Electric cars have crossed lifetime cost parity with petrol vehicles across much of Europe. In the used-car market they now have the lowest total cost of ownership.
Newer models even match petrol cars in estimated lifespan, that’s something early EVs could not claim.
This study shows that any new electric vehicle sold today will bring financial benefits to its second and third owner. New electric cars registered now will deliver between €262 and €849/year savings for their future second and third owners compared to an equivalent petrol car.
It’s probably about how much you have to drive. And remember this is for new cars, it implies second hand has been ahead for a while.
What did a new EV cost 6 years ago? Maybe $40k USD? So you need to save over $6000 in gas each year. This needs to be $6000 more than the electricity cost of charging your EV. It feels like you must do an above average amount of driving for the savings to pay for the car in 6 years, or otherwise I’m off with my price guess or you get free electricity (e.g. solar).
In europe gas is expensive and electricity can be quite cheap because of rapid renewables adoption. In addition, you also have to factor in that gas cars need regular oil changes, engine maintenance and their brakes usually wear out much faster too.
Yeah there is quite low maintenence on EVs but they are said to go through tyres faster (on account of the weight). I figure any maintenance difference is probably not that big compared to not using fuel though.
We bought an almost-new (ex-demo) EV about 6 months ago. We get free power (due to accidentally OPing our solar it’s use or lose) and we paid a little over half the price of what the car would be new.
With mostly free power (still have to pay when we travel away from home) it’s going to take about 16 years to pay it off in fuel savings for us - and that’s not accounting for the interest on borrowing the money or the opportunity cost of investing the money elsewhere. If we had paid full price it would have been more like 25 years. This is based on before times fuel prices though, right now the numbers probably look better.
I think you have to do a lot of driving for a new car to pay for itself. We do a lot of WFH and when we commute it’s with public transport so I think that really eats into any savings because we only do like 12 000km a year.
I’m not a long distance driver (only 5 or 6 times a year I drive more than 200 km in a day) and in 2 years my car is over 40000 km. Charging at home means a savings of more than 4000€ with the old gas prices. With 2€/l it’s even more. And I’m doing the maths with diesel numbers (more km/l).
That’s the part that I forgot about, I save about $480 a month because I get free charging at work. We used to refill my wife’s car twice a week for our commute. I can’t imagine what it would cost for gas now at close to $7 a gallon some days
Haha there you go. You still must do an insane amount of driving to go through $480 of power a month though.
(not OP) We have 2 tier electricity prices here for consumers…
I’m just going to skip the 1st because a bill of $480 would put them into tier 2 so fast.
Tier 2 is $0.1408 CAD/kWh
That’s 3,409kWh.
An Ionic 5 has 63kWh/220miles for a standard range.
That’s 54 battery cycles a month, or 11,880miles a month.
Account for some losses along the way and lets just call it 10k miles a month.
At least that’s what it would be here.
Yeah 10k miles is more than what I drive in a year and they’re doing it in a month 😅. I am thinking that $480 may be at retail DC charging prices rather than home power usage prices because I’m not sure who would drive that much and not be driving for work (which would then be an unreasonable comparison to others buying EVs).
Ah, ya maybe there’s no home charging. Electricity rates here are pretty cheap though, they could be somewhere where it’s much more as well which would bring the miles down a lot. California would be more than double what I pay for example.
Paid 20k€ for a new eGolf. We drive about 25000 km per year. Gas is about 2 euros per litre, previous car needed about 7 litres per 100 km. Makes 3500€ per year for gas. The car uses 12 kWh per 100 km, by now we’re on solar, but we previously paid about 20 cents per kWh. That’s about 600 euros per year. That’s a bit more than 6 years, but we own the car for a bit more than six years, so there’s that.
Ah nice, that 25000km would be way above average where I live but sounds like it has worked out for you!
20k is also less than I was expecting, I don’t think we had many options for new EVs where I live 6 years ago. Tesla, Ioniq, Atto, Leaf. I wasn’t looking back then so maybe there were others I didn’t know about.
6 years ago I paid 23k€ for my factory new Ioniq (that I am very happy with and already out 190k km on)
Damn I think we are getting fucked over on EV prices. I don’t know about 6 years ago but now an Ioniq 5 costs $70k NZD for the cheapest model, that’s 35k€.
That’s similar to what an Ioniq 5 costs here at the moment as well, but that’s also a significantly better car than the classic Ioniq. A better comparison would be the current Hyundai Inster, which is smaller but has similar range
The original Ioniq was a very different car with a tiny battery. The Ioniq 5 is a significantly improved beast and starts at 46k € where I live (we’re a lower income country within the EU so our car prices have been adjusted to be higher than many other EU countries, accordingly).