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.
I don’t have solar panels but own a house with parking spot.
I use the PG&E EV2-A night tariff at home which is still 0.23 $/kWh, though the rate at work is only 0.14 $/kWh which I use as much as possible. I rarely use the superchargers (0.45$/kWh.) Let’s use the 0.23 value.
I drive 15k miles per year. At roughly 2.5 mi/kWh. That gives $1380 per year.
At 20 mi/gallon and $6/gallon, I’d pay $4500 per year. At today’s gas prices, the difference is IMO not marginal anymore. (That said, I didn’t buy the EV for the drive savings…)
I live in a place with year-round fair weather, so I use a petrol motorcycle as my primary vehicle, and live in a rented apartment with no dedicated parking space or possibility of using an at-home charger.
Even with incredibly high petrol taxes causing petrol to cost more than 2.2 EUR/L (like 9.5 USD/gallon), the public fast EV charger rates available at refueling stations are so expensive, that when you take great motorcycle mileage into account, it still doesn't pay to buy an EV, even when only considering charging/refueling costs. Of course, if I could recharge from slow household electric power, it would be a different story. But the politicians are already worried enough about the loss of petrol taxes that the odds, IMO, are quite low of EV charging staying cheaper than petrol refueling (particularly when the vast majority of the petrol price is taxes to begin with).
My EV transport costs are roughly half of gas costs, only charged at home. I had zero garage visits in two years - but the car was also new so that might change.
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.
No. Jaecoo (Chinese but not really an EV company) is the third best selling car at the moment. You see a tonnes of BYDs about. We also have Geely and Leapmotor
"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.
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'?
> 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.
In the US, the used market for Teslas is quite strong, even into the high miles. I recently purchased a used EV and found the Teslas weren’t discounted enough from new for my liking. They moved quickly too, except for the ones with salvage titles.
I ended up getting an off-lease Hyundai EV because they tanked in value in part due to their ICCU failures, which are now covered under an extended warranty.
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.
If you are not in the market for a new car, there are plenty of second hand EVs now. Including some that are close to 15 years old. Most of those will easily beat your ICE car on maintenance and fuel consumption. And they aren't that much more expensive even.
They tend to be in much lower insurance bands and tend to incurr significantly lower motor tax - comprehensive policies for EVs are higher due to the (current) dearth of parts and licensed repair centres versus ICE cars running on multi-year platforms or sharing parts across lines that share a single monocoque design (e.g. VW, Ford, Toyota versus Tesla and their publicised parts shortages).
The problem is that, for economy of scale reasons, Comprehensive insurance is often cheaper than third-party cover in the UK, despite people tending to never claim so as to keep their no-claims bonus and not spike their premium out of affordability. With 3rd Party the EV option would be cheaper as they tend to be involved in less accidents, and when they do they tend to dissipate more impact on their side due to more modern crumple-zones and safety features.
The headline could not be more precise. Suppose for example that I am faced with a choice which of two cars to rent. (Car ownership is in any case kind of a boomer thing, so in Europe and US different occasions for rental arise.)
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).
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
True. But we load shift to the cheap period things like the washing machine, dryer and dishwasher. We have an old 5 bed house - currently eon reckon our bill for the month is about £50.
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".
fuel price went up 4% more last night, so we are now at 10x more than electric, and somehow there are 'arguments' bieng profered that there is something left to debate, unless you count in the OTHER discussion hapening around demand collapse for oil.
lots of rich people here who will get hurt bad when the petro dollar collapses, but are making more money today than ever before.
classic monkey trap.
EVs are rich people offloading tax burden to less fortunate ones.
Previously (last year) various taxes made almost half the fuel price.
We don't have green/car taxes where i live, everyone charges their cars at home and brag how 'cheap it is'. Additionally you can drive in bus lanes if you drive EV (capital only) and you have the perfect nepotism scheme - no taxes, premium transit for anyone already rich enough. No politician dares to bring this up as solution would lead to the introduction of general car tax (political suicide) so once again everyone else is left to pick up the bill after the rich.
Going through the comments, it looks like people in UK hate EVs. This is surprising, because the anti-EV arguments are mostly seen only in US (which is understandable, US is first and foremost a fossil fuel country).
All cars need parking and real-estate is wasted for parking at a humongous expense. Cars are next to some building. Usually, in most countries all building have electricity. UK has 230V, which means any outlet anywhere should work. All it needs is a cable from the nearest building to where the car is parked.
There are a lot of places in the UK where you do not have the facility to charge your car at home (terraced houses, apartment buildings with no parking spaces). Running cables to buildings is risky. Even where there are houses that have a road in front of the front door, there is no guarantee that the owner is able to park in front.
> All it needs is a cable from the nearest building to where the car is parked.
In many places, you don't have the luxury to park in front of your house and you don't have the liberty to open random doors and plug your cars to whatever outlet is available there.
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[ 0.19 ms ] story [ 29.3 ms ] threadOne-tenth the (fuel) cost, or 90% cheaper.
(That is, if you own a house with off-street parking).
I use the PG&E EV2-A night tariff at home which is still 0.23 $/kWh, though the rate at work is only 0.14 $/kWh which I use as much as possible. I rarely use the superchargers (0.45$/kWh.) Let’s use the 0.23 value.
I drive 15k miles per year. At roughly 2.5 mi/kWh. That gives $1380 per year.
At 20 mi/gallon and $6/gallon, I’d pay $4500 per year. At today’s gas prices, the difference is IMO not marginal anymore. (That said, I didn’t buy the EV for the drive savings…)
I live in a place with year-round fair weather, so I use a petrol motorcycle as my primary vehicle, and live in a rented apartment with no dedicated parking space or possibility of using an at-home charger.
Even with incredibly high petrol taxes causing petrol to cost more than 2.2 EUR/L (like 9.5 USD/gallon), the public fast EV charger rates available at refueling stations are so expensive, that when you take great motorcycle mileage into account, it still doesn't pay to buy an EV, even when only considering charging/refueling costs. Of course, if I could recharge from slow household electric power, it would be a different story. But the politicians are already worried enough about the loss of petrol taxes that the odds, IMO, are quite low of EV charging staying cheaper than petrol refueling (particularly when the vast majority of the petrol price is taxes to begin with).
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.
> Dacia Spring is now the UK’s cheapest car at less than £12k
> The all-electric Dacia Spring now costs less than any other car on the market
https://www.whatcar.com/news/dacia-spring-is-now-the-uks-che...
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.
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.
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.
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
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'?
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.
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.
I ended up getting an off-lease Hyundai EV because they tanked in value in part due to their ICCU failures, which are now covered under an extended warranty.
this is very simply completely untrue
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.
Quite possibly China and many other countries.
(edit) There's a comment further down, cheapest car in UK is EV: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49875856
It's still 12,000UKP more expensive than the paid-off ICE 15-yo I have on my driveway, which is a heck of a lot of petrol.
Why do you think Tesla insurance is that high?
The problem is that, for economy of scale reasons, Comprehensive insurance is often cheaper than third-party cover in the UK, despite people tending to never claim so as to keep their no-claims bonus and not spike their premium out of affordability. With 3rd Party the EV option would be cheaper as they tend to be involved in less accidents, and when they do they tend to dissipate more impact on their side due to more modern crumple-zones and safety features.
Is it the same in the UK?
Recently they started builing a truck charging facilty on the outskirts of town.
All it took was destruction of global energy markets and supplies.
Let’s celebrate!
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...)
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
ICE @ 40 MPG: ~22.6p per mile for diesel EV: ~3p per mile for off-peak home charging.
The difference from 23 to 3 is a decrease of 20, which is an 86.96% decrease.
https://www.theguardian.com/money/2026/sep/28/price-of-diese...
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".
Previously (last year) various taxes made almost half the fuel price. We don't have green/car taxes where i live, everyone charges their cars at home and brag how 'cheap it is'. Additionally you can drive in bus lanes if you drive EV (capital only) and you have the perfect nepotism scheme - no taxes, premium transit for anyone already rich enough. No politician dares to bring this up as solution would lead to the introduction of general car tax (political suicide) so once again everyone else is left to pick up the bill after the rich.
All cars need parking and real-estate is wasted for parking at a humongous expense. Cars are next to some building. Usually, in most countries all building have electricity. UK has 230V, which means any outlet anywhere should work. All it needs is a cable from the nearest building to where the car is parked.
In many places, you don't have the luxury to park in front of your house and you don't have the liberty to open random doors and plug your cars to whatever outlet is available there.