It can pay for itself within a week if you get out a loan for the car because it’s cheaper to pay the interest on the loan than to pay for fuel. I did some calculations above using Australian data - short version is that a week of petrol is $124, vs a loan repayment of $98 per week plus around $10 on charging cost.
Is fuel cheap in Canada? I’ve done some calculations using Australian data, and it’s cheaper to pay off a loan to buy an electric car than to keep paying for petrol.
The cost of petrol is $2.40 per litre. According to the Automobile Association affordability dashboard, the average Australian driver paid $93.81 for fuel every week in Q4 2025, when prices were $1.82 per litre. Scaling up for the x1.32 price increase since last quarter, that’s $123.71 per week on petrol for the average driver.
The cheapest EVs here are $25,000. According to the RACV EV loan calculator, borrowing $25,000 for an EV (at current rates for a 7 year loan) means a minimum payment of $196/fortnight, or $98 per week. This could be less if you were doing a novated/salary-sacrificed lease with the tax benefits. The cost of recharging is relatively insignificant (the average 30km commute cost of $1.68 per day, or $11.76 if doing that every day of the week).
She’s not a bot, just very active on here (and a mod of many communities).
The best algorithms of big tech are not even consistently good at basic things like delivering advertisements to a relevant audience.
I’ve written online about not owning or needing a car, without any attempt to hide my activity or even identity from advertisers. I still get ads for car products, like tyres. I’ve talked about being vegetarian and still get ads for meat-based fast food. I get ads for cat and dog food despite having neither of those pets. I get ads for child-related stuff despite not having kids.
Heading towards bankruptcy?
lithium and the used rare earth elements can be recycled. It’s not like they’d evaporate when being used.
This always amazes me about the anti-EV hysteria.
“But they aren’t 100% renewable, you have to mine metal” as they jump in their combustion car powered by a fuel that has to be mined only to be burnt up in use.
That’s a good idea, thanks. This was my first time using PyWaffle so probably rushed things a bit.
Also, recycling steel/aluminium/glass are easier to switch to electric furnaces than production from raw materials, so as production shifts towards reuse it will provide a double benefit.
It says the batteries are in 10 shipping containers. One TEU containers has an internal volume of 33 cubic metres, so 330 in total.
Even a small two-storey, four-unit apartment building is around 1000 cubic metres in total volume, so the batteries are only about a third of an apartment building at most.
No, they are telling the truth. Solar panels do not need to poop.
You don’t need to drive electrons around constantly - just drive the panels there once and you have power there for 20 years.
it probably wouldn’t ever need to be done.
As the parent commenter said, the energy itself wouldn’t need to be delivered. You just deliver the panels once.
separating the component elements is functionally impossible
No, it’s actually easy to pull apart the different components of a panel and can be done by hand. The main expense is the labour.
The labor cost is the problem - it costs $10 to $20 (AU) to recycle a panel, but the value of the parts vary based on the cost of copper, silver and aluminium and so capitalism struggles to make a consistent profit on it. Hopefully as the oil crisis worsens, transport costs will probably go up and the profitablity of recycling should increase.
The best bit, about a third of the way through:
… and so we end up sounding like a nineties era sociology textbook and there’s this trope of like toxic masculinity. And every time you hear the word masculinity among people on the left, it’s usually. It usually comes with that toxic trope. Now, if there’s not another option about a non-toxic masculinity, then at some point you’re basically condemning a whole group of people. And if you don’t offer them anything, why is it surprising that they’re gonna go in a different direction?
One government minister has suggested carrying an onion in your pocket as an alternative to air conditioning: