From NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT
By Paul Homewood
The price of charging an electric car using a public rapid charger is now more expensive than filling up with diesel according to data gathered by Parkers. The soaring price of wholesale gas and electricity has forced up the cost of charging a typical electric car, with £10 of charge taking you less far than the same amount of diesel.
This rise in EV charging begins to bite just as petrol and diesel prices are finally beginning to fall. Despite the spiralling costs of using public electric car chargers, the long-term consideration of an electric car is still very much on many drivers’ minds.
The RAC says that the average price per kilowatt hour (kWh) of a UK rapid charger is 63.29p, but it can cost a lot more. Osprey announced in August 2022 prices on its rapid chargers to £1 per kilowatt hour. Tesla charges an average of 77p/kWh for non-Tesla drivers (according to Zap-Map), and the second largest rapid network, Gridserve, charges 66p/kWh.
Refilling petrol vs public charging prices
The gap between petrol, diesel and electric is closing. Using Parkers’ own Miles Per Pound data gathered from official WLTP testing, we can directly compare how much it costs to fuel your car – by saying how far your money will take you when using public chargers at the RAC’s average cost. Putting £10 in your tank is now working out cheaper than £10’s worth of plugging in at a typical fast or rapid charger.
- Audi Q5 (2.0 TFSI petrol) vs E-Tron
Petrol takes you 46 miles for £10, whereas electric on a public charger takes you 35 miles - BMW 4 Series Gran Coupe (420d) vs i4
Diesel takes you 73 miles for £10, whereas electric on a public charger takes you 44 miles - Citroen C4 (110hp diesel) vs e-C4
Diesel takes you 84 miles for £10, whereas electric on a public charger takes you 59 miles - Mercedes-Benz GLA (2.0 petrol) vs EQA
Petrol takes you 43 miles for £10, whereas electric on a public charger takes you 52 miles - Peugeot 208 (110hp diesel) vs e-208
Diesel takes you 89 miles for £10, whereas electric on a public charger takes you 56 miles - Vauxhall Mokka (110hp diesel) vs Vauxhall Mokka-e
Diesel takes you 80 miles for £10, whereas electric on a public charger takes you 50 miles
In fact Parker’s are understating just how expensive running costs are for EVs, because their figures for petrol/diesel include fuel duties, which account for nearly half of the cost.
So, for instance, if you exclude fuel duties the Vauxhall Mokka will take you will take you about 130 miles for your tenner.
As we all know, sooner or later EV drivers will have to pay their share of fuel duties one way or another. Therefore it is fraudulent to ignore these costs in any comparison between EVs and proper cars.
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As I type there is a Nissan Leaf plugged into the lamppost next to my house. It’s going to be there for hours – it’s on a lighting circuit. This is part of a deal between my local council and Siemans. Petrol is still coming down in price – £1.62/l from £2/l, but then I have to pay road tax etc
My favourite is the guy with the EV Mini down the road. He has a domestic charge point, but he can’t always park it outside his house. So what does he do? He runs a bog standard mains extension cable to where it is.
I wondered about EVs and MOT tests. In the UK cars > 3 years old are tested by law, annually.
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/alternative-fuel-vehicles-guidance-for-mot-testers/hybrid-electric-and-hydrogen-fuel-cell-systems-guidance-for-mot-testers
“You need to know how to safely:
start the vehicle and move off
stop and immobilise the vehicle
If you’re unfamiliar with the vehicle, you can check the owner’s handbook or ask the customer to explain how to do this”.
And interestingly…
5 Training and more information
“You can carry out an MOT tests on these types of vehicles without any further recognised training.”
Some EVs must be coming up for a test before too long
I’d hate for you to have to sue him for the pain and anguish you’d suffer from tripping over his cables
And I have lived in places where an cord would be stolen if left out
I wonder how often those cables get stolen?
All the time if you did this and live anywhere near a major city from what I hear. Which is pretty much the only places where you would have to do this kind of thing, i.e. park on the street because no garage. Doing this in your driveway might last a bit longer before it disappears one morning. EV’s will never be the right solution for renters/ downtown dwellers.
In other words, the only place where you have a chance of being able to charge your EV, is the same place where EVs make the least amount of sense in the first place.
I can see EVs in high dense areas (i.e. large urban areas) but they clearly are not the complete solution
I grew up in cold climate, When you run a block heater drive on top of the cord, that makes thief rater difficult.
They sort of remind me of those traffic lights with LEDs. They were great until they didn’t heat enough to melt the snow that formed on them.
I wonder when the first death will occur from a stupid street vandal trying to cut the cable?
I don’t know about the UK, but where I live it is illegal to run an extension cord from your house to your RV. It is a gross safety hazard. Anything can happen to that guy’s cables, from animals chewing through the insulation to short-circuits from vehicles running into the street-side charging point. I wonder if his EV’s batteries can avoid combustion under all possible circumstances.
Where do you live and why do think it is a gross safety violation?
Been doing it for years in lots of different places.
I think it is a bad idea to sell candy out of white van in school zone.
Where I live everything is illegal. However, to get arrested you have to get stinking drunk and kill a few school children in front of the school.
I am not being sarcastic.
It is like this. It is an unlikely event for a cops to enforce rule that they are violating. While the mayor might have an EV parked in the driveway with a code charger, the city employees have extension cords running to their RVs.
Lots of RVs, no evs. I live in the US.
EV owners pay no road tax or the duty on fuel and often evade congestion charges etc. In addition councils are installing charger points free of charge.
EV drivers need to pay a £1000 a year licence fee as otherwise they are being subsidised hugely by other road users.
Like renewables its fine when there are only a few of you, you can bludge of the system without much pain.
As soon as the numbers start to increase though, and the system subsidising you starts to buckle, the cost is going to have to fall on the bludgers and the real cost will be revealed.
And with due regard for roads maintenance tax consider the weight of an EV when compared to an equivalent ICEV.
I read it but nothing registered. “Bog standard mains cable”. We use descriptions like welding cable, battery cable, or #4 cable. Is that what you mean?
Costs more and doesn’t work as well? Try having a service problem in a rural town with your EV and you’ll discover another problem with EV’s. There might be a good place for EV’s, like trying to reduce air pollution in the center of major cities, but everywhere else they are expensive virtue signaling.
The only EV – actually designed to do a specific job – that worked in the UK was the milk float.
Golf Carts!
In most large cities, with cars built in the last 20 years, the air coming out the tail pipe of an ICE, is cleaner than the air being pulled in through the filter.
Thanks, MarkW, I’ll tell my wife that he next time she complains about…….
But we have been told by our favorite troll the EVs, with fewer moving parts, don’t break down.
Also, why would you need service in a rural area – these are city cars.
But the battery pack removal and replacement is rarely mentioned, or the lower resale value based on condition of the batteries.
Well, to be fair, unless the broken thing is the battery or the other high voltage systems, your neighborhood mechanic should be able to fix any of the normal parts from frame/body to wheels. The service issue is more a problem with all the new electric car companies trying to be Apple, Inc 2.0, and use that business model. They won’t sell parts, won’t release build data, and won’t certify small repair shops unless they pay out the nose for meaningless credentals and play by a restrictive (and overpriced) set of repair by replace protocols.
To play devils advocate, you’re only fooling yourself if you think Ford, GM, and all the others are not planning the same. Unless governments start taking right to repair seriously, we are in the last days of independent repair shops for all makes. Every automaker absolutely wants your mechanic out of business.
That just isn’t true. The cost of EV repairs are more than 2x a car with an ICE engine during the first years of ownership, because just about everything that goes wrong requires expensive tools to diagnose and repair. Even body work is more complicated. They’re more dangerous to work on. You can’t even paint them the same way as a regular car.
I heard that a tail light lens for a new EV Hummer costs $6,100 plus labor
The few are not concerned.Rolls-Royce says it already has hundreds of U.S. orders for its $413,000 Spectre electric vehicle
Damn.
$413,000?!? Now THAT is some serious virtue signaling.
It just screams “Eat my shorts you cheap-ass Tesla drivers! $100k? pffftt!”
UK papers estimate [19th Oct] a cost of c. £500,000; so about US$ 550-600,000.
FWIW.
Auto
Just goes to show you how rich (and stupid) the U.S. has become.
Not all americans are stupid. Libtards and politicians, yes
You have to be very wealthy to be that stupid.
Nah, stupidity is egalitarian. It even drifts into populism.
GM Cadillac have announced their competitor EV.
“Therefore it is fraudulent to ignore these costs in any comparison between EVs and proper cars.”
Proper cars – exactly!! Using the inherent advantage of energy-dense hydrocarbon fuels, producing harmless H2O and CO2, the two most recyclable and environmentally friendly compounds we know of.
EV’s might indeed have a place in the market as users choose. But not by coercion or mandate.
If someone gave me an EV I’d sell it and buy something I liked.
EV’s are oversized, glorified Golf Carts/Car-b-ques, and don’t do it for my long distance trips, no thanks. My electric bill is already too high, and getting worse every month, don’t need to add another high power draw to my system.
Problem solved!
One of the reasons for “smart” motorways – pay per mile
As long as fuel duty and VAT are taken off petrol and diesel and VED applied to EVs I might find that acceptable
Not gonna happen, mate
Most EVs do 80% or more of their charging at home. In the US, this is circa 12c/kWh. Or 6c/kWh if you sign up for an off-peak rate.
EVs go 1-4 miles per kWh. Truck towing will use 1kWh/mi. Compact car in good weather will use 250Wh/mi.
In real life, EV fueling costs from 1.5-12c per mile US.
Fast charging is more expensive. Most drivers only use it when they have no other options.
Electricity costs are still reasonable in US but a different story in EU countries. Don’t worry I am sure some of your politicians are working hard to solve that for you 🙂
California will be the crash-test dummy for this pathway.
And New York State.
Since California is already crashing, how can you separate which damage was done by what? 😎
Looking around here in California, I don’t see us “already crashing”. But we are approaching a tipping point rapidly. The mid-term results, at the state level, should be a good indicator.
The mid-terms will depend upon voter turnout. Voter turnout is so important here in California that, in some areas, there was well over 100% turnout to vote in 2020. Talk about voter enthusiasm.
/sarc
Enough to wake up the dead!
Here in Arizona we had 40,000 more ballots than registered voters, funny Trump only lost somewhere in that margin. How can you have more ballots than voters in any election. That was the norm in the 2020 election, more votes than voters.
I thought about limiting my comment to California’s large cities (“If you ever go to San Francisco, be sure to wear hip waders while your there…”).
Guess I should have. Sorry.
https://freebeacon.com/issues/flashback-obama-promised-electricity-costs-would-skyrocket/
And the morons still “voted” him into oval orifice 2x. If the election process can be trusted even back in ’08 to be honest. Doubtful anytime a lefty gets elected. Now 0biden gets to carry out that promise, whilst 0zero hides behind the curtain.
Just sayin’.
A sizable fraction of those who vote for Democrats don’t pay their own bills.
Currently, there is no penalty for being stupid, instead it’s more like a debt system with no required interim payment. Sadly, once the accumulating costs of being stupid must be paid, it will come all at once and the price will approximate death in short order; especially for anyone in poor health, living in a city, or being dependent on technology or social stability.
The founding fathers had a fix for that in the U. S. Constitution, i.e. only property owners could vote. Guess they figured you should have skin in the game. Now, in some cities you don’t even have to be a U.S. Citizen to vote, at least in local elections.
Correction – that wasn’t in the US Constitution. Some of the original States had it in their Constitutions, others were statutes.
You have to remember just who the Republicans put up to run against him.
John McCain and Mitt Romney. Both were Obama-lites, RINOs that didn’t “pull people out of the woodwork” to vote for them like Trump did.
(“pull people out of the woodwork” means that people who hadn’t voted in years came out to vote that year.)
John McCain had spent a career attacking conservatives at every opportunity. He was always the first politician “reporters” would call when they needed good quotes bashing other Republicans.
I got a good laugh out of John’s expression when the press turned on him when he ran against a real Democrat.
And MOST of his voter were actually for Palin, with a hope that SHE would soon be President.
There were big problems in 2012. Not as blatant as 2020, but it makes you wonder. Here’s an example from Philadelphia:
https://www.phillymag.com/news/2012/11/16/election-dead-people-vote-philadelphia/
I believe there were similar stories out of Detroit. 2020 is hardly the first time the Democrat Party has tried to steal an election, it just was far more obvious than most of their crimes.
Go back to Cook county in Illinois and a couple of counties in Texas, near where LBJ was from and Nixon would have been POTUS in 1961, not Kennedy.
Old Chicago saying, “Vote early and often”.
The only thing that has changed since the 60s is that Dems have gotten FEDERAL money to get out the vote in cities.
With the new MAGA Republicans in control, they should redirect ALL get out the vote funds to people more than 2 miles from their polling places, eliminating funding for almost all urban voters. Help get those rural Republican voters to the polls!
If we ever get more than a tiny fraction of electric cars, the off-peak rates are going to disappear. Once the government figures out a way to start charging road use taxes to EVs, the rest of that so called savings is going to more than disappear as well.
Road taxes are simple: Base them on model weight and average driving distances for the type of vehicle. You can even adjust it by postal zones!
I Just think if we had a just world and someone put in a carbon tax guess the EV owners will be crying in their wine when the bill for the carbon their EV used in production and on the road is due.
Add in EV are not zero emission, they just shift the emission somewhere else. Somehow EV are not going to be to useable when the only time you can charge them is when the sun shines or the wind is blowing. The owner of EV have never considered that. Without coal, gas, nuclear and hydro electricity they aren’t going anywhere and that what the greens want, they are just to myopic to see that.
I’m not paranoid, but there are people after me.
The international elites, NGO bigwigs, WEF plutocrats, and socialists of all stripes don’t want you doing what you want to do: Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness (property ownership). That is too messy for their tastes and you will most likely do something they don’t want you to do.
Say what you want, but their ultimate goal is to put humanity into Soviet-era high-rise dwellings (modern hovels) and keep them from having significant material wellbeing. It is not driven by environmentalism but by the desire for control and wealth. Anybody that didn’t listen to Obummer is a fool; he openly said that he planned on vastly increasing the cost of energy. And Brandon said he was going to stop oil, gas and coal developments. This was not restricted to Federal lands, but through regulations and Fed financial manipulations they would kill all FF developments. Did not anybody listen? Our media didn’t.
When the fit hits the sham ordinary people will finally figure this out.
Even simpler: assume the car is good for XYZ miles and charge it as an excise tax the the dealership. OR assume 15,000 miles and charge it annually the way many states charge annual personal property tax on cars.
Don’t know where you live, but here in NY electric is 18 – 20c/KWH.
Even in Oregon, with significant hydro-power generation our costs are approx .14c/KWH. And going up.
Generation costs are only a part of the total. There are many taxes and fees on electricity. The cost of gasoline includes taxes and fees, so should electricity.
The latest Mercedes sedan EV with retail price around US$350K has a theoretical range of 360 miles but energy consumption is far higher than the for example TeslaS
Yes, but they don’t pay any of the infrastructure costs of providing road, lighting, service areas etc.
They mostly charge at home because they’re second cars and not used much. Don’t forget $2000 for the level 2 charger, and real electricity prices that are double what you quote in the states that heavily promote EVs. And the mandates that will allow utilities to stop your car from charging and even draw power from it. In places like California the difference in cost is entirely due to the high rate of tax on gas. When you figure the all-in cost of the vehicle and maintenance a car with a small efficient ICE engine is far cheaper and the EVs are just toys for rich kids.
This isn’t a strictly UK problem. Last week’ish I submitted a link to a story where a cost analysis was done on For Profit charging stations in the US and they are charging the equivalent of 35 mpg for fast charging. Nothing is free forever.
At what price for gas?
I’ll have to see if I can find the article again, bit off hand I think it was 3.75/gallon at 35 mpg.
Battery charging and discharging processes both lose efficiency in cold weather. Cut your optimistic range numbers by a third when it goes below 0C.
I am starting to see a few Teslas on the road out here in the Midwest. Probably, along with the convertibles and the motorbikes, they will disappear when it gets really cold.
Sometimes the I80 gets a blizzard and strands 100s of motorists. Imagine being stranded 100s of miles from a charging station in a completely snow-covered inert metal box. Not even insulated! Even if an emergency vehicle comes to help, they won’t have a huge diesel generator in tow able to fast-charge your dead Tesla! You will just have to leave it there, buried in snow, until the roads are cleared enough for a tow.
I hear you can’t even tow a dead Tesla, the wheels don’t disengage from the drive motors. So it takes a full flatbed vehicle hauler. Kiss that Tesla goodbye until spring! Even if the battery survives a long freeze I would not try to charge it near anything flammable.
Guess the electric vehicle craze is possibly practical in Silicon Valley and a few other warm dry places that have many more dollars than sense. But how do they do their Tahoe ski trip? Rent a vintage diesel Hummer?
I’ve been told that you can’t even charge a LiIon battery if the temperature is below 0C.
I used to sell flashlights and headlamps with lithium batteries. I learned the hard way that is you charge them ice cold they are ruined.
“Even if the battery survives a long freeze I would not try to charge it near anything flammable.”
Then how do you charge the battery when the battery itself is flammable? 😎
(Best to have it towed to one of those trash-burning power plants.)
The gap would more than disappear if EV owners were required to pay road use taxes.
They intended to increase the price of gasoline to force people into EVs. They could do better by not screwing with people’s lives. The moral here is watch who you vote for and demand honest elections.
You can expect a politician who knows he is in office through fraud in elections would have no problem supporting frauds in legislation.
Same was true, basically, in California before 2022. Electricity prices were $0.32/kWh in SoCal, and gas was $2.39/gallon. Filling up a model S to get 300 miles cost you $32, and filling up an Audi A6 to get 300 miles cost you $30.
Electricity prices are still at that point (https://www.sce.com/residential/rates/Standard-Residential-Rate-Plan).
What the hell is wrong with Mercedes-Benz gas mileage?
Mercedes-Benz GLA (2.0 petrol) vs EQA
OBVIOUSLY the UK must be undercharging for diesel and petrol. Problem solved.
#sarc
I pay 11p a unit charging 1:00 – 8:00 a.m at home. 10 units takes me 30 miles in winter, 40 in summer. £1.10 is a lot cheaper than petrol or diesel especially if you allow for the fact that no one gets close to book mpg with a petrol or diesel car
.
Oh, I do, and then some. My 5 cylinder 2 litre turbo diesel Volvo gets an average of 40 mpg all the time. If I drive on motorways at a steady 57 mph, as I did this summer because of fuel prices, I was getting 70 mpg. And the car is absolutely not an ‘economy’ type of car, it’s a sports car.
And in the winter, if you run the defroster and the heater?
And if you want to give a friend a ride?
What if you want to put the new coffee table you bought in the back to bring home?
And if there’s a traffic jam and it takes you four times longer to get to work that morning?
I’ve gotten better than book mpg on every car that I have ever owned.
As has been mentioned dozens of time, you are not paying road use taxes.
Funny how EV acolytes always manage to ignore that point.
“lot cheaper than petrol or diesel”
Now do UN-taxed gasoline computation (lol)
For a while ago, diesel-engined cars were the darlings of the European Governments. But now they are evil. Why were they even in the comparisons?
It was always more expensive to do public charging, since day one and into the forseable future. The charging stations operators just spent more effort hiding how pricing worked and who had the cheapest charging options, rather than offering electricity at a competative price. Plus there is the hidden cost of chargers often being broken. Public charging operations don’t feel any sense of public duty the way gas stations do.
“Public duty”? Gas stations keep their pumps working because they want to sell gas., even though the profit margin is much higher on food and soda sales.
Virtue signallidiots (and that’s not even a joke) :
https://www.automobile-propre.com/ep-tender-remorque-prolonge-lautonomie-voitures-electriques/amp/
I doubt if many people bought EVs if they knew in advance that they had to use expensive public chargers because they couldn’t charge their cars at home where they parked every night.
The EV scam is a disgrace as well as CAGW.
This comparison is for the UK, with prices in pounds or pence sterling. The commenter below says “petrol” is 1.62 pounds/liter, which is equivalent to 6.13 pounds/gallon. Since a pound sterling is worth more than $1, this is more expensive than gasoline in most of the US except California, even after Bidenflation of fuel prices.
It’s probably cheaper to use gasoline-powered cars in the USA than in the UK.
Also, the UK has a relatively mild winter climate, and snow is infrequent. But in the northern USA, snowstorms dropping more than a foot of snow are commonplace, probably several of them per winter. A person stuck in a gasoline-powered car in a remote area can stay warm by periodically turning on the engine for a few minutes to run the heater until rescued, but what happens to a person in an electric car with a dead battery?
In major metropolitan areas, the roads are usually cleared within a few hours after it stops snowing, by diesel-powered snowplows. What would happen if some government genius tried to replace them by electric snowplows?
Yesterday I drove past a six charge point EV recharging area attached to a liquid fuel outlet, there are usually none or maybe one EV using the facility but yesterday four were parked there.
It looked like a family picnic of many adults and children waiting for the recharge to finish on each EV.
Not fun as far as I am concerned, driving my diesel 4WD that I refuelled early in several minutes.
A friend of mine drove from NJ to Mass the other day, stopped to charge her car and have a coffee and breakfast, called some friends and then continued on her way. Seems a reasonable way to travel.
What if you’re in a hurry? You still have to make that 30-minute stop, regardless. I can fill up with gas or diesel and be on my way in minutes.
I wonder where griff is…
I’ve been waiting for this tipping point in the US for a decade. Many cities and states subsidized the charging stations for the EVs to encourage more people to switch. Now the freebies are coming to an end and people are getting slammed. Where do they think the power comes from? We have to burn something or we will be cold and hungry. California had to tell their EV owners not to charge their cars several times this past summer. How ironic. We are not ready for the switch with our current tech. and people need to face it and make the best of what we have in abundance.