How Much Does It Cost to Charge an Electric Vehicle? (A comparison at home and on the road, with gasoline)::Few people know what a kilowatt-hour costs them, so they don’t realize how cheap EV home charging is versus gasoline. On the road, it’s more complicated.
Some UK prices for comparison:
At home within the EV charging window with Octopus I pay 9p a kwh, outside that window its just over 29p, so I never charge outside the window. I also run my dishwasher, washing machine and anything else I can during that window, typically excluding my EV charging (we are a 3 EV household as both my kids have EVs), we have about a quarter of our electric usage during the cheap window.
Typical cost outside the home for a charger up to 22kw is about 45p a kwh, rising to 75p a kw for ultra rapid pushing out a couple of hundred kws. Its pretty normal in the UK to pay more for a faster charger.
Some places still have free charging but these are drying up, and typically they are limited to a couple of hours of charging at 3 to 7kw.
Petrol is 155.5p a liter, or about £7.06 a (UK) gallon. A modern ICE than is a similar size to my EV should be getting around 50mpg, so 14.12p per mile. 70mpg is possible out of a modern self charging hybrid, this is about 10p a mile. Plug in hybrids potentially offer the same battery power only for 100% of the journey that a full EV offers in the UK for the majority of journeys, as the UK average distance is about 8.5 miles.
Worth pointing out that petrol on a motorway service station (where you will mostly be charging your EV on a long journey) jumps from 155.5p to 177.86p. This increases the cost per mile for the 50mpg example to 16.14p.
My EV gets 4.5 miles per kwh in the summer so about 2p a mile, when its properly cold in the winter than drops to about 3.5 miles per kwh or 2.57p per mile. Assuming an ultra rapid charger at 75p a kwh, cost rises to 16.67p for summer, and 21.42p for winter. Obviously you only charge what you actually need to complete your journey at that price, not fill it up to 100%.
Assuming an equal cost to own and run (which is not the same as purchase price) EVs are significantly cheaper in the UK if you charge at home. If you cannot charge at home then I would look into a provider like Shell installing an on street charger in a lamppost or not bothering at this point if you are motivated by cost.
That’s really useful information. Thanks for taking the time.
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I agree, but I still get a hard-on for the electric Hummer. Not because of the way it looks, but because of all the crazy shit it can do like crab walk and the huge ass battery it has. It’s actually a pretty amazing piece of tech.
-Bolt owner
19 cents/kwh at home, and that includes all fees and taxes. The most expensive charge I did was at a Petro Canada, which was 53 cents a minute. I was just topping up so the 20 minutes I was there came to a whopping 91 cents/kwh. There’s a lot of free fast chargers where I am too.
This summer, at Electrify America in Erie PA, I recently paid $0.35 / kWh. And at Electrify Canada in Hamilton ON, I paid $0.57 CAD / min, which is $0.23 CAD / kWh at 150 kW.
This is roughly on par with the cost of gasoline, per mile. I assume the margins are pretty thick for Electrify, because household electricity costs less than a third of that.
For example, say it costs $0.35 / kWh. At 3.5 miles / kWh, that’s $0.10 / mile.
For comparison, say gas costs $3.50 / gallon. At 30 miles / gallon, that’s $0.12 / mile.
A side note: It’s only on par with gas dependent on the kWh. When that changes the outcome changes. Not all EVs get 3 kWh.
I got it how to charge at home or ok the road, but how with gasoline ?
Fill a generator with gasoline. Plug the car into the generator.
I appreciate the plain English for the mixed bag it is for apartment dwellers.
Can we have electricity? No, we have electricity at home!
In Louisiana, for a Bolt EV, 100 miles of home charging is $2.81, and 100 miles of EVgo fast-charging is $11.82; 100 miles in a 33-mpg small SUV would cost about $10.
So anyone not living in a home that allows them to setup home charging is better off (financially) with an ICE car. And anyone buying an electric car with long road trips as the justification, has been mislead.
So much for Tesla’s “Probably Savings” pricing they advertise everywhere.
yeah but thats mpg is typically highway miles, not counting for idling in traffick, which if you are hopping around town doing your chores and shopping and what have your super efficient highway MPG isnt going to be nearly as relevant, and will consume a alot more gas.
Which makes electric, even charging off a tier 1 plugin charger, more viable I think, from a fuel perspective.
Maybe. I think it will depend on each individual’s travel patterns, as well as the car they end up getting. A Honda Civic gets 31mpg in the city and 40 on the highway, and that’s just the first car I looked at. Looking at a hybrid, like the Prius, it’s in the 50-mpg range with only a 1-mpg difference between city and highway.
I think we can at least say that fuel savings should not factor in as a buying decision for those who won’t be charging at home. It isn’t a big enough difference to matter one way or the other, and the technical winner depends on the options on the table and the lifestyle of the buyer.
I mean it is, cause everything I’ve seen says that fuel costs can be double to 4x what the power costs are for recharging for an average EV… Which, if you have a 2000 per year gas bill, will see a very significant reduction.
especially if you do a lot of stop and go driving, or short range trips (to and back from work, store, school, etc), where you’ll be guzzling gas far quicker than on perfect highway conditions.
Hell, with stuff like A Better Route Planner, long range trips aint to hard either.
Technology Connections and Aging Wheels did a long roadtrip a few months back in an EV and did a series of videos about it.
Even plugging into a normal 110V at home makes a difference.
The biggest thing people forget about EVs vs ICE is that you almost never leave home without a full tank.
That’s all well and good for someone in a house. It doesn’t work for someone living in an apartment complex where they don’t have outlets they can simply plug into, and running an extension cord outside would likely violate some rules, or simply be impossible.
I’ve lived in places where my apartment was 3 floors up and my car was at least 100 yards from my door. I lived in another place where I was 21 floors up and my car was in a parking structure down the street. Another place has garage under the building with controlled access. I’ve lived in about 20 different apartments of all kinds, and I can’t think of a single one where I would have been able to charge a car.
Access is a problem for many people. I don’t know why I’m getting so much push back on this. Has no one lived in an apartment?
We definitely don’t realize how often we sit idle at lights, etc. That destroys MPG in a gas vehicle. In an electric the vehicle doesn’t even lower the kWh since it’s not providing energy to the motor(s) while idle. This is an easy to see comparison in a PHEV.
