Home charger installation costs
For those looking to charge at home, don’t forget the cost of a charging kit. For a 3.6kW smart charger, expect to pay £750 fully installed at a typical home. At the top end, with something like a 22kW three-phase V2x system, expect to pay more than £1,500. Expect to pay:
• £750 for a 3.6kW home charger with no grant, fully installed
• £900 for a 7kW home charger with no grant, fully installed
• £1,500 for a three-phase, 22kW home charger with no grant, fully installed
If you are charging at home you will be saving £1,000 a year in not using a public charger and the 7.5kW home charger will pay for itself in the first year.
Variables that can affect a home charger installation include:
– Distance from the fusebox
– Whether it is on-road or off-road charging
– Age of home and state of electrics
– Whether you want three-phase
– Type of charger you choose
Why do electric cars cost more than fossil fuelled cars?
Electric car prices are higher than fossil fuelled cars mainly because the battery and motor cost a lot more than an internal combustion engine. With production costs falling, even now the overall cost in owning an EV can work out cheaper than a fossil fuelled car thanks to the fuel cost per mile.
The increased cost of an electric car is largely down to the cost of the rare metals involved in the manufacturing of the batteries. In 2020 prices, the battery and motor of an average priced EV costs the car maker around £9037, as against just £4223 for the engine and gearbox of a fossil fuelled vehicle.
It’s not all bad though. As more mines are opened and battery gigafactories come on-stream, the price of making a battery is set to drop by more than half in the next seven years. These savings will be passed on to you in the falling cost of buying a new electric car.
Find out more on home charging.
What Government support is there to help?
The UK government has taken a long-term strategy to reduce electric car costs for the mass market.
- Most car sales (7.5 million a year) are for used cars
- Nearly half of new car car sales are company / business cars. These are usually sold after three years
- By heavily incentivising company car sales through Benefit In Kind (BIK) tax incentives, thousands of used cars are set to enter the used car market in 2023
If you are able to get a company car from your employer, the BIK company car tax scheme could make getting an electric car a no-brainer!
Benefit in Kind
BIK is the tax someone pays who has been given a company car for use at home and at work as a company perk. With company car sales almost half of new car sales in the UK, the government offers preferential BIK rates to incentivise greater EV sales here.
As you can see in the table above, the employee given a company car will have nearly £12,000 more in their take-home income over three years by choosing an EV over an equivalent-priced fossil fuelled car. With running costs factored in, this makes an electric company car almost too good to refuse.
Used Car Sales Buoyant
- As of 2023, there are now 660,000 battery electric cars and 440,000 plug-in hybrid cars on UK roads.
- Society of Motor Manufacturers (SMMT) data suggests that used electric car sales grew by 44% in 2022
- The first company cars bought on BIK are starting to hit the used car market at volume
- With the cost of living crisis biting, used car sales are down.
The used car market is market led and with the overall market down, used electric car prices are set to fall significantly.
Are electric cars cheaper to run than petrol or diesel cars?
- If charged at home electric cars are cheaper to fuel than petrol or diesel cars
- If charged on a public rapid charger all the time it will cost more than a fossil fuelled car
- There are far fewer parts on electric vehicles’ powertrains so they are cheaper to maintain
Doing 9,000 miles a year in an electric car, you could save £1,000 a year in fuel costs if charged at home over a fossil fuelled car. With taxes and insurance much lower, there is the potential for further savings to make your purchase more attractive!
For details on EV tariffs search our pages here.
Are electric cars more fuel efficient?
Electric cars are far more efficient at turning electricity into power through the wheels than internal combustion engines. In real terms:
- An efficient midrange EV will do the equivalent of 160 miles per gallon (mpg)
- An average EV 123mpg
- A less efficient electric car, under100 mpg
- An efficient mid sized diesel car will do 50mpg
- A fossil fuelled luxury car will do as few as 20mpg
In short, you could get as many as eight times the mpg from an EV as a fossil fuelled car
To compare energy efficiency between a fossil fuelled car and electric equivalent, multiply the miles per kilowatt hour (kWh) x 40
- A Tesla Model 3 Standard Range will do 163.2 mpg
- The average EV 122.8 mpg
- An Audi eTron 94.4 mpg
An Audi A6 diesel car, roughly the same size as an eTron S, will do 45 mpg.
Do electric cars cost less to fuel?
- It can be far cheaper to fuel your electric car than to use petrol or diesel in a fossil fuelled car if charged at home
- Using lower powered public chargers, it is slightly cheaper
- Higher powered public electric chargers actually cost more per mile than petrol or diesel
EV Tariffs – Will You Be Better Off?
As of February 2023 there are still EV charging and variable rate energy supply tariffs that go as low as 4.5p/kWh. Completely charging a 50kWh battery would cost you £2.25. If that car did a typical 325Wh per mile, you would get nearly 154 miles per charge, or £0.014 per mile – not even 10% that of a diesel car.
These tariffs have their drawbacks.
- Many will only offer charging at the low rate during night hours (01:00-05:00)
- You will pay more than the Standard Variable rate for all other home energy use
Even so, it will cost a lot less to charge your car at home than using a public charger.
Public chargers cost more than home charging
As of February 2023, leading public charging network operator Gridserve charges:
- 66p/kWh on a high powered charger between 61 kW and 350 kW
- 65p/kWh on a medium powered charger between 23kW and 60kW
- 49p/kWh on a low powered charger up to 22kW.
On a typical electric car doing 3 miles per kWh this would be:
- 22p a mile on a high powered charger
- 16p a mile on a medium powered charger
By comparison, based on 170.2p a litre of diesel, a fossil fuelled car doing 45 miles per gallon will cost 17.2p a mile to run. This is why it pays to charge at home.
V2x
V2x means that your EV would be part of your home energy network. It can both be charged and discharge energy either into your home or to the national electricity grid. Vehicle to grid (V2G) and vehicle to home (V2H) are both known as V2x.
Not all EVs have this facility but some do. Instead of installing an expensive home battery you have a bidirectional charger that would let your car power your home at peak hours. One energy provider – Ovo Energy – is piloting V2G just now and would pay you to use energy from your car battery at peak periods, while guaranteeing you the charge you need when you next use the car.
There are issues. If you went fully off-grid or left your car to sell energy every winter’s evening, each charge and discharge would degrade the battery incrementally in the same way as it would if you charged/discharged in a long drive. No studies have been done into the effect of this on car resale values but if someone used software to find out how many cycles the car battery had had, then even if it had low mileage the battery will behave as if it had done the equivalent mileage of a car driven a lot more. It would be like running your ICE car engine as a generator when it’s parked up with all the inherent wear and tear.
That said, a car would justify its value if you hardly used it, leaving it as part of your home energy system while working from home for example. It would effectively be a dual use battery system that can power your home for up to two days in the event of a grid outage as well as a form of transport.
