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

The Niro is a great car. They come up fairly often in used lease deals too, for about £160-240/month depending on what sort of deposit you put down (that includes all service, MOT, tyres, breakdown costs too).

We have 2 EVs so charge one every night between 11-5 (octopus cheap times). Our electric bill is about £200 a month. It’s not risen much at all because I’ve also got plug timers for things like the heated airer, the cordless vacuum and use the dishwasher etc in the cheap overnight hours.

The charger was £1000 to purchase and install. The cars are both secondhand and the price difference between them and petrol was negligible.

I don’t like charging on the go but do this very infrequently. Public Charger points don’t always work and are v expensive to use.

I save a lot. I used to fill up £60 tank twice a week. Now I charge on Octopus intelligent energy. I can charge I think it's after 11 pm for 7p pkh. In April it's going down to 3.4p pkh. I charge up overnight every night and over a month it cost about £20. Being on that tariff also saves money though as all overnight electric is going to be 3.4p pkh. I load dishwasher, washing machine and tumble dryer through the day but use delay switch so they only start washing after 11pm.

That's what we have. Love it. I have the '2' not the '4' because I see no need for heated seats.

We got our Cupra Born in January. In the colder weather our range was about 260 miles, at the moment, on warmer days, it's up to about 320. We got a home charger installed for £149 as a deal with the car.

@DancingFerret

considered the cost of a replacement battery at some point in the future

Why would you do that? All the experience of the last few years and over 50 million EVs sold worldwide, is that batteries are outlasting the cars. Already, 8, 10 & 12 year warranties are being offered with 100,000+ miles (model dependent, obvs) and those are only offered because the car companies are confident that only a tiny % of claims will be made.

Don’t be sucked into believing what Clarkson said in 2008, based on mobile phone batteries. Modern EVs have battery thermal, charging and discharging management systems that make an iPhone look like a Ni-Cad toothbrush from 1980.

The first EV we bought, a 4 year old Leaf in 2018, is now 11 years old and still going strong, and DS’s BMW i.3 is nudging 100,000 miles with almost no reduction in range, so you should take that “battery replacement” cost out of your calculation.

@isthesolution

Public Charger points don’t always work and are v expensive to use.

It’s true that you get stung for 89p/kWh if you rock up to a Shell or BP garage and use a credit card, but the Electroverse, Tesla and other apps enable you to join a rapid charging network of your choice and access steep discounts. 5kW Char.gy lamppost chargers cost 39p/kWh overnight, which is what we rely on for local driving.

We nearly always pay ca. 25-39p/kWh and over 1,000 of miles of 100% public charging are averaging 40.7p/kWh and 11p/mile, including the network membership fees we’ve paid. The most we have ever paid is 62p/kWh, but that included access to 4 hours of prime London parking, so the charging was almost free.

That’s not as cheap as home charging can be, for sure, but then we haven’t paid £1,000 or whatever for a home charger to be installed, and is a lot less than our Volvo estate used to cost, so we’re extremely happy with our EV - we will never go back to a fossil burner.

If i charge at night it cost 3.50 a charge opposed to 35.00 a week in petrol.

@WildCountry

lovely and snug without an engine running. Battery percentage didn’t even change!

I think this is something that non-EV drivers don’t appreciate at all. Being able to pre-cool/heat the car and running the climate doesn’t use much energy compared with a highly inefficient and polluting ICEV ticking over just to run the aircon. It makes EVs so much more pleasant to live with, even before one has discovered single-pedal driving (or its nearest equivalent).

DS made an impact leaving work last winter - while his colleagues were busy scraping ice off their cars (probably with their engines wasting fuel to “warm-up”) he just walked up and drove off, having set his i.3 to preheat before he left.

One of them has already traded in his plug-in hybrid for a full EV, since he realised there was almost zero benefit in the hybrid, given he did most of his miles commuting with the battery anyway.

Update! I have agreed to buy a Kia Niro EV used 2023. It’s the ‘2’ model so does not have heated seats etc but I am super happy with my decision. Well I don’t have it yet nor do I have a home charger but will do soon 😍. Key things are battery health of 100% mileage 22k.

@Ayebrow A home charger isn’t £1000!

About 2p/ mile on an EV tariff.

We are only paying about a £1 per 100km charging at home at the moment, though expecting it to go up a bit soon. We have a special cheap tariff for EVs that kicks in and charges the car at off peak times.

So about £2.50 a week for you. Less than £3 i think even when it goes up.

Obviously a lot more expensive if you end up charging on the motorway!

Mmm, let me Google that for you.

“Installing a home EV charger typically costs £800–£1,200 including labour.”

Cost of an EV charger

We paid well over £600 to have one installed in 2018. The basic cost can be quite low, but any kind of extended cable run from the consumer unit can easily double the cost.

So you may well have paid less than £1,000, but that says nothing about how much any other person would pay. So “£1,000 or whatever”, in my view, is a fair estimate, no?

We needed one at relatively short notice and had the choice of paying about £1100 to a bigger company with a few months' lead time or £1300+ to a local company who could do it within a week or so. The chargers themselves are often under £1000 but installation by a qualified person/company is a few hundred on top.

£151 this year so far on husband's mobility car (so we didn't pay for instalation). Done about 6k miles.
Put more than £150 in my 1ltr fiat last month!

We paid around £800 on installation of a charger. What we saved on petrol covered that in less than a year. I’ve had an EV for a few years now, but at the time spent around £150 a month on petrol; I increased our electricity DD by £20 per month. Obviously savings etc. are dependent on mileage etc., and I have a company car so I don’t need to factor in whether the car is more expensive but on fuel alone, very much more economical.