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

I’m at the point of considering an EV due to the cost of diesel so have read this thread with interest. Good to see that people are finding it a good monthly cost saving. Though I guess there’s a risk that electricity is expected to rise quite a bit in Jan?

I would definitely get a home charger fitted. No idea about an EV tariff. I have the electric meter where it’s cheaper at night…..would that do the same effectively as long as I charge at night?

I am looking at Skoda enyaq, Astra electric, Kia Niro, Hyundai kona. I like the look of the new fiat panda grande electric and also the Geeley electric cars. I need to go and see some and get an idea of size.

I could have a smaller car as it’s only me and two small dogs but I like a bigger car as it feels a bit safer. Most of my driving is rural roads rather than urban and I feel the smaller cars are more suited to urban driving?

It’s well worth thinking about how much driving you actually do before you get a home charger fitted. There’s an excellent YouTube channel, Technology Connections, that explains how it’s very easy to do quite a big distance every day just on a normal domestic socket.

Essentially, you can get a weatherproof mains socket fitted outside (as you would to power a lawn mower or pressure washer or whatever) for a small fraction of what a 7kW capable dedicated EV charger would cost.

A standard mains outlet can supply 2.5kW continuously (with a so-called “granny charger”, and an overnight charge of 10 hours can therefore provide 25kWh. A modern EV, particularly a smaller one, can usually manage 4 miles per kWh in an urban environment where you’re doing a lot of regenerative braking, so that’s 100 miles of range every day, even though it might only be half the battery.

So people with a more powerful charger are finding that they can fill to 80% and then drive all week.

As I mentioned above, we can’t charge at home and have used the local lamppost chargers, which go from 3.5kW to 5kW, but that’s easily enough to give us over 100 miles of range in one off peak 7 hour session, so we don’t need to use them very often - our local trips are probably only 4-5 miles / day

Technology Connections worked out that you could manage a daily commute in excess of what you can get overnight from a domestic socket, and gradually run your battery down from 100% to 20% over 5 nights, and then do a longer charge at the weekend to start on Monday with 100% again.

Obviously, if you have a need to do longer journeys quite regularly then a dedicated 7kW charger makes sense, but if your daily trips are 50 miles or less (which is the average for the vast majority of people), then a much cheaper outdoor mains socket may be more than enough, and would save you £100s

On the Tariff thing, I know some people who have an ultra cheap EV tariff, and some that have a standard overnight one like you do, but also several others that just use a normal domestic tariff. On its own that’s still a lot cheaper than petrol or diesel and it can be better overall if you cannot fit all your charging within the cheapest window.

That’s really interesting thank you. Hadn’t even crossed my mind about charging it at home with a normal exterior socket.

we pay about £8 a charge at home and it gives us 350 miles. We have a KiaEV4 it’s the best thing we did it saves us so much money.

I don’t think it sank in with me either until I watched that YouTube video (TC is great on dishwashers too 😀). Mostly because when we bought the Leaf in 2018 the government was still providing around £500 towards getting a full EV charger installed at home.

And that was nowhere near enough, since the consumer unit was at the back of the house so we had a longer cable run than was covered in the “standard” install and had to pay something like £300 on top to do that.

We had enough evidence an outdoor domestic socket would have been fine as well - in the 2-3 weeks before the charger was installed we hung an extension cord out of the window. The Leaf’s range is minuscule by today’s standards, with just a 24kWh battery, and it was bought just to do local daily driving anyway.

It’s not that a “proper” EV charger isn’t useful. Now there’s two EV’s in the household, one of which does much greater distances, the extra kW is needed. And some of the more advanced capabilities of flexible energy tariffs, particularly if you have solar panels and a home battery, need a dedicated unit.

But if your mileage needs aren’t huge, a domestic socket is sufficient, and you can ignore all the “experts” wanting to sell you the latest tech - just check that your EV has the ability to schedule the charge, either from the dash or its app, so that you can plug it in and let the car start and stop the charge.

Just a bit of an update on costs. When we bought our Cupra in Jan this year, we took our wheel and tyre insurance, the dealer discounted the cost as part of the total deal. Good thing, as we clipped the kerb last month, scuffing two of the wheels and damaging one tyre. The tyres are 20", low profile and wide - £265 each. Plus repairing the rims would have cost another £300. So more than covered by insurance. Checking how much tread has been used, I reckon we will get around 20,000 miles out of the tyres, so at around £250 per tyre, about 4p per mile. At the moment, our electric tariff costs us less than 1p per mile, expect this to increase to 4p per mile when our fixed tariff ends in March. So tyres and fuel together, max of 8p per mile, so even with the incoming 3p per mile tax, still much cheaper than a petrol car.