Last year was the first full year we have owned a fully electric car. Besides the environmental matters the one reason for the switch was costs. Electric cars are supposed to be cheaper to drive and maintain. So how did the promise hold up last year especially considering the unusually high electricity prices?
We drove a bit over 30 000 km last year. At 15kWh per kilometer that's 4500 kWh total. Most of that was charged at home where we paid on average 16 cents per kW, let's use 20 cents to account charging at the public charging stations, so that means 900€ spent on electricity.
30 000 new kilometers on the meter meant two service visits as well (the service interval is still 15 000 km or once per year. First one was mostly regular checkup at 200€ but the 60 000 mark was a bit more expensive due it including the change of battery coolant. Services added up to 700€ (including the self-changed wipers). There was also the additional cost from installing the home charger adding 1200€ to the years car related expences.
That totals to 2600€ spent on the car not accounting the monthly payment for the car itself, car wash, tire changes or insurances as those are pretty much the same as for the previous car.
The old car had services at around 300€, there were also those more expensive visits so let's estimate that cost at the same annual level. The old one obviously didn't need a charger either at home so that's 1200€ more paid last year. Of course that's an one time fee, so comparing just the yearly running costs warrants excluding that as well.
The biggest difference comes from powering the vehicle. Driving 30 000 km with the old car would have consumed nearly 2000 liters of gasoline. While the electricity prices were high last year so was the price of gas. At 2€/l the gas alone would have cost us 4000€! So even taking the charger into account we saved 1900€ last year.