How much would you pay to charge your Tesla? 3 times what a Civic costs to operate?

Photo above - Still waiting on the future to arrive. This is "Robbie the Robot" driving an electric jeep in the 1956 film "Forbidden Planet". Home electricity prices are 500% higher now than in 1956.

I finally found something MORE expensive than public chargers. Some condo association is charging 3X what residential electricity costs. And it’s only level 2, not a DC fast charger.

Most homeowners pay 16-17 cents per KwH. Unless you live in California, where it's about double: 31 cents or higher in most places. Public chargers in most of the USA go for 28-35 cents. The condo in the link below may have just set an American record. It's chargers cost 28 cents per KwH a couple years ago. Then they doubled it to 58 cents. For level 2, the slowest, lamest charger you can use. See link below.

Where is this rip-off happening? Massachusetts. How can the condo get away with this? Well, Taxachussetts is one of the places where, BY LAW, all new homes and condos must come with EV chargers.

Any cost advantages to owning an EV are going up in smoke. Government regulations now require the purchase and installation of chargers, but don’t provide any protection against price gouging. Your only escape from this con game is to install solar panels on your roof, or a personal wind turbine (if local codes allow).

A wind turbine might work better in Massachusetts, which is halfway to the arctic circle (latitude 42 degrees). It gets a mind boggling 4 feet of snow each winter. Between that and lots of cloudy/rainy days the rest of the year, you can’t really count on getting enough solar rays to commute to work. So pay your 58 cents per KwH and quit your bitchin’ . . .

How awful is this? Well, a Tesla 3 uses 34 KwH to travel 100 miles. And this condo electricity costs 58 cents per KwH so your bill is . . . $20 for 100 miles. If this sounds reasonable to you, remember that you could have purchased a Honda Civic Hybrid, which goes 100 miles on 2 gallons of gas. Gasoline costs less than $3.50 a gallon most places. Oh . . . and the Civic Hybrid stickers for $10,000 less.

Welcome to the future, which evidently WON'T be electrified. If you're a stock market investor, maybe buy Exxon, and not Tesla?

I’m just sayin’ . . .

Full disclosure – last month this writer bought a 2025 Honda Civic Hybrid Sport Touring (top trim) at full sticker price of $33,300. So now I am obsessed with mileage comparisons. Bonus factor – my Civic apparently won’t burst into flames and burn at 1,000 degrees if it bumps into something.

EV owner stunned by HOA's new policy on neighborhood charging stations: 'It's not a for-profit enterprise'

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Dignaga

I'm okay with hybrids, but think fully electric vehicles should be banned on moral grounds.

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PicturesOfABetterTomorrow · 41-45, M

@Dignaga Irrelevant. The specifics don't matter. But it has been at least half a century since the US gave up on doing any large infrastructure projects and just threw in the towel.

Running power along one of the largest countries in the world to build power charging stations is a major project that simply can't be done without massive government infrastructure investment.

But again. The US decided over half a century ago that you guys are no longer up for the task. Hell you are not even up for the task of repairing your existing infrastructure.

Other countries still do these sorts of things. Americans just gave up.

Dignaga

@PicturesOfABetterTomorrow That is because a combination of Regulations and OSHA driving costs and time through the roof.

OSHA is like CCOHS, in the US it started under Maritime OSHA for dock workers and merchant marines in the period prior to cargo containers. Then we spread it to other industries. I have a bunch of useless OSHA certifications.

When you heavily invest into OSHA and union perks, the cost of workers skyrockets, and their efficiency drops, as you can afford fewer skilled workers and the workers know it. A end result is you then have to technologically innovate in order to make it more efficient for government planning, but as a result they become even more specialized in the industry, costing more, and they do as a result even less. I've seen highway workers drag out djgging out a hillside to prevent rocksides into a highway along the Ohio River in (in the state of Ohio) over 25 years, it was the length of a couple city blocks. They only finished it because the local news started investigating.

We also prior to Bill Clinton maintained protective tariffs on industries like Steel. They are still on the law books, just not enforced anymore. Alot of that steel went towards government building projects. A steel mill, unlike a construction crew, is a very fixed industry so you can usually factor years in advance union worker shenanigans and book your orders agains a mean of productivity.

The Hoover Dam was overhyped, but is infamous for being a New Deal era work- but OSHA wouldn't allow that sort of thing to be built in under a few decades now. We do build large projects all the time (we aren't stupid like the Chinese making Tofu Dreg Dams all over the place, with shocking consequences) but nobody pays attention to them unless they are controversal, like Donald Trump's story of having a Nuclear Power Plant built of the hardest concrete known to man, harder than steel, and a inspector coming out and rejecting the entire facility because it was a quarter inch too thin. That powerplant will outlast the longevity of the pyramids, it isn't going anywhere, but legally can't be used. That's the regulatory insanity we have to leap over for every building project, and is one of the benifits of having Trump around, because he knows it. Some of it has to change.

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