Comment on Australia: Undergrad develops cheap kit for hybrid electric vehicle conversion
atzanteol@sh.itjust.works 8 months agoI drive an '07 ICE pickup. Would adding a battery / motors to it for the remaining 5ish years of its life really be worth the impact to the environment for those batteries just to save a bit of fuel over that time period?
Puzzle_Sluts_4Ever@lemmy.world 8 months ago
That’s for you to decide. But the environmental impact of batteries is drastically reduced if you actually recycle them and so forth.
As for cost effectiveness?
Quick google of a poorly documented site that looks “about right” says the average price of a gallon of gasoline was 7.079 Australian dollars and 4.459 USD, respectively. Normalizing, that is 4.54 and 4.459 USD. And it gets a lot higher in other countries, but those seem the two pertinent to this discussion
So doing a bit of math:
N city miles / X city Miles Per Gallon * 4.5 USD per gallon = Y dollars per retrofitSo get the price of the retrofit, your average city (stop and go) miles per gallon, and figure out if you are likely to travel that distance. Because the effectiveness of a hybrid drops drastically for extended highway (although 100 kilometers is a decent charge size), whereas they use trace amounts of gas during stop and go city driving.