inari
Electric VehiclesElectric cars have crossed lifetime cost parity with petrol vehicles across much of Europe. In the used-car market they now have the lowest total cost of ownership.
Newer models even match petrol cars in estimated lifespan, that's something early EVs could not claim.
This study shows that any new electric vehicle sold today will bring financial benefits to its second and third owner. New electric cars registered now will deliver between €262 and €849/year savings for their future second and third owners compared to an equivalent petrol car.
Second or third owner? These cars being sold every 4 years or something?
I don't think you can truly love ICE engines and the engineering that makes them work without realizing that an Electric Vehicle will always win as an everyday beater engine. Hands down. No contest.
ICE engines are cool because of how complex they had to become in order to become even as remotely as reliable as Electric Engines are fundmanetally. Like a Mechanical Clock vs a much more mechanically simple Digital Clock.
The only reason we are even having this discussion in 2026 and it things haven't flattened in favor of Electric Vehicles long ago was batteries used to suck. It is that simple.
We bought our first electric car 6 years ago. By now, we saved so much money on gas that the car paid for itself. Completely. How are electric cars presumably just now becoming competitive?
It's probably about how much you have to drive. And remember this is for new cars, it implies second hand has been ahead for a while.
What did a new EV cost 6 years ago? Maybe $40k USD? So you need to save over $6000 in gas each year. This needs to be $6000 more than the electricity cost of charging your EV. It feels like you must do an above average amount of driving for the savings to pay for the car in 6 years, or otherwise I'm off with my price guess or you get free electricity (e.g. solar).
In europe gas is expensive and electricity can be quite cheap because of rapid renewables adoption. In addition, you also have to factor in that gas cars need regular oil changes, engine maintenance and their brakes usually wear out much faster too.
Yeah there is quite low maintenence on EVs but they are said to go through tyres faster (on account of the weight). I figure any maintenance difference is probably not that big compared to not using fuel though.
We bought an almost-new (ex-demo) EV about 6 months ago. We get free power (due to accidentally OPing our solar it's use or lose) and we paid a little over half the price of what the car would be new.
With mostly free power (still have to pay when we travel away from home) it's going to take about 16 years to pay it off in fuel savings for us - and that's not accounting for the interest on borrowing the money or the opportunity cost of investing the money elsewhere. If we had paid full price it would have been more like 25 years. This is based on before times fuel prices though, right now the numbers probably look better.
I think you have to do a lot of driving for a new car to pay for itself. We do a lot of WFH and when we commute it's with public transport so I think that really eats into any savings because we only do like 12 000km a year.
That's the part that I forgot about, I save about $480 a month because I get free charging at work. We used to refill my wife's car twice a week for our commute. I can't imagine what it would cost for gas now at close to $7 a gallon some days
Haha there you go. You still must do an insane amount of driving to go through $480 of power a month though.
(not OP) We have 2 tier electricity prices here for consumers...
I'm just going to skip the 1st because a bill of $480 would put them into tier 2 so fast.
Tier 2 is $0.1408 CAD/kWh
That's 3,409kWh.
An Ionic 5 has 63kWh/220miles for a standard range.
That's 54 battery cycles a month, or 11,880miles a month.
Account for some losses along the way and lets just call it 10k miles a month.
At least that's what it would be here.
Yeah 10k miles is more than what I drive in a year and they're doing it in a month 😅. I am thinking that $480 may be at retail DC charging prices rather than home power usage prices because I'm not sure who would drive that much and not be driving for work (which would then be an unreasonable comparison to others buying EVs).
Paid 20k€ for a new eGolf. We drive about 25000 km per year. Gas is about 2 euros per litre, previous car needed about 7 litres per 100 km. Makes 3500€ per year for gas. The car uses 12 kWh per 100 km, by now we're on solar, but we previously paid about 20 cents per kWh. That's about 600 euros per year. That's a bit more than 6 years, but we own the car for a bit more than six years, so there's that.
Ah nice, that 25000km would be way above average where I live but sounds like it has worked out for you!
20k is also less than I was expecting, I don't think we had many options for new EVs where I live 6 years ago. Tesla, Ioniq, Atto, Leaf. I wasn't looking back then so maybe there were others I didn't know about.
Yeah, I don't buy lifetime cost parity is only hitting now. That's long past.
Might be a result of the assumed yearly driven distance.
I found 12000 and 10000 km in the report (for first and second buyers l think).
If you drive more, the reduced fuel cost will have an bigger impact.
E.g. I calculated it some time ago for our family's yearly <10000 km distance, and it wasn't favorable yet for the electric car.
In the us the average driver is doing a bit over 20'000km per year. I have no idea what eu numbers are but those look small and in turn mean a longer payoff. Of course average never applies to you, only a community.
I thought new EVs hit lifetime price parity over 5 years ago.
