ROI, or Return on Investment, tends to be the holy grail when you’re trying to justify something that is pricey, but promises to pay you back over a period of time. The big question is, how much time?
With the numbers you see in the previous post, an EV seems to make perfect sense… except, when you actually run the numbers. A simple spreadsheet I put together, here, lets you run the numbers pretty easily.
Pump in the numbers in the green fields, and the calculator will figure the number of miles it takes to break even on the cost of the vehicle, or the conversion.
Even with gas prices at over $3.00 a gallon, the numbers don’t really do much for the EV cause… you can see here that the payback is over 50,000 miles when you compare picking up a cheap $5000 bike to a new Brammo Enertia. Now, there are other factors of course… maintenance, rebates on taxes and things… but the cold, hard facts are that you don’t really have a hope of getting your money back from the gas savings.
Now… as far as my bike goes? The cost after my tax rebate and selling off unused parts was about $1400. At a cost per mile of about $.01, and compared to a used bike I could pick up for around $1200, the payback is maybe 4000 miles.
Not too shabby…
The Electric Chronicles: Power in Flux 