ($4/gallon gas price), the savings of going with a plugin vehicle (and driving it ALL-ELECTRIC) would be AT MOST (13.3 cents/mile minus 3.5 cents/mile =) 9.8 cents/mile.
That means, to make up for the extra $5k she's paying up front for a plugin vehicle, she'd have to drive it (in all-electric mode) at least 51,020 miles. ($5000 / $0.098 savings per mile). (If we are talking $3/gallon gas, the figure is ~77,000 miles).
When her Camry was totaled, it had 48k miles on it after 7 years. That's just under 7k miles per year, and much of that was accrued when she was commuting to work, which she doesn't do any more since she retired. So I'd estimate her actual annual mileage going forward at about 4500 miles per year.
This would mean she'd have to drive the plugin car for at least 11.3 years (51,020 miles / 4500 miles per year) before she made back the extra upfront cost of the plugin via cheaper fuel. And remember, that's the extreme case (assuming $4/gallon gas, a highly efficient plugin car without using ANY gas). More likely it would be more than that. If you just assume the $3/gallon gas, the figure jumps to 17 years.
So she COULD end up saving money, but it wouldn't be much. And it seems just as likely to me that for some reason she moves on to a different car before 11 years is up.
(Don't get me wrong, cost isn't the only reason to go for a plugin, and I'd still prefer she got one for environmental reasons, but I'm just making the point that cost is not a strongly convincing argument for her to go with a plugin. I'd imagine this is a similar issue for others who drive a small amount.)
smkettner said:
Did you mention NEVER going to a fuel station again?
Yeah. I wrote up a whole list of benefits associated with going the plugin route (CA rebate, Fed Tax credit, CA HOV lane sticker, plugging in at home, fewer visits to gas station, etc).
Frankly, I think if I were more present during her search/shop process I could have had a greater influence, but I was out of town working for most of that week. In the end her uncertainty about the range issue made a sole BEV out of the question (even though she rarely drives it outside her own city), and her size constraint meant only a couple PHEVs met her needs (the Ford and the Honda), and those were significantly more expensive.
The holy grail would have been for me to convince her that a Leaf would have met her real needs (it didn't meet her "perceived" needs). The net cost of my Leaf was $19k. It's smaller than a camry but not by a huge amount. Frankly I think a BEV is a perfect car for a retiree. She didn't see it that way though.
