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How Much Does It Cost to Charge an Electric Vehicle? (A comparison at home and on the road, with gasoline)
(www.caranddriver.com)
this post was submitted on 19 Sep 2023
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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.
How does the process of requesting a street charger work, wouldn't that require council approval or some such?
As its street furniture it will, like the approval to hook up a charger to the grid, which all fixed (home) chargers need in the UK, it should be handled by the installer for you. As there are as many NIMBY councils you have a non zero chance of it being approved or not approved, there are councils will reject solar panel installs for example.