So with insurance and deductible....are folks really winning?
Electric cars cost double and they can only be repaired by the maker....insurance doubled and deductible....?
Still saving the customer money or just looking great to neighbors?
1. I doubt anyone on FR with solar and/or an EV is doing it to virtue signal. I got mine to protect my retirement investments from energy inflation. Even if I wasn't saving money long term (which I'll get to in a minute) I basically have replaced many of my variable costs (who knows what the prices for gas, power, and natural gas will be for the next 10 to 20 years) with fixed costs (car payment and HELOC payment I took out to buy the solar and extra on insurance). In other words, it gives me financial peace of mind by defining most of my expenses in fixed monthly payments instead of the unknown costs of the Dims forcing us to tithe to Algore.
2. My car insurance for my EV is $70 more per month than it was for my old used gas car it replaced. Of course, for now I have no repairs both because it's new and because it's under warranty. I'm assuming when repairs come it'll be about as much as I was used to for driving 10-20 year old ICE cars (older ICE cars need repaired more frequently, compared to EV repairs, as you correctly pointed out, being costly when they do happen).
3. Even with paying an extra $100 in monthly insurance premiums (that's $30/month for homeowners, though some of that increase is just for the cost of lumber and such increasing, plus $70/month increase in car insurance), my overall costs will pay for themselves in about the 11th year. That assumes having to pay $10K in 10 years to replace the EV battery, and also a 3% inflation rate in the costs of power per kWh, and natural gas per ft3 that I'm mainly avoiding, and avoiding replacing my wife's car in 7 years with another one for $10K (like I've done on average every 7 years, but used car prices are going up), but also assumes a slight annual degradation in solar output (my panels have a 25-year warrantied guaranteed to still be producing 70% the final year, my home batteries have a 19-year/50% warranty).
3. Without an EV, and without upgrading my solar system like I'm doing this year, I was looking at a payback period of 9-10 years (including paying interest on the HELOC I took out to pay for most of it). That's because my first year it produced 58% of all the power I consumed in my two-story now all-electric house (but not charging my new EV). Not too bad since I estimated it would produce 50% to 60% of the power I needed (patting myself on the back for my research and calculations). I anticipate my upgraded system will produce 85% to 95% of all the power I need, including driving the EV ~200 miles/week.
4. EV's are not double the cost of ICE cars, unless you insist your EV be made by Tesla (the acronym stands for Too Expensive Still Liberals Adore). The same for Tesla's solar products like their Powerwall. My EV cost $62K after tax and fees. If you got the one like it without all the bells and whistles it'd be $52K, and it's tall enough for tall people in our 50's (too darn old to crouch down in a clown car like a lot of EV's are). So contrast that $52K cost with a gas version of new crossover (mini-SUV) that us tall people are comfortable in. I doubt you'd find one for $26K (half the cost of the comparable EV). Now for me, it cost 6 times what I was "going" to spend (the $10K I was about to spend to replace my wife's used ICE car with another used ICE car). But that meant we'd still be getting 15-ish mpg (as opposed to comparing the cost of a new EV with a new ICE car that costs more than a used one, but gets better mpg and, therefore, the $'s saved in gas each month wouldn't be as much).
5. In my case, because my solar costs weren't up front (I'm paying for most of it with a HELOC loan), my costs to save money go down as the years go by. What I mean by that, let's forget about the EV for now and the upgrade I'm doing with the solar system. Let's pretend I'm having just my solar system as is for many years. My HELOC payment + tiny power bill + increase in insurance is about what I was paying a year ago before I went solar when I'd pay my power bill + natural gas bill (part of my project was replacing my two nat gas appliances with high efficiency electric ones and removing my nat gas bill). Think of the HELOC payment and increased premium as the cost to save money, with the amount saved being the elimination of my nat gas bill and half of my power bill (because I'm buying only 42% of my power from the grid). As my HELOC balance is paid down my HELOC payment goes down too. Thus, next year it'd "cost" me less money, then even less the next year, etc. Meanwhile, the price of energy keeps going up. Thus next year I save more in dollars in my power bill (and in the nat gas bill I completely avoid), then more the year after that, then more after that. (This is even with a slight decline in performance from my solar system each year). Thus, each year it costs less money to save more money.
6. Bonus points: I've avoided the past 3 years' worth of energy inflation in my monthly budget. The way I'm handling it is by keeping my energy budget like it was in 2019. In other words, in 2019 I'd spend on average $313/month on my power bill + nat gas bill. So today when my HELOC payment + tiny power bill is over $300/month, I'm pulling the difference from the HELOC to make it "feel" in my budget like together they cost me $300/month. That withdrawal from my HELOC balance go up, but not as much as the HELOC payment makes the balance go down. That's part of my math in saying it'd pay for itself in 10 years ---- all while the home energy portion of my budget feels like Trump is still in office and covid never happened.