Expansion of the BEV charging network is relatively inexpensive, costing approximately
$1,000 for home-based charger installation, and ranging from approximately $5,000 to $50,000
for public charging station units (Green Car Reports, 2016; Inside EVs, 2014; Plug In America,
2017; Wolfram and Lutsey, 2016). For comparison, the cost of installing a gasoline station is
typically in the range of $1 million to $2 million (NPC, 2012).
General availability of public charging stations may prove to be more important for
BEVs than PHEVs, as drivers of PHEVs may often rely on the on-board ICE to power the
vehicle when the battery runs low; there is also evidence that PHEV users tend to charge mostly
at home, in the evening, relying less frequently on public charging than BEV users (DOE, 2014;
Kelly, MacDonald, and Keoleian, 2012; Tal, Nicholas, Davies and Woodjack, 2013).
Fuel pricing trends and effective cost per mile
Because units of sale are not standardized across different fuel types (gallons of gasoline
versus kWh of electricity), fuel pricing poses a challenge for customer acceptance and
understanding when comparing different vehicles and fuel types. Furthermore, the conversion
factors to the gasoline-gallon equivalent (GGE: the amount of an alternative fuel required to
equal the energy in one gallon of gasoline) are generally not known or easily understood by most
consumers.
For BEVs, 33.7 kWh of battery power is equal to the energy in 1 gallon of gasoline
(AFDC, 2014). With a national average price of approximately $0.128/kWh and GGE
conversion factor of 0.031 (GGE = kWh x 0.031; DOE [2017]), the current fuel cost
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for
charging a PEV is $1.21/GGE (AFDC, 2017). The average fuel economy for model year 2017
BEVs is 103.0 mpge, resulting in an effective cost per mile of $0.04. Analogously, the cost per
mile for PHEVs is $0.05 when operating electrically in CD mode with an average fuel economy
of 80.1 mpge, and $0.07 when operating on gasoline in CS mode with an average fuel economy
of 33.8 mpge. For current gasoline-powered ICE vehicles, an average fuel economy of 22.8
mpg, coupled with a fuel price of $2.38 per gallon (AFDC, 2017d), results in a cost of $0.10 per
mile. The average effective fuel cost per mile for current ICEs is approximately two and a half
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Per the AFDC (Department of Energy): “Electric prices are reduced by a factor of 3.4 because electric motors are
3.4 times more efficient than internal combustion engines” (AFDC, 2017d).