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I quite agree. $40,000 for a car is not especially outrageous (it is to me, but not to many others; of course, as a teenager the top of the line Cadillac was $5,000).
I have a brother-in-law (very conservative) who thinks the Volt and other electric cars are silly, 'liberal' and a waste of money. Mind, this is the same person who spent close to $10,000 for an electric golf cart.
I guess if the Volt were advertised as a 'state of the art' golf cart, he would buy it. Got to impress those country-club people.
You should read the link on my first post to see why he decided not to buy a Leaf. The Volt got into this thread after I failed to get back and tell people that it was a Leaf in the original post. It is done with some very serious reasoning by a man who thought it would be good to buy until he started realizing that he couldn't get from Pittsburgh to Cleveland in less than two days with a Leaf. Of course, the Volt is about the same.
Expecting electric cars to serve long distance travel needs is dishonest to say the least. It's ideally suited for local travel & short stops typical of city/ suburban life use.
This suburbanite would never buy an electric car. Life is too short to waste all of that time at charging stations. When they get around to decreasing the time you spend charging the car, when the distance traveled between charging times increases considerably, when the charge holds even when the car isn't in use, when tractor trailers on the highway are running on electricity, too, and when electricity prices aren't skyrocketing maybe I'll think about it.
I have wondered how smart buying one of those things at $40,000 would be and always seem to come to the same conclusion that old Bill Balsamico does in this blog. I think he has studied the problem out pretty well and finds that getting the thing to drive from near Pittsburgh to Cleveland next fall to see the football game would be very nonsensical. I wonder what Obama would say about such reasoning.
41000 (MSRP). Take off an easy 5K off the top if you can haggle like a 3 year old. So now we are down to 36,000.
Take off the 7,500 tax credit, now we are down to 28,500.
Then you take the fact that for most folks driving needs on a weekly basis would never have to buy gas. Seeing as gas is pushing 4.00 a gallon, and the electricity is roughly 1.5 dollars per gallon equivalent, you'd need to drive roughly 85,000 miles before the car started paying dividends.
So its up to you. Going to keep the car for 100K? Do you think the battery will hold the same charge for that long? Will gas stay at 4 dollars a gallon for that long?
Lots of questions. Or, you could buy a midsized hybrid or a regular gasoline engine that gets 30 to 35 mpg highway, and pay less up front.
Really, for my money, the 32K Leaf would be a better option.
32K MSRP, take about 4K off of that from haggling, down to 28K. Take about 7500 off for tax rebates, Now we are down to 21,000. Increase that by 1,100 for the charger and installation from Nissan, back up to 22,100.
But with a range of roughly 100 miles between charges, and the cost of gas, it would start paying off much quicker than the volt. But its a whole lot uglier.
The interesting thing about the price of the $40K Nissan Leaf is that it doesn't include the battery pack. You have to lease that separately from Nissan, for $150 per month. While it is extra expense, the consumer doesn't have to worry about a bad battery pack - if it goes bad, Nissan will replace it. Still, the buyer is on the hook for $150 each month for the life of the vehicle.
Nissan is thinking about changing that pricing structure for the North American market, but no word on the new MSRP for a Leaf that includes the battery pack in the final price.
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Should I buy one of those $40,000 electric cars?
