Reva NXR to e20

A colleague of mine was mad about this car. Ever since it was officially released, he had been seriously considering buying it until people began brainwashing him with useless but realistic facts. He decided to back out.

There was a lovely post in facebook about e20's amazing features. It is now a four seater. Gives a mileage of 100 kms in full charge and takes about five hours to fully charge. So the cost in Bangalore would be about 50 rupees for 100 kms. It also have a top speed of 80 kph and lots of other bells and whistle, but at the end of the day it all boils down to how complicated your life would become with this car. Lets dig in.

Complication 1 : Travel Radius

What happens when you want to travel more than 100 kms? You should be an idiot to even consider buying a car if you want to travel between cities. What about going to WonderLa from electronic city? Ah! idiotic thought again. I hope you get the idea of how much you can use this car if you know what I am talking about.

Complication 2 : Battery 

1.5 lacs to change the batteries after 60,000 kms or 3 years?? Thats about 1974 litres of petrol in bangalore and a mileage of 33,552 kms (17 kmpl). This means I can travel from Bangalore to Mangalore (370 kms) about 90 times, yelahanka to koramangala about 671 times i.e a year's worth of petrol.

Complication 3 : Weight

The more the load, the greater the battery usage. You have to be picky before deciding to go out with your friends and make sure you don't gain weight too. Start burning your excess calories. I think this car would actually motivate you to lose weight by giving you better mileage every time you shed a kilo.

Complication 4 : Charging

I think this is another good thing about this car. It teaches you discipline and patience. You got to plan well in advance to charge your car for full five hours. Its not as easy as dropping in to a petrol station and filling up in 5 minutes. All it takes is 10 units of electricity and you are done. Its about 220 rupees assumming per unit cost is 22 rupees.

Complication 5 : Solar Panel

The solar panel is not on the roof of the car??? Why did they decide to scrap what they showcased in the expo in Germany? The panel is now an external setup and has to installed separately. I am not sure if you need to pay extra for it. It would have been brilliant to have the panel on top of the car.

Now the fun part. Lets do some stats. I am going to compare my i10 with Reva e20 in terms of cost.

i10: 

Year	Petrol Cost	Distance per day	Travel Cost	Monthly Cost	Yearly Cost	Annual Maintenance	Total cost
2010	55	50	500 for 3 days	5166	62000	5000	67000
2011	66	50	500 for 2.5 days	6200	74400	6000	80400
2012	77	50	500 for 2 days	7500	90000	7000	97000

Cost after three years is about 2,44,400 rupees

Reva e20 (assumming it was launched in 2010 and 10 units for 5 hours of full charge) 

Year	Charging cost	Distance per day	Travel Cost	Monthly Cost	Yearly Cost	Annual Maintenance	Total cost
2010	5 per unit	50	50 every 2 days	775	9300	0	9300
2011	6 per unit	50	60 every 2 days	930	11160	0	11160
2012	7 per unit	50	70 every 2 days	1085	13020	0	13020

Cost after three years is 33,480 + 1.5 lacs for battery change after three years = 1,83,480 rupees. 

There you go, the overall cost of using reva is lesser than that of a petrol car. A saving of 60,000 rupees. However add the cost of the car and you can see a huge difference. The reva comes at a price tag of 6.8 lacs and the i10 is 4.8 lacs. This brings the overall cost of reva to 8,63,480 and the i10 to 7,24,400, a difference of 1,39,080 rupees. 

The battery prices keep coming down 8% every year and their capacities keep increasing. So in the long run this could reduce the cost of replacing the batteries every 3 years or 60,000 kms. Damn! I wish they installed the solar panel on the car. We simply could save even more. Imagine if you parked it outside under the sun and it would just charge your battery fully for free!!!! What happened Mahindra? Why did you drop this plan? Burgers!!!