Financial News: Nope, EVs do not save you money. Get serious!
Once upon a time…
Over 10 years ago, my wife told me about her colleague who shared that he bought a hybrid car because he wanted to save on fuel. It could be driven like many hundreds of km and the cost to pump petrol is super low. I laughed. Please note that we can never save enough from petrol costs in order to make these hybrids become cost-effective to our expenses yeah. Hybrid cars of the same size versus petrol cars are usually double or higher the price of a similarly sized car. Let’s just do a simple calculation as below.
Hybrid car – RM100,000
Typical car – RM50,000
Difference is RM50,000.
Cost per 1 litre of petrol RON95 is RM2.05 (it used to be lower and may be higher in the future) and typically 1 litre can be driven for 12-20km (depending on what car you drive). Let’s just take the lower point which is 12km. If RM2.05 for 12km, that’s 17 sen per km.
Now, how many km do we need to drive in order to save the RM50,000 price difference?
RM50,000 divided by 17 sen (per km) = 294,117km. Anyone wants to tell me how long would we need to drive in order to drive 294,117km? Typical km per year is maybe 20,000 km? Even this 20,000 is on the higher side because most people could not drive more than 15,000km per year. It means we need to drive the SAME hybrid car for 15 years or more in order to save the same amount of money which we have saved right from the start versus buying a hybrid.
Why need to say it’s for saving petrol?
Just be direct yeah. Say I buy hybrid car because I like the brand… or I like to tell people I care about the environment… all these reasons are debatable but at least it makes more sense this is more on a personal perspective and it’s hard to say one is wrong from their perspective. From a financial point of view, please stop thinking that we can save on costs when we buy a hybrid yeah. It does not hold water at all.
Now let’s look at EVs (electric vehicles)
This is the cheapest Electric Vehicle we have in Malaysia today. Yea, I have seen the actual car in Bangkok in September last year. No frills, nothing to complain, looks moden and yea, today, it’s the cheapest model we could buy. Nope, I did not have the driving experience but generally the first few comments are usually, ‘It’s quiet!’ or ‘The acceleration is very good.’ or even ‘It’s so easy to drive.’
The price for Neta V is RM99,800.
What’s the size of a Neta V?
The below is the dimension of a Neta V. We measure it versus a Proton Saga’s size right after.
Body measurements of Proton Saga 2022:
Wheelbase: 2,465 mm
Length: 4335 mm
Width: 1,690 mm
Height: 1,1515 mm
Extremely similar dimensions for a Proton Saga to a Neta V.
Meanwhile the price of a Proton Saga is as below. The highest priced version is RM46,000 On The Road. Yeah, this is probably half of the price of Neta V. I will not repeat the calculations above but I think you get the idea that buying an EV can be a lifestyle. It could be due to the brand. It could also be a personal choice of brand. It is definitely not because you want to save on petrol…
I know, that driving experience is a different one?
Many people may point out that driving this Neta V will be more comfortable than driving a Proton Saga! Haha. Noted and perhaps I say that I agree with you since Neta V is likely to be much more quieter and the acceleration is much smoother. So essentially, one could say that they are driving a better car in terms of Noise, Vibration and Harshness (NVH). That’s perfectly fine. You have your valid points this time. Happy driving!
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