I've had this discussion many times. Unless you own a house, with solar panels and your own parking spot any cost/km gains on fuel with EV are marginal. Gas get's adjusted more quickly but eventually the roadside charge prices will catch up. And many "researchers" take the average price (not any better metric) which is heavily skewed by "public" chargers which you cannot use since they are inaccessible on private property but are public for tax reasons.
The primary cause of this current price differential is the enormous taxation applied to diesel and petrol in the UK. Obviously this situation won't last.
Not to forget greater depreciation. So for those who drive relatively little the ICE card might still have lower total cost of ownership. Not to forget time comparison on fuelling versus charging.
I would bet that this is different for cars made in the last 3-4 years. More and more stats from the automobile clubs are rolling in that show that electric vehicles last much longer, because they have less moving parts, and that batteries last much longer than expected.
So as of today, I’d certainly buy electric if I was worried about depreciation.
Surely depreciation is determined by the buyer's expected price? So it doesn't matter if objectively you say the battery is at 95% health but all the buyers apply a steep discount due to it being an EV.
And for the buyer, it's about perceived value compared to other vehicles. Even an unused well-stored 6 year old EV would have to sell at substantial discount compared to its purchase price because new EVs are just better
Depreciation will slow down when the rate of improvement slows down
Are they? An equivalent model don't seem to be significantly more new, and you can now get some great deals on secondhand EVs.
I'm in the UK and have now gone completely electric - motorbike (Zero SRF), car (wife's Model 3) and van (ID Buzz). To be honest though, that was mostly because I like EVs - yes, even the motorbike. The fuel costs are just a bonus.
This depends on country, and what you consider to be a comparable car.
If we compare, for example, the Tesla Model 3 (RWD) against the BMW 3 series (320i), then we get:
NL: Model 3 ~€36K vs 3 series ~€50K
UK: Model 3 ~£37K vs 3 series ~£41K
In both countries the Model 3 is more expensive than that the 3 series.
Second hand the maths can change again, since EVs typically depreciate faster, due to battery degradation fears, and the fact that range on newer cars is always improving, but still, typically for a four year old version of the above, the Model 3 is still cheaper than the 3 series.
There is, of course, the discussion on whether it is fair to compare a model 3 with the 3 series, but it is often used, so I'll go with it.
If you want to compare cheaper cars, then you could compare a Ford Focus with an MG4 EV, and in the UK the EV wins, in NL, the Gasoline car wins, but in both cases, they are more price comparable.
Well what if rather than a Tesla+, one bought a cheaper EV instead? In the UK, the Leapmotor T03 seems to go for around 16000 GBP new. That's actually not much more than an equivalent petrol car.
"Cheaper to run" if you only count the cost of fuel versus the cost of electricity, and only if you can charge at home.
It currently costs 85p/kWh to charge an EV near where I live if you can't charge at home, and 95p/litre for gas (my car is dual fuel).
Then you've got the vastly more expensive insurance for EVs.
Then you've got the cost of paying for an EV.
Then you've got to find an EV that directly replaces the existing vehicle. There are currently no EVs on the market that can tow heavy trailers off road, which is the main reason I have a biggish 4x4.
Repair costs are very high (and take ages) and most of them are expensive cars outright which puts the premiums up.
Performance being pretty high on even a basic Tesla doesn't help things either. The insurance market in the UK is very expensive anyway and any excuse to wind up premiums they'll gladly use.
Wait, insurance includes repair costs? What kind of insurance are we talking about? In Spain, mandatory insurance plus some perks is about the same: includes damage to others, own car broken glasses, theft and fire, and road assistance. Maybe Tesla is slightly more, expensive because the horsepower of their cars is too high, and it gets in the group of cars with over 300 HP, so insurers assume it is a bit of a sports car. Anyway, the difference with similarly powered ICE car is negligible.
I don't know, but it was going to cost me about two grand a year to insure a Kia Niro EV compared to 200 quid to insure a 4.6 litre Range Rover.
Presumably because (at least round here) they're driven by retired guys who are simply not capable of staying in front of a 700bhp gokart that gets to 60mph faster than if you threw it off a cliff.
The cost of public charging is still one of the biggest problems. I'm currently on a night-time charging tariff at home at 4p/kWh. It will go up to 8p/kWh in October but that's still pretty good considering it's not uncommon for public rapid charging to be 10x that.
Of all the rapid charging networks, I find Tesla are often the cheapest, there are Tesla 250kW charging stations near me that are 33p/kWh during quieter hours.
Headline is misleading. Cheaper on per-mile operating costs but typically more expensive to purchase and insure. There’s also a nasty depreciation curve to contend with. Nobody wants a 10 year old Tesla, but a 10 year old well mentioned petrol car still has a ton of life left in it.
It still often ends up a bit cheaper across comparable vehicles but not a slam dunk and nowhere near as good as the headline suggests.
Honest question: how else would one interpret 'cheaper to drive', if not 'cheaper per-mile operating costs'? Wouldn't they have used plain 'cheaper than' if they would have meant 'purchase+operating'?
Because driving includes a lot more costs than just fuel. And as others are calling out, nobody wants a used EV so deprecation is a real cost to every day regardless of if the car is driven or not.
I think "nobody wants a used EV" will change, there is already a growing amount of evidence that battery deterioration is nowhere near as bad as feared on average. ICE vehicles also tend to get less efficient over time as well due to wear and tear, build-up, degrading sensors etc, it's just that nobody talks about that.
For whatever reason, my wife’s car needs yearly scheduled dealership visits that always cost a few hundred. Meanwhile, my 5 year old EV has had none of that, other than one of those recalls that required a technician to park 15 minutes on our driveway to tighten some bolt (which my wife car also had, but it took another visit to the dealership.)
The depreciation thing is true, but I drive my cars into the ground anyway, so it’s not a factor for me.
There’s also a nasty depreciation curve to contend with. Nobody wants a 10 year old Tesla, but a 10 year old well mentioned petrol car still has a ton of life left in it.
It's worse, there's almost no second hand market for the vehicles. There is barely anybody trained to repair them (even if they will sell you the parts) and if they are crashed significantly it's almost always a write-off.
It still often ends up a bit cheaper across comparable vehicles but not a slam dunk and nowhere near as good as the headline suggests.
Only because of government meddling. Fuel is almost uniquely taxed 3 times, which pays for subsidies to pay for green energy initiatives.
I think I'll hold out with my diesels and petrols and see how this all goes.
There is barely anybody trained to repair them (even if they will sell you the parts)
No longer true at least in most decently urban/semi-urban Western countries/regions.
The parts shortage is real though, it's always been a plague for Tesla, and most established manufacturers never really recovered from Covid (and in the case of wiring harnesses, Ukraine) as a lot of their supply chain closed down shop for good.
and if they are crashed significantly it's almost always a write-off.
That's true of all modern vehicles, no matter the engine type. Crash resiliency comes at a cost, the frame absorbs the crash energy and permanently deforms. Yes you can bend even an aluminium frame back into shape but it will never be as strong as before, and anything carbon-composite or plastic is out of the question as well.
Crash damaged cars have loads of good components though - typically allowing nearly all non-crash repairs to be done by just swapping parts about, unless the manufacturer has got software locks on swapping parts.
The cheapest car for sale in the UK is an EV at this point. The market is rapidly filling with EVs in essentially all price segments. Most EVs are still under warranty when they hit the second hand market for the simple reason most EVs on the market were produced in their typical warranty period.
There are over 120,000 public charging points across the UK, with over 25,000 of them being 50kW+ DC. That's averaging more than one charger per square mile of the mainland UK (density distribution of course varies).
Yes, I responded to your other comment about that. Charging at home is very cheap though and it's estimated that roughly half of housing in the UK has a driveway. Some more creativity is going to be required to address it for everyone else indeed, for example kerb or lamp-post chargers, or in flat building car parks etc.
Mainly due to the standard 20% VAT rate applied to public electricity (compared to 5% for home charging) which could be rectified overnight if there was political will.
Breakdown of UK Public/Private and EV/ICE Per Mile Costs:
* Home (Off-Peak EV Tariff): ~3p per mile
* Home (Standard Standard Variable Tariff): ~8p per mile
Meta: As plenty of commenters have pointed out, this kind of statements (and similar ones like "PV electricity is the cheapest one", etc...) are entirely true _with some attached caveats_.
For example, an EV is both undoubtably cheaper to operate than a gas powered car ; and infinitely more expensive to operate if you can't afford to buy one in the first place.
Similarly, the price of kWh of PV-generated electricity is both lower than pretty much everything else as this point ; and, basically infinite when the sun is down and your 4h battery has run out.
Is there a proper math concept to fairly express those things ? "Mean", "Average" or "Median" fall short. Mean with very very large error bars ? "Average with substitution" ?
In the end, I can't wait for all those circumvoltions to be irrelevant (when EVs are just cheap to buy too, and electricity has enough storage to bake it into the price, etc...)
I live in the UK and own an EV and this article is misleading in how they get the 90% figure. All off peak charging tariffs in the UK have higher peak energy charges than their flat tariffs - so you make your EV charging cheaper at the expense of higher energy costs elsewhere. For me it’s about break even assuming 6k miles per year.
Also, if you do not have a home charger, you are very unlikely to come out cheaper than petrol. I think 40p/kwh is about the breakeven
Once they factor in my current budget for buying a car which is up to £2,000, insurance around £70pm, (relatively) inexpensive repairs and ease of finding spare parts/mechanics, we can talk.
All this kind of spin does is turn people who were on the fence, off electric. Just treat people like adults and say "whilst there are still lots of reasons to prefer a traditional car, electrics are the future, and here's something that shows the progress".
Hopefully the article authors are only attempting to reach their target audience, but please don't encourage numerical illiteracy!
One-tenth the (fuel) cost, or 90% cheaper.
(That is, if you own a house with off-street parking).
I've had this discussion many times. Unless you own a house, with solar panels and your own parking spot any cost/km gains on fuel with EV are marginal. Gas get's adjusted more quickly but eventually the roadside charge prices will catch up. And many "researchers" take the average price (not any better metric) which is heavily skewed by "public" chargers which you cannot use since they are inaccessible on private property but are public for tax reasons.
The primary cause of this current price differential is the enormous taxation applied to diesel and petrol in the UK. Obviously this situation won't last.
Electric cars (Tesla+) are much more expensive than gasoline cars to purchase initially.
Not to forget greater depreciation. So for those who drive relatively little the ICE card might still have lower total cost of ownership. Not to forget time comparison on fuelling versus charging.
I would bet that this is different for cars made in the last 3-4 years. More and more stats from the automobile clubs are rolling in that show that electric vehicles last much longer, because they have less moving parts, and that batteries last much longer than expected.
So as of today, I’d certainly buy electric if I was worried about depreciation.
Surely depreciation is determined by the buyer's expected price? So it doesn't matter if objectively you say the battery is at 95% health but all the buyers apply a steep discount due to it being an EV.
And for the buyer, it's about perceived value compared to other vehicles. Even an unused well-stored 6 year old EV would have to sell at substantial discount compared to its purchase price because new EVs are just better
Depreciation will slow down when the rate of improvement slows down
It is not like normal cars don't already last very long time. Decade plus on good brands is nothing now. EVs may or may do pretty much the same.
When you buy used, the depreciation works in your favour.
You can get a mint condition IONIQ 5 with 300bhp and 20-minute charging for less than a new Corolla.
Does it still charge as new?
Used cars still take a full fuel tank.
Are they? An equivalent model don't seem to be significantly more new, and you can now get some great deals on secondhand EVs.
I'm in the UK and have now gone completely electric - motorbike (Zero SRF), car (wife's Model 3) and van (ID Buzz). To be honest though, that was mostly because I like EVs - yes, even the motorbike. The fuel costs are just a bonus.
Since this is a article about UK car costs, lets look at the UK
https://www.whatcar.com/news/dacia-spring-is-now-the-uks-che...
The article has an honourable mention for the Leapmotor T03, another EV that is only slightly more expensive than the Dacia Spring.
This depends on country, and what you consider to be a comparable car.
If we compare, for example, the Tesla Model 3 (RWD) against the BMW 3 series (320i), then we get:
NL: Model 3 ~€36K vs 3 series ~€50K UK: Model 3 ~£37K vs 3 series ~£41K
In both countries the Model 3 is more expensive than that the 3 series.
Second hand the maths can change again, since EVs typically depreciate faster, due to battery degradation fears, and the fact that range on newer cars is always improving, but still, typically for a four year old version of the above, the Model 3 is still cheaper than the 3 series.
There is, of course, the discussion on whether it is fair to compare a model 3 with the 3 series, but it is often used, so I'll go with it.
If you want to compare cheaper cars, then you could compare a Ford Focus with an MG4 EV, and in the UK the EV wins, in NL, the Gasoline car wins, but in both cases, they are more price comparable.
Well what if rather than a Tesla+, one bought a cheaper EV instead? In the UK, the Leapmotor T03 seems to go for around 16000 GBP new. That's actually not much more than an equivalent petrol car.
Has the UK decided to block or add protectionist regulations to Chinese EV imports?
No, at least not yet. It was one of the issues when discussing with EU, as they were worried those EV will get routed through UK to EU without tariff.
"Cheaper to run" if you only count the cost of fuel versus the cost of electricity, and only if you can charge at home.
It currently costs 85p/kWh to charge an EV near where I live if you can't charge at home, and 95p/litre for gas (my car is dual fuel).
Then you've got the vastly more expensive insurance for EVs.
Then you've got the cost of paying for an EV.
Then you've got to find an EV that directly replaces the existing vehicle. There are currently no EVs on the market that can tow heavy trailers off road, which is the main reason I have a biggish 4x4.
Why is EV insurance that more expensive than an ICE vehicles'?
Repair costs are very high (and take ages) and most of them are expensive cars outright which puts the premiums up.
Performance being pretty high on even a basic Tesla doesn't help things either. The insurance market in the UK is very expensive anyway and any excuse to wind up premiums they'll gladly use.
Wait, insurance includes repair costs? What kind of insurance are we talking about? In Spain, mandatory insurance plus some perks is about the same: includes damage to others, own car broken glasses, theft and fire, and road assistance. Maybe Tesla is slightly more, expensive because the horsepower of their cars is too high, and it gets in the group of cars with over 300 HP, so insurers assume it is a bit of a sports car. Anyway, the difference with similarly powered ICE car is negligible.
In Germany full coverage does include some level of repair costs.
I have had my side mirrors and windshield repairs covered.
I don't know, but it was going to cost me about two grand a year to insure a Kia Niro EV compared to 200 quid to insure a 4.6 litre Range Rover.
Presumably because (at least round here) they're driven by retired guys who are simply not capable of staying in front of a 700bhp gokart that gets to 60mph faster than if you threw it off a cliff.
The cost of public charging is still one of the biggest problems. I'm currently on a night-time charging tariff at home at 4p/kWh. It will go up to 8p/kWh in October but that's still pretty good considering it's not uncommon for public rapid charging to be 10x that.
Of all the rapid charging networks, I find Tesla are often the cheapest, there are Tesla 250kW charging stations near me that are 33p/kWh during quieter hours.
Wow that is super expensive.
I usually charge at the super market (60KW) for 44ct / kwh which is not cheap but much more reasonable.
For comparision my employer offers charging at 23ct and my home price (from the grid) would be +-30 if I could get a charger there
Headline is misleading. Cheaper on per-mile operating costs but typically more expensive to purchase and insure. There’s also a nasty depreciation curve to contend with. Nobody wants a 10 year old Tesla, but a 10 year old well mentioned petrol car still has a ton of life left in it.
It still often ends up a bit cheaper across comparable vehicles but not a slam dunk and nowhere near as good as the headline suggests.
Depends on the specific car, Tesla's are notoriously expensive to insure, but I believe that the Volkswagen ID series is much more reasonable.
They’re extremely expensive to repair for one, which drives up the rates since many are just written off after relatively minor accidents.
[delayed]
Headline is misleading
Honest question: how else would one interpret 'cheaper to drive', if not 'cheaper per-mile operating costs'? Wouldn't they have used plain 'cheaper than' if they would have meant 'purchase+operating'?
Because driving includes a lot more costs than just fuel. And as others are calling out, nobody wants a used EV so deprecation is a real cost to every day regardless of if the car is driven or not.
I think "nobody wants a used EV" will change, there is already a growing amount of evidence that battery deterioration is nowhere near as bad as feared on average. ICE vehicles also tend to get less efficient over time as well due to wear and tear, build-up, degrading sensors etc, it's just that nobody talks about that.
Oil changes, break pads, oil filters, spark plugs, …
For whatever reason, my wife’s car needs yearly scheduled dealership visits that always cost a few hundred. Meanwhile, my 5 year old EV has had none of that, other than one of those recalls that required a technician to park 15 minutes on our driveway to tighten some bolt (which my wife car also had, but it took another visit to the dealership.)
The depreciation thing is true, but I drive my cars into the ground anyway, so it’s not a factor for me.
It's worse, there's almost no second hand market for the vehicles. There is barely anybody trained to repair them (even if they will sell you the parts) and if they are crashed significantly it's almost always a write-off.
Only because of government meddling. Fuel is almost uniquely taxed 3 times, which pays for subsidies to pay for green energy initiatives.
I think I'll hold out with my diesels and petrols and see how this all goes.
No longer true at least in most decently urban/semi-urban Western countries/regions.
The parts shortage is real though, it's always been a plague for Tesla, and most established manufacturers never really recovered from Covid (and in the case of wiring harnesses, Ukraine) as a lot of their supply chain closed down shop for good.
That's true of all modern vehicles, no matter the engine type. Crash resiliency comes at a cost, the frame absorbs the crash energy and permanently deforms. Yes you can bend even an aluminium frame back into shape but it will never be as strong as before, and anything carbon-composite or plastic is out of the question as well.
Crash damaged cars have loads of good components though - typically allowing nearly all non-crash repairs to be done by just swapping parts about, unless the manufacturer has got software locks on swapping parts.
10-year old Teslas are great, you just need a sticker "bought before Elon went crazy".
The cheapest car for sale in the UK is an EV at this point. The market is rapidly filling with EVs in essentially all price segments. Most EVs are still under warranty when they hit the second hand market for the simple reason most EVs on the market were produced in their typical warranty period.
Also in Australia: AUD 19,900 driveway (means taxes, registration etc included), or about US$14K: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49772728
Quite possibly China and many other countries.
Also it is extremely expensive to repair some EVs.
Why do you think Tesla insurance is that high?
What about the infrastructure? It always comes to this for any country, sadly.
There are over 120,000 public charging points across the UK, with over 25,000 of them being 50kW+ DC. That's averaging more than one charger per square mile of the mainland UK (density distribution of course varies).
These are very, very expensive to charge at.
Yes, I responded to your other comment about that. Charging at home is very cheap though and it's estimated that roughly half of housing in the UK has a driveway. Some more creativity is going to be required to address it for everyone else indeed, for example kerb or lamp-post chargers, or in flat building car parks etc.
Mainly due to the standard 20% VAT rate applied to public electricity (compared to 5% for home charging) which could be rectified overnight if there was political will.
Breakdown of UK Public/Private and EV/ICE Per Mile Costs:
* Home (Off-Peak EV Tariff): ~3p per mile
* Home (Standard Standard Variable Tariff): ~8p per mile
* Standard Public EV: ~15p per mile
* Petrol Car: ~17p per mile
* Diesel Car: ~17.5p per mile
* 50kW+ DC Public EV: ~22p to 23p per mile
Where I live (central Europe) I noticed that public fast chargers increased by a lot over the last two years in particular.
Is it the same in the UK?
Recently they started builing a truck charging facilty on the outskirts of town.
Many new public charging sites are being built in the UK too, yes. Several thousand rapid charging points in the last year alone.
Good, can’t wait to see what fertiliser and heating costs will be.
All it took was destruction of global energy markets and supplies.
Let’s celebrate!
Meta: As plenty of commenters have pointed out, this kind of statements (and similar ones like "PV electricity is the cheapest one", etc...) are entirely true _with some attached caveats_.
For example, an EV is both undoubtably cheaper to operate than a gas powered car ; and infinitely more expensive to operate if you can't afford to buy one in the first place.
Similarly, the price of kWh of PV-generated electricity is both lower than pretty much everything else as this point ; and, basically infinite when the sun is down and your 4h battery has run out.
Is there a proper math concept to fairly express those things ? "Mean", "Average" or "Median" fall short. Mean with very very large error bars ? "Average with substitution" ?
In the end, I can't wait for all those circumvoltions to be irrelevant (when EVs are just cheap to buy too, and electricity has enough storage to bake it into the price, etc...)
Could be worded better. Maybe say petrol is 10 times costlier? Multiplication is a lot quicker than division.
I live in the UK and own an EV and this article is misleading in how they get the 90% figure. All off peak charging tariffs in the UK have higher peak energy charges than their flat tariffs - so you make your EV charging cheaper at the expense of higher energy costs elsewhere. For me it’s about break even assuming 6k miles per year.
Also, if you do not have a home charger, you are very unlikely to come out cheaper than petrol. I think 40p/kwh is about the breakeven
Once they factor in my current budget for buying a car which is up to £2,000, insurance around £70pm, (relatively) inexpensive repairs and ease of finding spare parts/mechanics, we can talk.
All this kind of spin does is turn people who were on the fence, off electric. Just treat people like adults and say "whilst there are still lots of reasons to prefer a traditional car, electrics are the future, and here's something that shows the progress".