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In these days of rising energy prices and especially oil prices many have turned their heads to micro-mobility and EVs. Electric scooters are the ones that are getting a lot of traction, especially for people commuting in the city.
The question you might ask is: Does it actually save that much? Let’s take a look at pure math to see how much would you save riding a Langfeite C2 city scooter compared to a car in the USA right now.
The whole format is actually quite straightforward for calculating how much it costs to use an escooter. Let’s just take a look at how much the energy electricity vs gas costs to do the same distance on a scooter and on a car.
Other than distance we can compare escooters to public transport and depreciation costs. Let’s start!
The range of the C2 is 45 KM or 28 miles. This is done with a battery 48V battery which has the capacity of 15.6 Ah which means that its capacity is wattage hours is about 750W (48V x 15.6Ah) or 0.75 kWh
Now before the energy crisis, the price of 1 kWh was $0.13 so the price to charge C2 would be ($0.13×0.75kWh) just about 9 cents.
9 cents for 28 miles! Even as the energy prices have soared by August 2022 and in New York the average kWh price is $0.18 which is still just barely 14 cents per charge. Now you could say that charging isn’t 1:1 efficiency it’s still pretty safe to say that no matter how you look at it you can pretty much charge your C2 scooter for 20 cents almost anywhere in the USA.
Result: $0.007 / mile worst case. If you commute to work and ride about 5 miles 20 times a month your monthly fees will be about $0.7, which means it’s practically free.
(Price source: https://www.electricchoice.com/electricity-prices-by-state/)
Now just comparing full electric vehicle to a gas car isn’t probably fair these days as more and more cars are hybrids and taking advantage of the electric motor as well. So let’s take a look at a pretty well-known economical hybrid: Toyota Prius Eco Hybrid which has combined miles-per-gallon rating of 56mpg.
Now the price of a gallon in the USA is now $4.163 (8/3/22) so from there we can see that riding a Prius would cost you $0.074 / mile in combined use. That’s more than 10x the price of the worst-case escooter price per mile!
Now you could argue that the 10X price per mile is still something you can take but then again it doesn’t include the additional fees that commuting with a car takes. Maintenance, parking pass, insurance, depreciation, upfront costs. All in all the AAA says owning a new car costs about $805 / month. That’s where their biggest saving comes from.
Looking at the monthly fees is pretty easy as most cities have a public transport card. If you know the price in your city that’s your number and how much you save with a scooter. For example, in NYC the transport card is $127 / month.
Well, there you have it. Electric scooter 70 cents vs car $812 vs public $127 / month. Not to mention that riding electric scooters is super fun and really makes your commute more fun.
We also didn’t even take into account accidents, extra parking fees, having to have a parking space, etc. To be fair we didn’t calculate the maintenance fees of electric scooters but those are also minuscule compared to a car, you can basically buy a new escooter almost every month with the price of using a car, or if you need some maintenance the monthly price of a transport card is going to take you pretty far.
So are you convinced that micromobility is the way forwards? If you want to join the electric scooter boom and start selling the best escooters on the planet contact Langfeite today!