How much cheaper is an electric car to run?

[BewareTheBeardedDragon]

Totted up the monthly cost of running my 12yo diesel people carrier - all in. With astronomical fuel prices now and additional pollution levies it is about £550 per month.

My preference would be to just get rid if I had the choice but sadly this is not logistically possible for a good few years yet.

So I'm just idly wondering, excluding the cost of buying it, how much the running cost of an electric car would be? Including and tax, insurance, maintenance, and electric costs.

I probably drive approx 300 miles per month averaged out.

@Fushiadreams is a spouting twaddle btw. Would love to her her sources

EVs have a measure like MPG: miles per kWh. This is the number of miles you can do per kWh of electricity, and it'll be listed in the car info. It's typically around 4miles/kWh. You can use it to predict journey costs, e.g. if you drive 100miles, and miles/kWh is 4, then you'll need 25kWh. At 20p per kWh, this'll be £5.

It's also a way of looking at charge times. An extension cable out the window will charge at about 2.5kW, so per hour adds 2.5kWh to your battery, and at 4miles/per kWh that's like adding 10miles of charge an hour. A home charger does 7kW, so like adding 28miles per hour to your battery. Supermarket chargers do about 22kW, so like adding 88miles per hour. A rapid charger, is about 50kW, so like adding 200miles per hour.

The most expensive part of an EV is its battery. So to save costs makes sense to get the smallest battery that'll work for you. We have a second-hand BMW i3 with a range of 130miles - so a tiny range compared to new EVs - but it's fine for us because in practice we just don't often drive that far in a day.

You mentioned the ULEZ - electric cars are exempt, but so are very many petrol cars. And EVs are often exempt from the congestion charge - but the rules are confusing, so you have to check your particular car.

What do people think of hybrids?

Worst of both worlds or worth a look?

You're in a tricky position right now because of your need for a seven-seater. There are some EV seven-seaters, but not many and they tend to be extremely expensive. (Mercedes EQB or EQV, for example.)

Kia e-Niros and BMW i3s are all very fine but they don't suit your family circs so they're not going to help.

I think a lot of your cost issue is due to the fact you're driving a diesel in the city. Diesels are OK when they get good long motorway runs but they're pretty inefficient at under 40mph and dreadful under 20. If you're only doing 300 miles a month, but having to put £300-worth of diesel in the tank, that's where it's all going. That is truly dire fuel economy. You'd be better off in V8 Range Rover!

Assuming you do want to replace your current car, I wonder if your best option would be to get some kind of stopgap ULEZ-compliant petrol car to tide you over for a few years, by which time there will be more seven-seater EVs on both the new and used markets at a range of price points. A Ford Galaxy or S-Max might be worth a look, for example, or a Mazda 5.

If you in a terrace and genuinely interested in an EV then get onto Zap-Map and see what’s available near you for charging. We got a fully electric car with intention of doing a weekly 90 min charge at Lidls fast charge with occasional top ups at more expensive charge points if needed.

This is nonsense.

The absolute risk of a fire in an EV is less than in a petrol car. 0.03% chance per year, compared to 1.0% for ICE, hybrids are highest risk, although the data for EV's is new, so the statistical power is quite low.

True, the fires can be more difficult to put out, however the chances of 'wrapping it around a tree' are less, since the battery adds significant structural strength.

Battery decline is around 1-3% per 100,000 miles, again around the same decline in efficiency you see with combustion engines over the same distance.

Incidentally, where do you charge your iphone? It must be massively inconvenient having to stow it in a fireproof box outside the house every night....

Absolutely.
EV's of today are not the EV's of a few years ago. Massive leaps forward in technology.

As for hybrids. I can only base my reply on the one we owned 2 years ago, which was the Ioniq Plug In.
It did give us a really good saving. The battery range was small, around 30 miles iirc, but crucially for us DH's office is about 25 miles away and his firm installed several free chargers. This meant that it was a 'free' journey home.
It was extremely economical though when driven properly, the catch with a lot of EV's and Hybrids are they are so responsive and fun to drive you find yourself having a Schumacher moment and sacrificing economy for fun. I do recall if driven well the best we had out of the Ioniq was around 700 miles a tank.

I really am very tempted but - how does it work when you need to charge on a longer journey? For example, travelling from London to Cornwall? My boss has a Renault Zoe and is well catered for around here but has experienced issues when travelling further afield. Are things changing? Some service stations have limits on how long you can stay so if the charging points are full, what do you do? I'm really hoping there is a very obvious answer to this that you experienced EV owners can provide!

It depends where you are going - there are def some blackspots, North Yorkshire for one, but on main routes it is fine there are chargers now at every motorway service station and also many more just off them.
Never really had an issue. Sometimes there has been a small queue and I've had to wait say 20 minutes, then charging took half an hour and then I'm on my way.
What you do have to do (until there are more of them) is take a little bit of care in planning where you are going to have your lunch stops etc. Not only do apps like zap map tell you where the chargers are, they also give real time info in terms of if they are currently taken and if they have technical issues (which isn't unusual sadly). And yes in the 3 years I've had an EV there are many more, and many more of the very fast kind, than we first got ours.

Also the EV infrastructure isn't being built just along the old motorway services and current main routes. Dedicated charging places are also being installed on pieces of land or the edges of car parks on retail land just off motorways. If you're an ICE driver and you're only looking at petrol stations and motorway services, you'd be missing an awful lot of the infrastructure that is in place. That's why EV drivers always refer to apps like Zap Map and A Better Route Planner because it's what we use to find chargers.

That's not to say the Infrastructure is sorted, there's still masses of investment and many more chargers needed!

@mafsfan
@Frazzled2207

Thank you both! Very informative and good to know about the apps and to think outside of the usual infrastructure! Now to get test driving.

Thanks @BewareTheBeardedDragon
for starting this thread, it's been a really interesting read.

Thank you to all who have contributed and helped me develop my knowledge of car engine stuff from 'nothing' to getting close to 'rudimentary' 😂

Lots of food for thought. Do love MN.