It can pay for itself within a week if you get out a loan for the car because it’s cheaper to pay the interest on the loan than to pay for fuel. I did some calculations above using Australian data - short version is that a week of petrol is $124, vs a loan repayment of $98 per week plus around $10 on charging cost.
Is fuel cheap in Canada? I’ve done some calculations using Australian data, and it’s cheaper to pay off a loan to buy an electric car than to keep paying for petrol.
The cost of petrol is $2.40 per litre. According to the Automobile Association affordability dashboard, the average Australian driver paid $93.81 for fuel every week in Q4 2025, when prices were $1.82 per litre. Scaling up for the x1.32 price increase since last quarter, that’s $123.71 per week on petrol for the average driver.
The cheapest EVs here are $25,000. According to the RACV EV loan calculator, borrowing $25,000 for an EV (at current rates for a 7 year loan) means a minimum payment of $196/fortnight, or $98 per week. This could be less if you were doing a novated/salary-sacrificed lease with the tax benefits. The cost of recharging is relatively insignificant (the average 30km commute cost of $1.68 per day, or $11.76 if doing that every day of the week).
In the City Of Melbourne LGA, there was a group running last council elections called “Rip up the Bike lanes” - lead by a guy who was angry at bike infrastructure being around Lygon St because he thought they hurt the business of the cafes and restaurants there. Apparently bike riders never buy coffee or gelato.
There was a similar thing on Chapel Street with a business association leading protests against bike lanes because they said that changing parking to bike lanes would hurt their businesses (apparently bike riders never go shopping for overpriced clothing either).
Some more numbers from the RACV to dispel the EV misinformation
240v charging adds 10-12km of driving range per hour. If your car is plugged in 12 hours from 7pm to 7am you can drive at least 120km each day. That’s a lot further than “just around the corner” - that RACV page also notes that the average commute is about 30km per day so you only need 3 hours on an ordinary mains.
I did the maths back in 2017 and got rid of my car. Calculated that if I took two or less car trips per week, it was cheaper to get a taxi for those than to pay for ongoing maintenance, registration etc.
She’s not a bot, just very active on here (and a mod of many communities).
The best algorithms of big tech are not even consistently good at basic things like delivering advertisements to a relevant audience.
I’ve written online about not owning or needing a car, without any attempt to hide my activity or even identity from advertisers. I still get ads for car products, like tyres. I’ve talked about being vegetarian and still get ads for meat-based fast food. I get ads for cat and dog food despite having neither of those pets. I get ads for child-related stuff despite not having kids.
97% of new cars sold in Norway are EVs. We have excess solar power going unused. Why dig up oil just to burn it when we could be running off free solar?
Telling rich people they can’t waste fuel on their own jets and have to travel on a commercial airliner would guarantee a recession?
Heading towards bankruptcy?
lithium and the used rare earth elements can be recycled. It’s not like they’d evaporate when being used.
This always amazes me about the anti-EV hysteria.
“But they aren’t 100% renewable, you have to mine metal” as they jump in their combustion car powered by a fuel that has to be mined only to be burnt up in use.
One of the most depressing things about COVID was learning how selfish most Australians are. Forget everything we like to pretend about community spirit and mateship and all that. People were acting like having a bit of fabric over their mouth was oppression, and taking a month off going to the pub was apparently unbearable.
Nah, don’t waste it. Anyone caught hoarding fuel should get demerit points.
As I said, I reckon the best thing the govt can do for everyone including those at the bottom of the economic hierarchy is to put some pressure on those countries receiving our LNG to reciprocate.
Why not limit the most excessive uses of fuel? Private jets should be restricted so more fuel is reserved for essential trips. Combustion car races, use of yachts etc could be suspended until they replace with electric or the crisis is over.
I would prefer to see fuel rationed for the most important uses rather than the government cut tax on it to make it cheaper for the most wasteful people to use it all up.
Lowering the price will just increase consumption and hoarding.
The solution to shortages is rationing, but the government is worried (probably accurately) that it will be unpopular.
The dog photographed in the article - Millie the Maltese shih tzu - was bashed with a metal pole by Mark Martinaj for 5 minutes and has since disappeared, presumed killed. He successfully appealed his jail sentence and got off with a community corrections order.
We need to somehow invent batteries and solar panels that can be made using nothing non-renewable, but we’re not even close.
This is simply untrue. Here’s an in depth Technology Connections video about renewable power, including the ease of recycling both solar panels and batteries
Solar panels are 90% recyclable and most parts can be easily separated by hand. The aluminum, glass, silver and copper can then be simply melted down. The only reason it isn’t more common is that the labor costs are more expensive than buying virgin raw materials - a capitalism problem, not a technical problem.
Likewise, most batteries are recyclable by simply separating the electrodes and melting them down. For alkali metals like Lithium and Sodium you have the complication of having to work in an inert space but that doesn’t make it impossible, just more work (Edit: Ask a chemistry graduate, they have probably done this in a glove box before). Again, it’s a problem of the labor cost of recycling being prohibitive, not a technical problem. Lithium batteries are 98% recyclable.
The suggestion that 98% recyclable batteries are somehow less sustainable than oil-based fuels that are literally burnt up and completely unrecoverable is ludicrous.
What non-renewable materials?
What is less renewable than literally burning a finite resource?
They’re cookers - what minds?