Mileage May Vary

Here’s the magic that my new car does.

Let’s say you have a 2018 Ford F150 truck, and your sister has a 2018, and your brother has a 2018 Prius, and I have my spanky red Prius Prime. What does it cost to drive around?

We all drive 80 kilometres. Around here current gas prices are about $1.35 per litre, and household electricity is $8.29-$12.43 per kilowatt hour depending on how much you use. My house has electric heating, so we pay the higher rate.

Or course, the big truck owner will pay the most to move his machine around. To go the 80 km, it will cost the truckster $14.94.

Sis, in her Corolla will get off much more cheaply. Her rate for the same distance will be $8.21.

The brother, in his gas-sipping Prius hybrid car will make the first two vehicle owners seem overly extravagant. The price to move one of those babies 80 km is only $4.86.

But I don’t drive a big Ford, or a Corolla, or a Prius. My car of choice is a Prius Prime. It is what you call a “plug-in hybrid.”

You plug into house current, and that charges an extra battery that can propel the machine happily down the highway at whatever speed you choose for a 40km distance without using any gas at all. Beyond that, it automatically and seamlessly turns into a normal Prius hybrid.

Taking that puppy 80km down the road will take exactly half the gas that the Prius burned. That’s a paltry $2.43 for petrol.

The funny thing is, when I talk about my car, people freak out about how much all the electricity must be costing. Really? Gas versus electricity. That’s why I did the actual math.

To charge my car up to cover the first half of our test distance costs me a grand total of slightly under $.75. Adding on the price of the gas for the second half of the trip and the bill for 80km totals $3.18. For somebody who qualifies for the cheaper electric rate it would be somewhat lower.

Now, I’m not saying a Prius Prime is the right car for everybody. For me it is. Let’s say you find yourself always driving very long distances, and would rarely be in a situation where you could plug in. In that situation, the 40km of cheap gas-less travel wouldn’t make a very large difference. Next winter we will be driving to California and back, and staying in hotels. Our Prime will then be the same as a regular Prius, which is already pretty great.

But, suppose you had a situation where you rarely needed to put in more than 40km at a time. For somebody like that, having a Prime would mean almost total electric use, and therefore cheap driving.

That’s pretty much how we live. The exception is that I drive to the neighbouring town about 4 times a week. Getting there and back is about 50km. Each time I do, my poor car is forced to use a few swallows of gas on the return drive.

We’ve had the car for about two weeks now, and have used about 1/16th of a tank of gas. At that rate, it should be 8 months before needing a fill up.

We could have bought a straight electric car, and avoided even that tiny gas usage, but then we wouldn’t be able to drive to California. We seem to have the best of both worlds; the economy of electric and the range of gasoline.

I suppose 80km in a true electric car would cost me about $1.50.