EV running costs?

Re efficiency.

It’s basic physics at heart.

The main vehicle loss is aerodynamic drag, which increases with the square of speed.

For EVs there are low “fixed” losses, and the motor efficiency curve is quite flat, so over above 20mph is efficiency drops off. An EV also recovers a large proportion of braking energy so the stop start nature of slower speed driving like in cities has less of an impact. Overall result – much better efficiency at lower speeds.

For ICEs, the same aero drag applies. An ICE has higher “fixed” losses – mostly waste heat and power needed to keep the engine and all its ancillaries spinning. It’s also got a very non-linear efficiency curve. The engine has its max efficiency point at fairly high power levels vs the power a car actually needs to run (one of the reasons why large engines cars get worse MPG vs small ones – they run further away from the max efficiency point more of the time). They also lose all braking energy to heat via the brakes so stop start driving is bad for efficiency. The net result of all that is the peak efficiency point where the factors balance out is about 50mph mph – vs slower speeds is increasing but the engine is also running closer to the max efficiency point and the fixed losses are getting less important due to then higher number of miles covered per unit of time. Above this 50mph ish point aero drag effects increases faster than the other factors hence efficiency drops.

I notice everyone is taking the cost of the vehicle as a sunk cost.

Just buy second-hand. A used Model 3 that’s just ticked over 3 years is now about £20k – still expensive for a car, but close to a third of the new price. You’ll still have the powertrain warranty for another 5 years too.

Mine was a salary sacrifice car so the sunk cost is pretty negligible since it fixed the awkward (but nice to have) marginal tax situation of >62% on every pound earned.

Give over do VW tyres need changing every 8k miles, maybe if you insist on launching it for the electric torque and no shifting giggles but normal driving no way. I’ve done 18k on mine in an ID4 and they’ve still got plenty of life.

I’m saving 13p mile ish on fuel compared to where I was on diesel, almost exclusively charging from home on intelligent go. Other costs are the same or lower, servicing is £150 but only every 2 years, insurance is basically the same, no adblue, no ulez issues and no tax.  It is more expensive but that because of the choice of vehicle at the time and the savings offset that, with the choice and prices available now that wouldn’t be an issue.

Prompted by this thread I’ve tried to work out our spend.

We bought a 3 year old eNiro July last year. We’ve put around 12k miles on it this year. Trip computer shows 4.1 miles/kWh over this time. Charging efficiency is around 80%.

The vast majority of the 12k is local driving, realistically probably averaging 20 – 30 miles per hour. We’ve done maybe 10 longer trips over the year 150 – 250 miles each way. Some of these we’ve had free charging at the far end. I rarely drive over 60 mph.

By my reckoning we’ve put around 750 kWhs into the car on rapids – £400. 2900 kWhs at home – £300. I reckon we would have spent around £2200 in petrol vs £700 electricity.

We had the battery go flat when we went on holiday last year, had to call out the AA to start the car. Not sure if it’s fair to count this as a cost to the EV but likely if it had been our old car we could have push started it (or would have gotten someone to jump start it). This cost us £200.

New battery and battery booster to prevent this happening again £125, again not sure it’s fair to count this as a cost against an EV but likely in the old car we’d have replaced the battery only.

Out insurance when up from 260 for an old Volvo s40 to £520 on the eNiro and up again £540 on year 2. I’m sure the s40 price would have gone up but equally sure there’s a big differential here.

We got free servicing year 1, bought a Kia service plan for year 4/5 – cost £135/year. MOT was £50. This is significantly less than we were spending to keep our old Volvo on the road though the Volvo was a 53 plate, I don’t expect the eNiro will get to 19 years old.

On the tyre side given discussion above, when we bought the car the fronts needed replaced, we put Goodyear 4Seasons on the front. These are about half worn now so I’d expect to get around 25k mile out of them. The rears hardly wear at all, when we bought the car they had around 4.5mm tread on them, now at 3.5mm.

Having guestimated the charging costs above, it obvious after writing it down but it was pretty shocking how a handful of rapid charges has cost significantly more that the majority of our home charging.

Note that we have not installed an EVSE – we do all home charging on a granny charger. This mostly suits us, there have been a few times where I’ve had to charge at peak rates as I couldn’t get enough into the car on the granny charge in the off-peak window. I reckon a EVSE would cost us on the order of £1500 to install. Seems massively expensive to me for what is essentially a glorified socket and I’ve read many anecdotes of EVSEs failing.

 I thought there were worries about having to replace the battery at great cost.

I think this was only really the very first few EVs… Early nissan LEAFs etc.

It seems that, past the 24/30kWh LEAFs, your car (as in..the metal and spinny parts) will die before the battery does..

DrP

EDIT – “I reckon a EVSE would cost us on the order of £1500 to install”.. prob more likely £900-1000..

EDIT – “I reckon a EVSE would cost us on the order of £1500 to install”.. prob more likely £900-1000..

Nope, not a simple install here so pretty sure it’ll be more than that here. My point stands at £900 – £1000 though, totally not worth it for us on expense vs convenience (and massively overpriced for what you’re getting).

I think the initial failing batteries was a) old battery tech batteries and charge management systems in early cars and b) small capacity batteries which needed fully charging/discharging to get sensible range putting further stress on the systems.

What’s a granny charger?

It’s a slow speed charger (2kWh I think) that plugs into a standard 13A socket. Tended to come with all EVs originally but think now it’s probably an option on a lot of them.

An EVSE is 7kWh so charges faster but needs a professional install.

Over the last 14k miles my Tesla Model Y has cost 5.9p a mile for electricity. That’s 65% home charging (7.5p per kWh or free solar), 28% Tesla Superchargers and 7% other charging networks.

Servicing costs have been zero but I just paid to have the tyres rotated. Reckon I’ll get low 20k miles out of them so you can tell the performance has been used. Insurance is another story working out around £1k a year with a clean licence. Expensive yes but probably on par with a similar sized and specced ICE vehicle that has the same performance.

* I found this interesting – counter to an ICE, they reckoned efficiency was higher on urban driving because the ‘engine braking’ regen of stop-start driving harvests energy back into the battery. Whereas on motorway driving it’s all out. I sort of understand thermodynamics, and can’t quite work that out, it might be right about reharvesting but does efficiency of movement outweigh aerodynamics, etc. Anyone with an EV can compare range for different sorts of driving?

Yep entropy.

At higher speeds your converting more of the power into heat via drag which cant be recovered.

Lower speeds = less drag = more miles per kW.

Regenerative braking in effect averages out the energy demand, it’s not as efficient as driving a the same average but constant speed but it will make 30mph stop/start closer to the 30pmh efficiency than the 70mph one.

It’ll vary by car though, I would imagine something smaller and slippery as a Tesla 3 would do far better on the motorway than the absolutely enormous brick that is the Polestar.

I don’t believe many batteries actually fail even on the older cars.  Certainly not all of them as there are loads trundling around here on commuter duty, inc mine (183000 kms).

Also how are older second hand Ears fairing?

Donald?  Is that you?

can definitely appreciate variable costs are lower, but how about fixed costs, what’s the breakeven on the difference in purchase price

Depends how many miles you do.  You can work it out based on 2p a mile or whatever your efficiency is going to be.

Battery replacements happened occasionally on early cars as they were working things out, but these days it’s no more of an issue than catastrophic engine failures in ICEs.  It might happen, but it’s not the norm.  There is a huge amount of anti-EV propaganda out there though for some reason.  The only cars we really have long term data for are themselves early models, like the Tesla Model S – and they are on average still at 90% of original capacity after 120k miles.  And a lot has been learned since they were built.  Also worth noting that batteries are servicable, cells can be replaced – you don’t need to replace the whole thing. Also, there are more used batteries available from scrapped cars  than are being used for replacements.  Sometimes DIYers replace whole batteries on old cars which means old Leafs basically.

Also there are far fewer other bits on EVs to go wrong.  EGR valves, turbos, camshaft sensors, timing chains, exhausts, DPFs – remember those?

Anyone with an EV can compare range for different sorts of driving?

Hyundai Ioniq EV 38kWh summer values: 5.2 miles/kWh on our trip to Scotland; about 6 on my wife’s commute involving largely DC and motorway but at slower speeds; 6 or sometimes 7 around town depending on the route profile.  Knock about 5-10% off in winter depending on how bad the weather is.

ev running costs are low but depreciation is meteoric, and still really high. eg : if you bought a corsa-e 4 years ago, it cost £29k. the same corsa is now worth £9k

https://www.autotrader.co.uk/car-details/202406120676787?sort=price-asc&advertising-location=at_cars&make=Vauxhall&model=Corsa-e&postcode=bn6%208ff&year-from=2020&fromsra

£5k/year in depreciation is way way higher than the equivilent petrol would have cost – it would also be worth £9k now (similar milage), but only cost £17k to start with

https://www.autotrader.co.uk/car-details/202407121723998?journey=PROMOTED_LISTING_JOURNEY&sort=price-asc&advertising-location=at_cars&make=Vauxhall&model=Corsa&postcode=bn6%208ff&year-from=2020&fromsra

£3k/year in additional depreciation is much more than the fuel would have cost over a similar period of time – at 15,000 miles per year in a corsa (per the above examples) you would have spent a bit under £2k/year in fuel, and nothing on electricity.

Buy second/third hand and keep for several years.

even if you buy at 1 year old and keep for 3 years, you’d have lost £20k in the above example. there isn’t enough data for cars older than that at the moment, except for the model s (with free charging which keeps its prices artificially high) the leaf (with dodgy batteries keeping its prices low) and oddballs like the i-miev\g-wizz which were never mainstream enough to really have comparitors. if you take cars that were sold as both hybrid and ev (eg the ioniq, the i3), the hybrid models hold their value much better.

I think the depreciation will settle once the technology stabilizes and people don’t get massive discounts on new ones by running them as a company car, but until then its a very big part of the TCO

Whilst I dont disagree that EVs cost per mile will be better than ICE, as above people are not factoring in the capital costs, whether this is a lease, or cash purchase.

Plus the charger costs. Also isnt EV insurance much higher than ICE?

I cant see how the overall cost per mile can be that good given that all EVs are stupidly expensive.

Oh and then there is the smiles per mile. Most EVs are as dull as heck to drive. (although i would have one all day long for city driving)

I think the depreciation will settle once the technology stabilizes and people don’t get massive discounts on new ones by running them as a company car, but until then its a very big part of the TCO

It’s partially down to external forces on the market though.  A disproportionate number of new EV’s are sold compared to the appetite for them. Not that they’re inappropriate/inadequate/poor just that people are buying MG4’s when they might have bought diesel Fabias.  Then those external market forces (tax breaks) don’t exist on the 2nd hand market.

The depreciation cost probably looks a whole lot more palatable if you add on the company car tax breaks.

And also part of it is surely the fact that the price of new ones have also fallen rapidly?  Fewer people are going to be spending ~£27k on a 2nd hand £45k  EV like a Model 3, when MG will now sell you a similar car a few years later for ~£27k.

Most EVs are as dull as heck to drive

Hmmm…I dunno about that…

Even our basic 148BHP FWD leaf was a hoot to drive, and the acceleration felt much ‘more’ than the headline power figures would suggest.

DrP

Whilst I dont disagree that EVs cost per mile will be better than ICE, as above people are not factoring in the capital costs, whether this is a lease, or cash purchase.

Plus the charger costs. Also isnt EV insurance much higher than ICE?

EVs aren’t always expensive necessarily – the main difference is that there aren’t new cheap/low end cars available.  If you fully load a big saloon or SUV to the same extent as the EV you will be paying similar money.  And the used values are in your favour if you buy used.  My EV was a similar price to an equivalent ICE, and now that model is significantly cheaper than the exact same car with a diesel engine.  The expensive new cars are aimed at leases where the zero/low BIK offsets it. Don’t buy a new EV – or ICE for that matter.

You don’t always need a charger.

My EV insurance is the same as for my diesel.

I cant see how the overall cost per mile can be that good given that all EVs are stupidly expensive.

It cost £12k for a 4 year old car; insurance is £500, fuel costs 1.5p a mile.  The saving over fuel is enough to pay for half the car loan payments.  I’m happy with that.  If we had to get an ICE we would be on a much older/crappier car for the same monthly outlay.

Most EVs are as dull as heck to drive

suspect most owners will disagree with this.  As I put in an earlier post, the big fat rear tyres on my BMW i4 are just about needing replaced at 10000 miles.  I suspect this is in part down to the 335 bhp going out through the rear wheels – it is an absolute pleasure to drive !

@5lab – your postcode (assuming that’s your postcode) is in those Autotrader links.

Most EVs are as dull as heck to drive

Where the hell did you get that idea from?

EVs are not always more expensive to buy. I had an Ateca that was €400 a month (Ireland), replacement was going to be closer to €450a month but my Born was only €300 a month, add in the fuel savings and no maintenance costs for 3 years (service/tyres/brakes included on service pack), insurance is the same as before. I reckon I am saving about €3k a year in fuel/repayments/running costs or €9k over the 3 years which covers any sh!tty depreciation. That said people often use book prices when stating depreciation but who pays book price (discounts/subsidies etc). My car was something like €44k but I paid around €37k, which again helps cover any depreciation. Cars are not cheap and cost what they do, you need to decide what’s right for your budget and for someone like me EVs make sense.

Whilst I dont disagree that EVs cost per mile will be better than ICE, as above people are not factoring in the capital costs, whether this is a lease, or cash purchase.

Plus the charger costs. Also isnt EV insurance much higher than ICE?

I cant see how the overall cost per mile can be that good given that all EVs are stupidly expensive.

Oh and then there is the smiles per mile. Most EVs are as dull as heck to drive.

As I and others have shown…SH EV prices have tumbled. If you’re buying secondhand (which the vast majority of people do) then the prices are largely parity.

Chargers payback depends on mileage done.

Insurance depends, ours wasn’t any higher on an eNiro. Would’ve been hefty on a Tesla.

You can’t see it because you’re looking at generalisations, and as @molgrips says, there’s a huge amount of misinformation out there around EVs. It’s funded by the FF lobby.

Smiles per mile comments crack me up. Car ownership and driving form an integral part of some peoples life. I’m not one of those people. It’s a means to get from A to B.

Oh and then there is the smiles per mile. Most EVs are as dull as heck to drive.

Top selling cars in the UK: Ford Puma 26,374, Kia Sportage 24,139, Nissan Qashqai 22,881, Nissan Juke 19,429, Audi A3 19,209, Volkswagen Golf 17,587, MG HS 16,730, Hyundai Tucson 16,182, Volkswagen T-Roc 15,667.

Evidently most car buyers don’t really care about Clarkson-style “performance”.

Most EVs are as dull as heck to drive.

I think this is a fair comment, but also missing the point. We’ve a fun car (gt86) and a boring family car (zafira tourer). There are no EVs that would come close to fulfilling the GT86 role (small, light, engaging to drive), although the tesla roadster was close, and I think it’d be pretty hard to engineer one that would. The market for those cars is tiny regardless of the drivetrain, so its no surprise manufacturers aren’t going after that market as a priority.

as a family runabout, the dullness is likely outweighed by the silent running and the ease of accessing performance. EVs are better at that, so being dull to drive isn’t really an issue

As politecameraaction says, most cars full stop are dull to drive. I’d suggest that on average EVs are better to drive since they are all autos and all have buttery smooth instant power delivery.  My Leaf was a fairly rubbish car but was still good fun to throw about for a family hatchback.  It had instant torque at low speeds that was a right hoot, and the roadholding was good enough to have some low key fun in it.  Obviously no sports car but more entertaining than other boring family cars I’ve driven.  The Ioniq has soft springs but brilliant weight distribution with all the weight low down and centred, so it turns in really well.  If you lowered it properly, changed the springs and dampers and fitted low profile sporty tyres it’d be a right hoot – again, within the context of a normal family car.  Only the lack of overall power lets that one down.

So no small lightweight sportscars but it’s absolutely untrue to say that EVs are dull to drive all round.  They redefine the concept of ‘nippy’, you can get up to speed and brake again in an incredibly short length of road.

Most EVs are as dull as heck to drive

Most people who think this conflate “noisy” with “exciting”.

Been following this thread with interest as getting and running an EV is a possibility now our lease cars about to go back and so looking for real world range and running costs etc …most of our driving is rural country lanes to work , 12 miles each way , BUT …. we need enough range to get to Birmingham (167 miles) easily enough when needed …but this is only 5 or 6 times a year,  almost all charging will be done at home except the odd trip out , see above

Anyone run an ID3 pro .. or even the new Astra although wife’s not keen on the looks of the Astra , she prefers the Mokka but range is barely 200 miles !

Thanks for any info and sorry for the slight Hijack …… As you were

200 mile range will do what you’ve mentioned with ease…

I’d reckon 95% of your charging would be at home… If you headed off to Brum (just…why?! ?) with 100% you’d arrive with, prob, 30 %… Half fill up the battery there, and you’ll make it home again…

The ev mindset is different..once you get over the idea of “arriving home on empty” (cos you can fill up at home) it makes more sense…

DrP

If you headed off to Brum (just…why?! ?)

As my children and grand kids live there , I escaped after 52 years and now live up’t north near the coast 🙂

Don’t want to get an EV with 200 mile range only to find out in the real world its 170 etc …. as you say its a mindset thing

My Born (same as ID3) gets me around 220 miles on average (according to the onboard info after nearly 4k miles) depending how I drive. If I take it handy etc it will do more (240+) but I can have a heavy left foot and can reduce the range to 190miles on some occasions. Only had the car 4 months and mainly driven on main road/dual carriageway at 60+. On slower country roads, 50ish, my range increases a fair bit, not done a motorway drive yet so can’t say how this impacts on range.

Without knowing the battery capacity, that’s ^^^ totally useless.

‘^^^eh, how’s that. Stumpy was asking about ID3 so i gave the info from my car (an ID3 with a different skin basically). They mentioned 200 miles so I take it they are looking at the 58kw battery (my car) not the 77kw.

drove from Glasgow to Silverstone and back for the Grand Prix the other weekend.  About 4.5 hrs driving time each way to our Air BnB in Rugby.  The car scheduled 2 top ups on each main journey on fast chargers – 7 mins and 14 mins or thereabouts on way down, and similar on way back. In addition we plugged it in for an hour and a bit on the Friday night while we ate a Nando’s, and for 20 mins on the Sunday night (we had been commuting accommodation to venue Sat and Sun which was about 25 mins driving and 2 hrs car park queuing stop start each way).

Got home with 10%.  Our away charging cost £80 for about 800 miles of use, having left home with a full battery.  Once back home on the Monday it charged overnight from 10% to 100% at a cost of around £6.

^^^ should have added, BMW i4, 84kWh battery, around 280- 330 miles range depending on weather and roads

2500km into running a new model 3 dual motor here. Tesla indicate I’ve spent $21 total (£11) in electric. So 0.7p per mile in “fuel”. I’m on the same tariff as the OP here in Aus, so we do the majority of our charging for free.

The vehicle is on a salary sacrifice. The dual motor is around $66k AUD new here. I’m fortunate to get full higher-rate tax benefits on the car, electric, all maintenance and insurance. So that’s 45% off all list prices.

As above, it feels like cheating. Such a nice car to drive, so cheap to run, I can almost forget that I have mental Elon to thank for the pleasure.

Does this thread contain all the making progress drivers that make holes in hedges?

( sorry car enthusiasts)

You might factor in that the government will have to tax evs as they get more widespread.

The current situation where you are subsidised by the rest of us who are doing our best to use more sustainable transport will not last forever.

The goal has to be to reduce car use and speed and leave cyclists and walkers to feel slightly safer on the roads.