yes perhaps I should have been more specific.
assuming you drive average mileage (c7000 miles a year), with an average amount of urban driving in that, then typically the extra PCP costs are immediately offset by the reduced ‘fuel’ costs, reduced maintenance, tax, etc.
I'm not sure how that works. In pure "fuel" terms (ignoring maintenance costs - I accept there's a difference, but I don't believe it is as massive as some claim), if I drive 600 miles a month (7,200 miles a year) in a car which does 55mpg (small Diesel town/ex-urban) and I pay £2/l for fuel (there isn't anywhere around here that charges that just yet, but it's probably coming), that's about £100 a month.
If I have a purely electric car which claims to do 300 miles on a 60kWh charge (that's better than most) and I have signed up for something like Octopus's EV cheap rate and do all my charging at 7.5p/kWh (that's their current rate around here), that comes to £9 a month.
Under those ideal circumstances, the finance, HP or PCP on an electric car can be no more than £90 more expensive than that on an ICE car if you want to "break even". It's worse than that though, because I already have a Diesel with no outstanding finance and I don't have an EV, and Octopus's EV rate comes with a daytime electricity rate (for cooking, cleaning, lighting, TV watching etc) which is currently about 16% higher than their standard flat-rate tariff, so all my other electricity use (let's call it 15kWh per day and 5p difference - it's probably more in the winter) adds another £22.50 per month to the "cost" of the EV.
I'm ignoring future electricity price rises because Diesel is also rising.
If I were to do half my charging at home at 7.5p and half at a public charger at 50p (an effective cost of 28.75p), charging the EV would cost £34.50 so the saving in "fuel" is now just £65.50 per month, or £43 including increased daytime electricity costs.
A 4-year PCP on the cheapest MG EV (the ZS) with a £5,000 deposit and 8,000 miles a year works out to £311 per month with a final payment of £11,800ish
A 4-year PCP on the equivalent MG ZS with a petrol engine, £5,000 deposit and 8,000 miles a year works out to £160 per month with a final payment of under £8,400
I don't think this equates to extra finance costs being "immediately offset". In fact under those conditions, buying and running a new EV costs at least £50 - £70 more per month than buying and running a new petrol car (petrol cars doing fewer miles per gallon than Diesel, but the fuel being slightly cheaper) and you could also add in another £70 per month to account for the difference in final payment, if the intention is to hang on to the car.
It does work rather better if you do more miles. I actually do around 24,000 miles a year in a car which regularly achieves over 60mpg. That amount of mileage might not be possible on some PCPs but leaving that aside, at £2/l that would cost me around £303 a month in Diesel while the electricity - assuming 250 miles / 60kWh because a lot of my driving is motorway and EVs are less efficient on the motorway - would be around £36 (at 7.5p). That £270ish difference is quite a lot of finance, though it reduces to £165 if charging works out to 28.75p/kWh and I think you'd be hard pushed to finance an EV at less than £300 a month, let alone £165 a month.
My point? Yes, an EV is cheaper to run than a Diesel car, however it's not so much of a difference as to make swapping on purely financial grounds viable for me, or for many people I know, even were I needing to buy a new car anyway, and I'm rather hoping to get at least another 5 years out of my current car!
Since I don't have to buy a new car just yet, it's far, far cheaper for me to stick with my Diesel. My next car, in 5 years or so? So long as I can be confident of the range (on the motorway, in the winter, with the battery down to 70% of as-new capacity), definitely electric, but with battery warranties commonly around the 100,000 mile mark, that's only four or five years' driving for me, which isn't a terribly exciting prospect.
M.
