Financial viability is one of the most important factors when it comes to a new technology making a big impact on the target markets. Millions of dollars in research is done by companies in order to find the right price point to make the most sales, as well as the highest profits. However the future of this technology isnt only going to be how well priced electric vehicles are going to be to purchase, but how much money you will be saving over the life of the product in terms of dollars per km.

Taking a look at a regular petrol vehicle, using the 2007 Toyota Corolla (Conquest Sedan 4dr Auto 4sp 1.8i) as a guide. The 1.8L 4cyl engine in the 1270kg car uses 7.4L/100km3 combined over city/highway driving. Looking at how much petrol this uses per km, we can work out how much it is costing to drive every km.

Compared to the 2007 Toyota Prius (Liftback 5dr CVT 1sp 1.5i) with a 1.5L 4cyl petrol engine coupled with an Electric Engine to create a Hybrid. The Prius weighs 1295kg so very similar to the Corolla, and achieves a fuel consumption of 4.4L/100km4 combined.

The Honda FCX Hydrogen Fuel Cell vehicle (Brooks, 2004) uses hydrogen converted from completely solar energy. The solar energy is able to produce half a kilogram of hydrogen a day for the FCX, which is enough to drive the vehicle up to 28 miles or 45 kilometres. Data from Honda shows that it takes 64 kiloWatt hours to produce one kilogram of hydrogen, which means that it takes 32kwh to run the vehicle for 45kms. Of those 32kwh, 8kwh are used to drive the vehicles electric motor, while 24kwh are wasted. So this shows that if the solar panels charged batteries instead of producing hydrogen, a car could be run for 180km instead of the 45km on hydrogen. Using the hydrogen fuel cell example anyway, if those 64kwh were to be bought from an electric company at c/kwh5 then the costing would be shown below.

Electric Vehicles are extremely cheap to run as shown below with the 2008 Tesla Roadster, this vehicle is said to achieve an equivalent of 1.74L/100kms and uses 31kwh/161kms.

The above graph quite clearly shows that the Tesla Roadster is the cheapest to run costing only 2.5c per kilometre. The Hydrogen Honda is at a similar price to current petrol engines, but as there is ¾ of the electricity used to produce the hydrogen wasted, then it isn’t really the most cost effective method of transportation, but that could easily change in the future with the development of hydrogen technology.