Headline is misleading. Cheaper on per-mile operating costs but typically more expensive to purchase and insure. There’s also a nasty depreciation curve to contend with. Nobody wants a 10 year old Tesla, but a 10 year old well mentioned petrol car still has a ton of life left in it.
It still often ends up a bit cheaper across comparable vehicles but not a slam dunk and nowhere near as good as the headline suggests.
The cheapest car for sale in the UK is an EV at this point. The market is rapidly filling with EVs in essentially all price segments. Most EVs are still under warranty when they hit the second hand market for the simple reason most EVs on the market were produced in their typical warranty period.
They tend to be in much lower insurance bands and tend to incurr significantly lower motor tax - comprehensive policies for EVs are higher due to the (current) dearth of parts and licensed repair centres versus ICE cars running on multi-year platforms or sharing parts across lines that share a single monocoque design (e.g. VW, Ford, Toyota versus Tesla and their publicised parts shortages).
The problem is that, for economy of scale reasons, Comprehensive insurance is often cheaper than third-party cover in the UK, despite people tending to never claim so as to keep their no-claims bonus and not spike their premium out of affordability. With 3rd Party the EV option would be cheaper as they tend to be involved in less accidents, and when they do they tend to dissipate more impact on their side due to more modern crumple-zones and safety features.
> There’s also a nasty depreciation curve to contend with. Nobody wants a 10 year old Tesla, but a 10 year old well mentioned petrol car still has a ton of life left in it.
It's worse, there's almost no second hand market for the vehicles. There is barely anybody trained to repair them (even if they will sell you the parts) and if they are crashed significantly it's almost always a write-off.
> It still often ends up a bit cheaper across comparable vehicles but not a slam dunk and nowhere near as good as the headline suggests.
Only because of government meddling. Fuel is almost uniquely taxed 3 times, which pays for subsidies to pay for green energy initiatives.
I think I'll hold out with my diesels and petrols and see how this all goes.
In the US, the used market for Teslas is quite strong, even into the high miles. I recently purchased a used EV and found the Teslas weren’t discounted enough from new for my liking. They moved quickly too, except for the ones with salvage titles.
I ended up getting an off-lease Hyundai EV because they tanked in value in part due to their ICCU failures, which are now covered under an extended warranty.
> There is barely anybody trained to repair them (even if they will sell you the parts)
No longer true at least in most decently urban/semi-urban Western countries/regions.
The parts shortage is real though, it's always been a plague for Tesla, and most established manufacturers never really recovered from Covid (and in the case of wiring harnesses, Ukraine) as a lot of their supply chain closed down shop for good.
> and if they are crashed significantly it's almost always a write-off.
That's true of all modern vehicles, no matter the engine type. Crash resiliency comes at a cost, the frame absorbs the crash energy and permanently deforms. Yes you can bend even an aluminium frame back into shape but it will never be as strong as before, and anything carbon-composite or plastic is out of the question as well.
Crash damaged cars have loads of good components though - typically allowing nearly all non-crash repairs to be done by just swapping parts about, unless the manufacturer has got software locks on swapping parts.
Honest question: how else would one interpret 'cheaper to drive', if not 'cheaper per-mile operating costs'? Wouldn't they have used plain 'cheaper than' if they would have meant 'purchase+operating'?
Because driving includes a lot more costs than just fuel. And as others are calling out, nobody wants a used EV so deprecation is a real cost to every day regardless of if the car is driven or not.
For whatever reason, my wife’s car needs yearly scheduled dealership visits that always cost a few hundred. Meanwhile, my 5 year old EV has had none of that, other than one of those recalls that required a technician to park 15 minutes on our driveway to tighten some bolt (which my wife car also had, but it took another visit to the dealership.)
The depreciation thing is true, but I drive my cars into the ground anyway, so it’s not a factor for me.
I think "nobody wants a used EV" will change, there is already a growing amount of evidence that battery deterioration is nowhere near as bad as feared on average. ICE vehicles also tend to get less efficient over time as well due to wear and tear, build-up, degrading sensors etc, it's just that nobody talks about that.
Right now I would hesitate to buy a used car with 5 years and a 100% of 300 km range but down to 250 km due to battery wear, when I could buy a new car with 500 km range. Owners of first Leafs got hit by already low initial ranges (~120km), so even a 20-30% battery wear have huge impact or car usability. That would change when ranges stops growing (about 700 km, maybe, the same as ICEs?), and used cars have the same range than buying new. 600 km instead of 700 km? Good enough.
The torque/hp figures also do not help since they are in correlation with abuse and thus higher crash rates. e.g. a Tesla just for liability is significantly more expensive due to hp, you get nothing for crashing it, same weight Model 3 vs ID.3 both 60kwh but 205 vs 150kw is 115 vs 85 euros as a first owned car for a 35 year old and it drops quickly with less power (rates also differ for where you live, don't try to insure an audi with specific trim of wheels on some cities).
The main reason is the performance. Many early EV's had blistering acceleration and this was reflected it the number of claims insurance companies were getting.
My girlfriends X4 was stolen 4 months ago. Replaced it with an Audi A6 etron. Her insurance renewal came up 30 quid cheaper at 510 last week! We were stunned.
The EV was definitely the right choice, due to luck rather than knowing Trump was about to kick off with Iran. It costs us £8 to charge the car overnight for around 380 miles range.
I've had this discussion many times. Unless you own a house, with solar panels and your own parking spot any cost/km gains on fuel with EV are marginal. Gas get's adjusted more quickly but eventually the roadside charge prices will catch up. And many "researchers" take the average price (not any better metric) which is heavily skewed by "public" chargers which you cannot use since they are inaccessible on private property but are public for tax reasons.
The primary cause of this current price differential is the enormous taxation applied to diesel and petrol in the UK. Obviously this situation won't last.
For me (not UK, no price cap on either electricity or petrol) the taxes for the equivalent in EV vs petrol is about half of the taxes for petrol are also applied to EV in km equivalent (11ct/kwh, 84ct/L, assuming my plug in hybrid usage).
My main point is that even with happy hour prices this is only viable for people which do not have to rely on external chargers, which is the majority. Currently EV is cheaper again, due to rapid rise of fuel prices, but the power companies with street side chargers generally "adjust" prices every year to match petrol and it's been for a long time cheaper to run petrol. Also: getting petrol from a few km away for cheap is easy, you are not going to park in the next village overnight to charge your car.
Meta: As plenty of commenters have pointed out, this kind of statements (and similar ones like "PV electricity is the cheapest one", etc...) are entirely true _with some attached caveats_.
For example, an EV is both undoubtably cheaper to operate than a gas powered car ; and infinitely more expensive to operate if you can't afford to buy one in the first place.
Similarly, the price of kWh of PV-generated electricity is both lower than pretty much everything else as this point ; and, basically infinite when the sun is down and your 4h battery has run out.
Is there a proper math concept to fairly express those things ? "Mean", "Average" or "Median" fall short. Mean with very very large error bars ? "Average with substitution" ?
In the end, I can't wait for all those circumvoltions to be irrelevant (when EVs are just cheap to buy too, and electricity has enough storage to bake it into the price, etc...)
Once they factor in my current budget for buying a car which is up to £2,000, insurance around £70pm, (relatively) inexpensive repairs and ease of finding spare parts/mechanics, we can talk.
All this kind of spin does is turn people who were on the fence, off electric. Just treat people like adults and say "whilst there are still lots of reasons to prefer a traditional car, electrics are the future, and here's something that shows the progress".
I live in the UK and own an EV and this article is misleading in how they get the 90% figure. All off peak charging tariffs in the UK have higher peak energy charges than their flat tariffs - so you make your EV charging cheaper at the expense of higher energy costs elsewhere. For me it’s about break even assuming 6k miles per year.
Also, if you do not have a home charger, you are very unlikely to come out cheaper than petrol. I think 40p/kwh is about the breakeven
True. But we load shift to the cheap period things like the washing machine, dryer and dishwasher. We have an old 5 bed house - currently eon reckon our bill for the month is about £50.
There are over 120,000 public charging points across the UK, with over 25,000 of them being 50kW+ DC. That's averaging more than one charger per square mile of the mainland UK (density distribution of course varies).
Mainly due to the standard 20% VAT rate applied to public electricity (compared to 5% for home charging) which could be rectified overnight if there was political will.
Breakdown of UK Public/Private and EV/ICE Per Mile Costs:
* Home (Off-Peak EV Tariff): ~3p per mile
* Home (Standard Standard Variable Tariff): ~8p per mile
Yes, I responded to your other comment about that. Charging at home is very cheap though and it's estimated that roughly half of housing in the UK has a driveway. Some more creativity is going to be required to address it for everyone else indeed, for example kerb or lamp-post chargers, or in flat building car parks etc.
EVs are rich people offloading tax burden to less fortunate ones.
Previously (last year) various taxes made almost half the fuel price.
We don't have green/car taxes where i live, everyone charges their cars at home and brag how 'cheap it is'. Additionally you can drive in bus lanes if you drive EV (capital only) and you have the perfect nepotism scheme - no taxes, premium transit for anyone already rich enough. No politician dares to bring this up as solution would lead to the introduction of general car tax (political suicide) so once again everyone else is left to pick up the bill after the rich.
fuel price went up 4% more last night, so we are now at 10x more than electric, and somehow there are 'arguments' bieng profered that there is something left to debate, unless you count in the OTHER discussion hapening around demand collapse for oil.
lots of rich people here who will get hurt bad when the petro dollar collapses, but are making more money today than ever before.
classic monkey trap.
Are they? An equivalent model don't seem to be significantly more new, and you can now get some great deals on secondhand EVs.
I'm in the UK and have now gone completely electric - motorbike (Zero SRF), car (wife's Model 3) and van (ID Buzz). To be honest though, that was mostly because I like EVs - yes, even the motorbike. The fuel costs are just a bonus.
This depends on country, and what you consider to be a comparable car.
If we compare, for example, the Tesla Model 3 (RWD) against the BMW 3 series (320i), then we get:
NL: Model 3 ~€36K vs 3 series ~€50K
UK: Model 3 ~£37K vs 3 series ~£41K
In both countries the Model 3 is more expensive than that the 3 series.
Second hand the maths can change again, since EVs typically depreciate faster, due to battery degradation fears, and the fact that range on newer cars is always improving, but still, typically for a four year old version of the above, the Model 3 is still cheaper than the 3 series.
There is, of course, the discussion on whether it is fair to compare a model 3 with the 3 series, but it is often used, so I'll go with it.
If you want to compare cheaper cars, then you could compare a Ford Focus with an MG4 EV, and in the UK the EV wins, in NL, the Gasoline car wins, but in both cases, they are more price comparable.
Not to forget greater depreciation. So for those who drive relatively little the ICE card might still have lower total cost of ownership. Not to forget time comparison on fuelling versus charging.
I would bet that this is different for cars made in the last 3-4 years. More and more stats from the automobile clubs are rolling in that show that electric vehicles last much longer, because they have less moving parts, and that batteries last much longer than expected.
So as of today, I’d certainly buy electric if I was worried about depreciation.
Surely depreciation is determined by the buyer's expected price? So it doesn't matter if objectively you say the battery is at 95% health but all the buyers apply a steep discount due to it being an EV.
And for the buyer, it's about perceived value compared to other vehicles. Even an unused well-stored 6 year old EV would have to sell at substantial discount compared to its purchase price because new EVs are just better
Depreciation will slow down when the rate of improvement slows down
Yes, and it's easy to verify how much of the original capacity remains (95% typically).
The deprecation has very little to do with the cars themselves. It's mainly due to original prices being inflated during covid demand spike + chip shortage followed by releases of decent brand new EVs under £25K.
Well what if rather than a Tesla+, one bought a cheaper EV instead? In the UK, the Leapmotor T03 seems to go for around 16000 GBP new. That's actually not much more than an equivalent petrol car.
No. Jaecoo (Chinese but not really an EV company) is the third best selling car at the moment. You see a tonnes of BYDs about. We also have Geely and Leapmotor
"Cheaper to run" if you only count the cost of fuel versus the cost of electricity, and only if you can charge at home.
It currently costs 85p/kWh to charge an EV near where I live if you can't charge at home, and 95p/litre for gas (my car is dual fuel).
Then you've got the vastly more expensive insurance for EVs.
Then you've got the cost of paying for an EV.
Then you've got to find an EV that directly replaces the existing vehicle. There are currently no EVs on the market that can tow heavy trailers off road, which is the main reason I have a biggish 4x4.
The cost of public charging is still one of the biggest problems. I'm currently on a night-time charging tariff at home at 4p/kWh. It will go up to 8p/kWh in October but that's still pretty good considering it's not uncommon for public rapid charging to be 10x that.
Of all the rapid charging networks, I find Tesla are often the cheapest, there are Tesla 250kW charging stations near me that are 33p/kWh during quieter hours.
Repair costs are very high (and take ages) and most of them are expensive cars outright which puts the premiums up.
Performance being pretty high on even a basic Tesla doesn't help things either. The insurance market in the UK is very expensive anyway and any excuse to wind up premiums they'll gladly use.
Wait, insurance includes repair costs? What kind of insurance are we talking about? In Spain, mandatory insurance plus some perks is about the same: includes damage to others, own car broken glasses, theft and fire, and road assistance. Maybe Tesla is slightly more, expensive because the horsepower of their cars is too high, and it gets in the group of cars with over 300 HP, so insurers assume it is a bit of a sports car. Anyway, the difference with similarly powered ICE car is negligible.
I don't know, but it was going to cost me about two grand a year to insure a Kia Niro EV compared to 200 quid to insure a 4.6 litre Range Rover.
Presumably because (at least round here) they're driven by retired guys who are simply not capable of staying in front of a 700bhp gokart that gets to 60mph faster than if you threw it off a cliff.
It still often ends up a bit cheaper across comparable vehicles but not a slam dunk and nowhere near as good as the headline suggests.
The cheapest car for sale in the UK is an EV at this point. The market is rapidly filling with EVs in essentially all price segments. Most EVs are still under warranty when they hit the second hand market for the simple reason most EVs on the market were produced in their typical warranty period.
Quite possibly China and many other countries.
(edit) There's a comment further down, cheapest car in UK is EV: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49875856
The problem is that, for economy of scale reasons, Comprehensive insurance is often cheaper than third-party cover in the UK, despite people tending to never claim so as to keep their no-claims bonus and not spike their premium out of affordability. With 3rd Party the EV option would be cheaper as they tend to be involved in less accidents, and when they do they tend to dissipate more impact on their side due to more modern crumple-zones and safety features.
It's worse, there's almost no second hand market for the vehicles. There is barely anybody trained to repair them (even if they will sell you the parts) and if they are crashed significantly it's almost always a write-off.
> It still often ends up a bit cheaper across comparable vehicles but not a slam dunk and nowhere near as good as the headline suggests.
Only because of government meddling. Fuel is almost uniquely taxed 3 times, which pays for subsidies to pay for green energy initiatives.
I think I'll hold out with my diesels and petrols and see how this all goes.
I ended up getting an off-lease Hyundai EV because they tanked in value in part due to their ICCU failures, which are now covered under an extended warranty.
No longer true at least in most decently urban/semi-urban Western countries/regions.
The parts shortage is real though, it's always been a plague for Tesla, and most established manufacturers never really recovered from Covid (and in the case of wiring harnesses, Ukraine) as a lot of their supply chain closed down shop for good.
> and if they are crashed significantly it's almost always a write-off.
That's true of all modern vehicles, no matter the engine type. Crash resiliency comes at a cost, the frame absorbs the crash energy and permanently deforms. Yes you can bend even an aluminium frame back into shape but it will never be as strong as before, and anything carbon-composite or plastic is out of the question as well.
Honest question: how else would one interpret 'cheaper to drive', if not 'cheaper per-mile operating costs'? Wouldn't they have used plain 'cheaper than' if they would have meant 'purchase+operating'?
Oil changes, break pads, oil filters, spark plugs, …
For whatever reason, my wife’s car needs yearly scheduled dealership visits that always cost a few hundred. Meanwhile, my 5 year old EV has had none of that, other than one of those recalls that required a technician to park 15 minutes on our driveway to tighten some bolt (which my wife car also had, but it took another visit to the dealership.)
The depreciation thing is true, but I drive my cars into the ground anyway, so it’s not a factor for me.
Why do you think Tesla insurance is that high?
The EV was definitely the right choice, due to luck rather than knowing Trump was about to kick off with Iran. It costs us £8 to charge the car overnight for around 380 miles range.
One-tenth the (fuel) cost, or 90% cheaper.
(That is, if you own a house with off-street parking).
My main point is that even with happy hour prices this is only viable for people which do not have to rely on external chargers, which is the majority. Currently EV is cheaper again, due to rapid rise of fuel prices, but the power companies with street side chargers generally "adjust" prices every year to match petrol and it's been for a long time cheaper to run petrol. Also: getting petrol from a few km away for cheap is easy, you are not going to park in the next village overnight to charge your car.
All it took was destruction of global energy markets and supplies.
Let’s celebrate!
For example, an EV is both undoubtably cheaper to operate than a gas powered car ; and infinitely more expensive to operate if you can't afford to buy one in the first place.
Similarly, the price of kWh of PV-generated electricity is both lower than pretty much everything else as this point ; and, basically infinite when the sun is down and your 4h battery has run out.
Is there a proper math concept to fairly express those things ? "Mean", "Average" or "Median" fall short. Mean with very very large error bars ? "Average with substitution" ?
In the end, I can't wait for all those circumvoltions to be irrelevant (when EVs are just cheap to buy too, and electricity has enough storage to bake it into the price, etc...)
All this kind of spin does is turn people who were on the fence, off electric. Just treat people like adults and say "whilst there are still lots of reasons to prefer a traditional car, electrics are the future, and here's something that shows the progress".
Also, if you do not have a home charger, you are very unlikely to come out cheaper than petrol. I think 40p/kwh is about the breakeven
ICE @ 40 MPG: ~22.6p per mile for diesel EV: ~3p per mile for off-peak home charging.
The difference from 23 to 3 is a decrease of 20, which is an 86.96% decrease.
https://www.theguardian.com/money/2026/sep/28/price-of-diese...
Is it the same in the UK?
Recently they started builing a truck charging facilty on the outskirts of town.
Breakdown of UK Public/Private and EV/ICE Per Mile Costs:
* Home (Off-Peak EV Tariff): ~3p per mile
* Home (Standard Standard Variable Tariff): ~8p per mile
* Standard Public EV: ~15p per mile
* Petrol Car: ~17p per mile
* Diesel Car: ~17.5p per mile
* 50kW+ DC Public EV: ~22p to 23p per mile
Previously (last year) various taxes made almost half the fuel price. We don't have green/car taxes where i live, everyone charges their cars at home and brag how 'cheap it is'. Additionally you can drive in bus lanes if you drive EV (capital only) and you have the perfect nepotism scheme - no taxes, premium transit for anyone already rich enough. No politician dares to bring this up as solution would lead to the introduction of general car tax (political suicide) so once again everyone else is left to pick up the bill after the rich.
I'm in the UK and have now gone completely electric - motorbike (Zero SRF), car (wife's Model 3) and van (ID Buzz). To be honest though, that was mostly because I like EVs - yes, even the motorbike. The fuel costs are just a bonus.
If we compare, for example, the Tesla Model 3 (RWD) against the BMW 3 series (320i), then we get:
NL: Model 3 ~€36K vs 3 series ~€50K UK: Model 3 ~£37K vs 3 series ~£41K
In both countries the Model 3 is more expensive than that the 3 series.
Second hand the maths can change again, since EVs typically depreciate faster, due to battery degradation fears, and the fact that range on newer cars is always improving, but still, typically for a four year old version of the above, the Model 3 is still cheaper than the 3 series.
There is, of course, the discussion on whether it is fair to compare a model 3 with the 3 series, but it is often used, so I'll go with it.
If you want to compare cheaper cars, then you could compare a Ford Focus with an MG4 EV, and in the UK the EV wins, in NL, the Gasoline car wins, but in both cases, they are more price comparable.
So as of today, I’d certainly buy electric if I was worried about depreciation.
Depreciation will slow down when the rate of improvement slows down
You can get a mint condition IONIQ 5 with 300bhp and 20-minute charging for less than a new Corolla.
Used cars still take a full fuel tank.
The deprecation has very little to do with the cars themselves. It's mainly due to original prices being inflated during covid demand spike + chip shortage followed by releases of decent brand new EVs under £25K.
MG is a British car badge, now owned by SAIC China
Volvo and Polestar are owned by Geely
LEVC makes the new EV London black cabs, is also owned by Geely
XPeng and Omoda are present too.
> Dacia Spring is now the UK’s cheapest car at less than £12k
> The all-electric Dacia Spring now costs less than any other car on the market
https://www.whatcar.com/news/dacia-spring-is-now-the-uks-che...
The article has an honourable mention for the Leapmotor T03, another EV that is only slightly more expensive than the Dacia Spring.
It currently costs 85p/kWh to charge an EV near where I live if you can't charge at home, and 95p/litre for gas (my car is dual fuel).
Then you've got the vastly more expensive insurance for EVs.
Then you've got the cost of paying for an EV.
Then you've got to find an EV that directly replaces the existing vehicle. There are currently no EVs on the market that can tow heavy trailers off road, which is the main reason I have a biggish 4x4.
Of all the rapid charging networks, I find Tesla are often the cheapest, there are Tesla 250kW charging stations near me that are 33p/kWh during quieter hours.
I usually charge at the super market (60KW) for 44ct / kwh which is not cheap but much more reasonable.
For comparision my employer offers charging at 23ct and my home price (from the grid) would be +-30 if I could get a charger there
Performance being pretty high on even a basic Tesla doesn't help things either. The insurance market in the UK is very expensive anyway and any excuse to wind up premiums they'll gladly use.
I have had my side mirrors and windshield repairs covered.
Presumably because (at least round here) they're driven by retired guys who are simply not capable of staying in front of a 700bhp gokart that gets to 60mph faster than if you threw it off a cliff.