How economical is an EV really?

[Cleo5mum]

Just that really. I need a new car soon and want a compact SUV.. will do about 150 miles a week. Does anyone have an idea of the cost electricity to run an EV? Also what would the cost of the charge point at home be..? Given the volatile petrol prices now I am thinking EV rather than a petrol hybrid I had thought of..Thanks

Our home charger was just under £1k and it took me less than a year to recoup that from savings on the cost of petrol. I do about 8000 miles per year.

I recently bought an EV. I needed a new car anyway so the cost of buying wasn’t really a factor. I bought a compact SUV from a main dealer for about £17.5k including an extended warranty. The car was about 20 months old and the warranty would take it to 8yrs old.

I also bought a service plan which is paid monthly. Ev services are generally much cheaper as far less to do and many vehicles (mine included) only need a service every 2 years to retain warranty.

I charge with a granny cable. Didn’t really see the point of a 1k charger as I don’t have any issues charging slowly with the 3 pin. I use about 40% of battery per week and charge once a week overnight. I guess that’s around 100 miles of driving. I haven’t changed tariff. Just on my usual one and spend maybe £30 per month? I never use fast chargers really.

I love my ev! Some things I just had t anticipated! Sitting on a cold night waiting for my son- with the heated seats and heating on, music playing- lovely and snug without an engine running. Battery percentage didn’t even change!

I think we pay around 3p a kWh to charge overnight
ans get around 4 miles to the kWh on average

so 150 miles would be £1.12 a week
outs has long range battery so would need charging less than once a week

it would be about 3 gallons of petrol -14 litres which is £21 roughly

£20 a week is over 1000 a year which would mean you should recover the cost of the charger in a year

the cheap electric rate applies to anything run overnight

Depends where you live I think. In france it’s very economical. We save about €400/month in comparison to running diesel cars.

Very. Our car, secondhand at three years old would be £17k or thereabouts. It does between 280 and 330 miles on a full charge, and only costs us £15 to charge.

I can see that a replacement battery would be very expensive but I don’t know anyone who’s ever had to do that. There’s no sign of loss of function in my car’s battery so far after 6 years.

Both Octopus and Eon Next have a tariff that works like this. You need a compatible EV or charger though and not all will work. Look up Intelligent Octopus Go and Eon Next Drive Smart. If you can’t get onto the ‘smart’ tariff, they both have a normal EV tariff as well but you pay 1p/ kWh more and don’t get the extra hours at the cheap rate.

Replacement batteries are not something you need to plan for. Our EV is 10 years old and still has 90% battery health.

I have a phev, and it’s about 6hrs to charge for 40 miles of battery. That’s about 36p on our overnight rate.

My DH gets free charging with his work, he runs a full electric car. We only have a 3 pin charger and his car is probably £2-3 to charge for 300 miles.

My old diesel would do 600 miles for £100 of fuel at old prices. So rough maths of £6 for those 40 miles that now cost me 36p.

I paid £1000 to get home charger and full charge is just over 200 miles and about £3.00 but in the winter that 200 miles is reduced in real mileage as having the heating running etc affects consumption

My ioniq does about 5 miles per kWh, and we largely charge at home overnight at 8.5p per kWh. So that costs 1.7p per mile.

If you've got a petrol car that manages 50 miles per gallon, and you're paying £1.52 per litre (or £6.99 per gallon), that's just under 14p per mile.

From April 2027 your EV will cost an extra 3p per mile for Electric Vehicle Excise Duty. But it's still a relative bargain on a per-mile basis.

i.e. assuming petrol & electricity prices stay the same 😬 for every 10,000 miles you drive you're saving £1300 by doing it in an EV (or £1000 from next April).

My dh has a company EV. We don’t have a charging point and he doesn’t fully fill up here at home, but his company has chargers that staff can use for free and he fills up then. He’s in the office two days a week. In London two days, at home one day.
The thing that sucks the fuel is the heating or air conditioning, phone charging, heating the seats and the steering wheel in the winter.

The single best thing I bought for my home was my EV charger. A local electrician installed it for £800 and connected it up to my Pod Point account.

My cars range is 165 miles and I do a round trip of 18 miles 2 x per week and only really local driving the rest of the week. I charge my car once or twice a week as I like the power gauge to show over 100miles.

I pay £154 per month for all my gas and electricity, including my EV charging (house is a 3 bedroom 1930’s semi), so I’m pretty happy with the cost.

Slightly annoyed that I no longer get free congestion charging to drive into London, and I’ve just been charged my first road tax of £200. Given I’ve had the car 3 years I’ve had it really cheap so far, so I can’t be too cross about it.

Plus I'm soooooooo happy about never having to visit to a petrol station, I hated them.

We pay 5.34p/kWh and the car gets 4.6miles/kWh. So 1.16p/mile. Net, we pay a lot less as we have solar and get a feed in tariff of 12p/kWh.

It’s a PHEV with a battery range of around 40 miles (more like 30 in winter) which covers the vast majority of our journeys. When in hybrid mode it gets 46mpg which is not bad for a huge estate.

With the new tariff starting today our electric car works out at 1.5p a mile. We also run our dishwasher, tumble dryer etc during that time so bigger sanings

Op just saw you said about the distance you travel, I commented to a salesperson about how some days on my day off I’d need to drop my mum who is almost 2 hours away to hospital, then come back to collect the kids and drop eldest to work and he said to be careful because some cars wouldn’t have that capacity without a charge in between or else I’d have to be extremely well organised with a full charge, and he said some hybrids wouldn’t cope well with so much motorway driving/ such distance

150 miles/week would cost about £1.72/week for me (largish car and EV tariff which is very cheap to charge overnight). It only gets expensive (though still less than current petrol prices) if you use public charging for all your miles. So far we've never needed to use it at all.

We have a Cupra Born, with a 79kwh battery. Not a. SuV, but the same battery and motor as the Skoda Elroq. We got it in January. If you charge at home abd getcab EV tariff, you get a very low rate at night for a few hours, and at your mileage you will probably always charge at home.
Our insurance was a little higher than our old car, and the tyres are more expensive, but only needs to be serviced every 2 years, and much less to have serviced, so that is cheaper. They use the motor for a lot of the braking so the brakes last much longer.
We just had our first road trip that needed charging at a public charger. I did a fair bit of research into the bext place to charge abs settled on a Tesla Charger at Gloucester Services. Downloaded the app, and added my credit card. Dead easy. Plugged in, started charge. Went fir breakfast. By the time we had been served our food and tea, before I had taken a sip, I got a notification the charge was complete. Nipped out, disconnected, moved car, the went fir breakfast. A lot easier and quicker than expected. We put in enough leccy to cover the rest of the journey, about 160 miles. Cost £21, the equivalent of about the same that petrol would have cost for the same mileage. Got home, wuth 45 miles range left, plugged in and charged up over 2 nights at the cheapest rate. To charge the battery right up, would take 70kwh at 4p per kwh, so £2.80, so the whole trip, 400 miles cost £23.80 in electricity. Petrol woukd have cist £56 in my old car
We expect to do about 10,000 miles this year, most charged at home at 4p per kwh, getting about 4 miles per kwh, so 1p per mile. So the 10,000miles will cost £100. We will probably have a few trips where we need to charge away, so if we allow another £100 for that we will spend £200 on fuel to drive 10,000 miles. Petrol for the same distance would be £1,400 so a massive saving.

If you can charge at home the savings are well worth having. There are some good prices on used cars, and some good deals on new.

Electric tariffs have gone up, we fixed ours before Trump started the Iranian bombing, but it still a lot cheaper than Petrol.

If you can't charge at home it will probably be more expensive, but you can get accounts with some of the charging companies which give you discounts

My EV has saved us a fortune. It does about 4 miles per kWh an hour and from today it costs 3.49p per kWh to charge.

We frequently use ours to travel from South Yorkshire to Norfolk to see DS2. In the Summer we could probably get home too, on one charge but we are too scared to risk it so top up at Tesla before we leave. We always manage to get there in the Winter with charge to spare, too despite having the lights, heated seats, heated steering wheel on, and charging our phones.

Sounds good. Which EV? Is the free charger always included with this car?

Which EV is this? How much does the range reduce to in this colder months?

Thanks that’s interesting. I think I would not have to do long motorway journeys: in reality it will be 40-45 mile round trips to work x 3 days per week plus any local runaround’s

Thinking of the Kia Niro EV: would be used and they seem to be anywhere from 12k upwards. I needed to buy a new car anyway as my 16 year old Yaris needs replacing soon. I was dead set on a Yaris Cross but now an EV seems the way to go . Not in a desperate hurry though so open to suggestions

We can get over 5mikes per KWH in ideal conditions - summer, daylight, slowish roads

it can drop to 3 - it was cold winter, dark, driving into a strong headwind , windscreen wipers running and the fans to get the windows from misting up. Think it was slightly uphill as well

id never drive more than 2 or 3 hrs without a short break though so could always do a top up charge…

however

had the car nearly a year and this weekend may be the first time we need to use a commercial charger. We haven’t needed to be that far from home yet ( we took a train to London once but wouldn’t have driven for that trip whatever the car )

Nero has usually a 64kwh battery size
at that age - lost around 10%
so 58 kwh

under less than ideal conditions -3 miles per kWh- and assuming you run in the 20-80% range under most circs that’s over 100 miles before charging ( don’t charge past 80%, don’t run on empty for optima battery health) . 100 miles round here is 2.5 to 3 hrs so time for a break anyway.

under normal conditions you would get more range , and for a big trip you can charge to 100% to get more again