Chris M.

I've had a Tesla Model S for a few months now. How much does it cost me to drive it each day? Electric vehicles are more efficient than gasoline vehicles. fueleconomy.gov says : " Electric vehicles  convert about 59%–62% of the electrical energy from the grid to power at the wheels—conventional  gasoline vehicles  only convert about 17%–21% of the energy stored in  gasoline  to power at the wheels." Given an electric vehicles (EVs) increased efficiency, current electric rates, and gasoline prices, are you saving money on a per-mile basis when driving an EV? Tesla provides a calculator on their website to help people estimate the cost and cost savings between electric and gasoline cars. Tesla's calculator says it would cost $3.41 for electricity and $7.52 for gasoline for my typical daily commute of about 84 miles round trip. The text at the bottom of the calculator explains the criteria used to calculate those two costs, an electric rate of $0....

Earlier this year I purchased a Toyota Plug-in-Prius . The car comes with a slow charger module that is powered through a standard 120v 15amp outlet. This kind of outlet can deliver something around 1kw of energy. For the 4.4kw battery pack in the PiP , it takes about 3 hours to charge the pack from its empty state. Empty for the PiP isn't actually a zero charge level, the battery is kept within a 15% to 85% State-of-charge(SOC) to prolong its life. Frequently I was finding that I didn't have enough time to charge the pack before leaving on another trip. One option was the $1500 or so to purchase a 240v charger and have someone install it. A quick search on the web turned up the OpenEVSE project , a project to build a evse charger. I started to read about the evse project and got interested in building one. I did want to have some kind of network support so I could control and monitor charging, schedule it better than the car could and otherwise expand upon what the proj...

2013 Toyota Plug-in-prius I recently upgraded from a 2001 Acura Integra to a 2013 Toyota Prius plug in. The Integra was getting older, mpg wasn't great and the dealer was offering a pretty good trade-in, a big discount on Plug-in-prius (PiP) and  0% financing. The good Mpg is excellent. Even without the plug in battery the car gets about 60 mpg if you stay in the 65-70 mph range. This basically matches the regular Prius even though the larger Li battery pack adds a hundred or more pounds. With the ev battery fully charged I get about 80 mpg on my 35 mile 40 minute trip. Oh, and the pip displays helpful trip summary after being powered off: Plug-in-prius trip summary Side decal The touch screen on the in car system works relatively well. It appears to be a resistive touch screen though. Resistive touch screens are being replaced by by surface and projected capacitance technologies. Resistive only detects single touches, requires harder touches, and takes more ...