Cost per mile

[ROMAD]

So if you use your Aptera for business/charity at your estimated 20¢ per mile and the IRS allows a flat 56¢ per mile, you just made 36¢ per mile tax free!

[ImAlwaysMIA]

I could see annualized maintenance over a 10 year period costing you $500-$1500 per year.

[larry-kaiser]

You are probably close in everything but the energy cost. If the Aptera gets 10 miles per KW that is about 1.4 cents a mile in my market. If you consider just 20 free miles a day from solar that would give you around 7000 “free miles”. I wonder how many miles per year your gestimate is based on.

[ROMAD]

Where I lived in California it would have been at LEAST 3.2¢/mile while here in Arizona it will be 1.13¢

[Mike-Mars]

Don’t forget public charging versus charging at home, too, since not everyone can charge at home.

Here it’s around $0.90/kWh from a public charger, versus around $0.40/kWh for charging at home, and around 40% of people can’t charge at home (no off-street parking, etc).

[joshua-rosen]

Just looked at my Tesla app, my most recent Supercharger rate was 35 cents/KWh, the highest I’ve seen it is 50 cents/KWh, which translates into 3.5 – 5 cents/mile depending on when and where you Supercharge. My home rate is 25 cents so the 35 cent Supercharger rate that I got last week is very reasonable.

[raymond-nettleton]

It was a quick swag on most items. I used to track this pretty close. My 04 Corolla was around $.23 per mile after I had put 200k miles on it that was based on 20,000 miles per year.

I think you are right about the energy cost. I as way high. I bet averaging 15000 miles per year and mixing in some premium supercharging time you could safely say $.02 per mile. Power in Utah is still stupid cheap. $.10 per kWhr. So even in California where it is more expensive you still might only be $.04 per mile

[ray-holan]

I came across this interesting article in Car & Driver magazine about how much it costs several different EV’s to charge. It evaluates the cost of home charging vs. public DCFC (always more expensive per kWH). Being more than a little math-challenged, I’d appreciate some help from others here on the forum to plug-in (pun intended) Aptera’s numbers.

https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a45036169/electric-vehicle-ev-cost-to-charge/

My favorite turn of phrase from this author is his quip about the Hummer EV needing to: “…overcome the aerodynamic drag of a vehicle the size of a small municipal building.“

[Kamakiri]

Using their stat of 16 cents for the national average kWh cost and their estimated 5% conversion loss, an Aptera would cost about $1.68/100 mile, given the estimated 10 mile range per 1 kWh.

For me charging at home 100 miles would be about $3.36 if I stay on the lower tier of consumption on my bill and about $4.30 if my charge usage bumped me up to the higher tier. I am not on a TOU (time of use) and would switch to that if I planned to charge a lot overnight.

Just gotta remember that it would be $0.00/100 miles when just solar charging, as I plan to! 😃

[joshua-rosen]

Look at your electric bill and divide the total cost by the number of KWhs and that’s your price KWh, mine is 26 cents but I also have an off peak discount of 5 cents. The offpeak program assumes that the power company can communicate with the car company and that they can communicate with the car, Tesla’s can do that we don’t know if Aptera will have that capability.

Assuming 10 miles per KWh on the Aptera the home cost per 100 miles would be $2.60 for me.

Supercharging varies by state, I paid 42 cents per KWh in NH last week so 100 miles in an Aptera would cost $4.20.

• This reply was modified 1 week, 3 days ago by  Joshua Rosen.

[ROMAD]

I’m in Tier 1 (600 kWh or less) with a rate of 11.298¢/kWh. My last month’s usage was 467 kWh so my bill should be $52.76, correct? Nope it was $85.72! So what was in the $32.96 difference? Well, there were the governmental taxes and fees totaling $8.34, then there were electrical costs of $24.62 NOT covered by the kWh rate: Delivery service charge: $13.95; Power supply adjustment: $8.90; Federal transmission cost adjustment: $0.17; Lost Fixed Cost Recovery adjustor: $1.23; Unknown $0.37. So if I ignore the governmental $8.34 my electricity cost was actually $77.38, which divided by 467 gives me a tad over 16.569¢ kWh rate.

[joshua-rosen]

That’s why I said look at the total cost, the bottom line is all that you care about. There are all sorts of fees and in my state the generation charge is separate from the power company’s charge. Electricity costs very wildly from state to state and even within states depending on the power company that services your town. The national average that’s quoted in articles like is useless, everyone has to look at their own bill and do the calc themselves because no where on that bill is there real cost per KWh. My bill shows a cost per KWh for the generation charge which is less than half of the real cost.

[Jeff]

“Look at your electric bill and divide the total cost by the number of KWhs and that’s your price KWh”

What matters when discussing charging costs is the marginal cost for an additional kWh, not the average cost per kWh. For this reason you should exclude any flat monthly charges.

For example, I have ~$15 of flat-rate charges on my monthly bill. (A “customer charge” and a “metering charge”.) If I included those in my per-kWh calculations it would misleadingly inflate the $/kWh figure.

[Tom]

Here in SE Washington state a kWh costs $0.0739 (24/7). So a 42 kWh Aptera LE would cost (0 to 100%) $3.10 to charge. Assuming a range of 400 miles (it could be more if it’s efficency meets or beats 100 Wh/mile or when boosted by solar), that’s about 0.8¢ per mile. Our rate will change to $0.0688/kWh in November which will bring it down closer to 0.7¢ per mile. We also have rooftop solar which, averaged over the year, provides about 70% of our electricity so our effective rate is (currently) about $0.0222/kWh which makes the Aptera’s charging cost about 0.23¢/mile. Compare that to our Subaru Outback ICE. Assuming ~23 mpg and a current gas price of ~$4.699/gal (typical right now in these parts), that converts to 20.4¢/mile. Seems like a no-brainer to me.

[FinMod]

We had solar panes installed to cover 90% of our very high usage and once we got them in place, we found ways to cut usage to the point we have significant carried surplus credits. We sell excess power for credits to get future power and buy it at the same rate + 6.6 cents/ kWh delivery/infrastructure support fee. With the level of credits (not redeemable in cash) I have, power is “free” if the sun is shining in excess of usage and 6.6 cents a kWh if it is not. With a commute of 80 miles per day that is probably equivalent to 100 miles a day, I do not expect to need to really ever pay for power unless on a road trip – like when I driver the Aptera from CA to MI.

PS On a side note, after the small crash this weekend, I am increasingly likely to change the wrap color for safety.

[ray-holan]

Your home situation with PV panels is very close to mine. Thanks for your post. Also your point about addressing safety concerns about being seen by others on the road is well taken. A high-visibility color wrap as you suggest would likely help.