By WhichEV

Since the start of the war in Ukraine, the news has been full of stories about the huge increases in price for energy of all varieties. That has led to a splash of stories about how much the cost of charging an electric vehicles has sky-rocketed. But what is the reality? Mina has released a detailed report into the ways in which fuel costs have changed – and how that has impacted the cost of charging EVs for business.

The RAC has been tracking average mileage per driver in the UK, over a number of years. It has been dropping steadily and will likely be close to 7,000 miles for 2023. That works out at 19 miles per day, 133 per week and 578 per month. If you have an EV with a 70kWh battery, then you’re likely to clear 250 miles range per full charge. Heading into Q4 2022 and ‘filling up’ at an average of 30p per kWh, that would mean a fully-charged cost around £21.

In Mina’s research, the majority of charging (close to 80%) was completed on reduced-rate tariffs (for example overnight), either at home or at work. Those rates can still be under 15p per kWh. Public charger prices shot up in the summer of 2022, but started to calm down in Q4. These rates are often used in sensationalist headlines by the national media – when they seem to want to push the agenda, “EVs now cost the same as petrol and diesel to fill-up”.

Filling most petrol and diesel cars will need around 55 litres of fuel at a cost of at least £1.50 per litre – which would make a tank cost at least £82. You can make the argument that traditional cars often achieve 30mpg, so a tank of fossil fuel will take you closer to 360 miles or 1.4 times further than a full battery, in our example.

So what is the direct price comparison for fuel, between the two systems?

Filling up with fossil fuel 1.6 times (to hit the monthly average mileage) will come to around £132. Getting that mileage from an electric vehicle will cost closer to £53. Even if you allow for a 50% higher charging cost for the EV (assuming that you want to re-charge ‘on the road’ much more often than average), you would still be saving over £50 every time that the petrol/diesel vehicle needed to refuel. If that happened 20 times over 12 months, then your advantage in choosing an EV would be around £1,000 a year. That is a minimum saving on fuel alone – the reality could be much higher.

At the time of going to press, you would also have advantages in terms of BiK and free access to city centres etc – so the financial argument for EVs in business is still very strong.

Click here to read the full story over at WhichEV…

Charging your EV should be easy. In fact, it should be as easy as the experience people have putting petrol in their internal combustion cars. But some of the time it isn’t. This is frequently used by EV haters as an excuse to avoid switching to an EV, or even to vocally criticise them on social media.

However, a lot of this is merely a cultural change. In the same way that you need to avoid putting petrol in your diesel car (and vice versa), an EV owner needs to know their CHAdeMO from their CCS, their AC from their DC, and other characteristics of their vehicle’s charging capabilities. This WhichEV guide is here to help you navigate the cultural shift, to help you make EV charging easier.

Click here to read the full article.

By James Morris, Editor, WhichEV

In April 2020, the Benefit-in-Kind (BIK) rate for EVs dropped to 0% for the tax year. It rose to 1% for 2021-22, then 2% for three years from 2022 to 2025. Given the previous rate 16%, these are significant changes.

In other words, if you received an electric vehicle as a company car this year, you paid no personal income tax on it until April 2021, and very little until at least 2025, whereas before April 2020 you’d have paid a lot more, making the reduction a significant incentive for employees to have an EV as a company car. In our previous article, we calculated that, if you received a Tesla Model 3 Standard Range Plus instead of a Mercedes C220d saloon as your company car from your employer, you’d save well over £10,000 over three years of use in terms of tax, fuel and other running costs.

But what are the incentives for the employer to buy you an EV? Other than providing an attractive perk for employees, why should your company go electric, when EVs still tend to be considerably more expensive than internal combustion engine cars? In a follow-up to our original article, we will show that buying an EV makes just as much sense for a company as it does for the employee that receives it, and even more so if you run your own Ltd company…

…Click here to read more.