Revisiting fuel costs

Now that I’ve had the Bolt for a few months (3) lets take a look at what its costing and some overall things:

The old Focus Electric would cost about $50/month over the summer months to drive about 1,000 miles a month. With the Bolt its very similar as I’m getting about the same consumption numbers as I did with the Focus (4 miles/kWh or 250Wh/mile) so I’d expect “fuel” costs to be similar.

Now if I look at the bigger picture it gets even more interesting: Before I drove electric I was driving a Super Duty pickup which would get me about 11 mpg and cost about $350/month in gas. At the same time my wife would also be burning through about $250/month in gas in her SUV. This meant that we were using a good $600/month in fuel alone.

Fast forward to now: I’m driving the Bolt and the wife has decided to drive the C-Max until its lease is up. The electricity costs for the month have only risen a little bit (to just over $60/month) and she now only gets gas about once per month (about the same I did in the C-Max). This means our “fuel” bill has gone from $600/month down to just shy of $100/month for both of us driving in about 5 years (we each drive about 1,000 miles a month).

Of course the math for this will change when the C-Max lease is up as we’re still trying to determine what we’re going to do about that. The equation will also change as the temps fall around here but that is for another post (or 2, or 10, or 100! LOL).