7 ms·

Average EV fast-charging costs soar above petrol

62 points by clouddrover 4y ago

cr3ative 4y ago
Well, yes. We're in an energy crisis in the UK and the commercial rate for energy was about 75p/kwh at the start of the year. Domestic is lower due to government intervention. The prices have risen accordingly. They should fall when the market allows them to. At least this article is more honest than most when they point out "using public rapid chargers" - the most expensive way you can - because charging at home is still vastly cheaper than petrol.
sebazzz 4y ago
If you actually need to fast charge the majority of the time, then an EV is probably not the best option right now. The difference is that you can easily drive to a cheaper petrol station near the highway while fast chargers are always expensive regardless. I'm saying this as an Opel Ampera-e owner whose wife who doesn't drive has permanent range anxiety anxiety though I don't ;-)
- timbit42 4y ago
  If you would need to fast charge an EV a lot, look at a PHEV instead.
ajross 4y ago
Article spends all its time talking about a ~40% increase in electricity costs, when the headline is just as related to oil prices having crashed in the past few months. Indeed, electrical generation in Europe remains high right now due to the disruption in the gas market. That's newsworthy and deserves coverage, but it's got nothing to do with "Electric Vehicles". Also, article spins badly trying to conflate charging at DC fast chargers with "charging an EV". In fact most EV charging happens at home at residential rates, not at fast chargers which need to charge a premium to provide high-amperage service to remote locations. FWIW: my Model Y in the west coast of the USA (an area much more heavily reliant on long road trips and thus fast charging) has received just 27% of its total energy from superchargers. I'd expect British cars to use them even less.
- throwawayapples 4y ago
  > Also, article spins badly trying to conflate charging at DC fast chargers with "charging an EV". In fact most EV charging happens at home at residential rates, not at fast chargers which need to charge a premium to provide high-amperage service to remote locations. Contrary to your point, the article actually addresses that directly: "The RAC data shows that those charging from a slower home charger are paying just £17.87 for the same 188 miles of range." > my Model Y in the west coast of the USA (an area much more heavily reliant on long road trips and thus fast charging) has received just 27% of its total energy from superchargers. I'd expect British cars to use them even less. It's quite possible that British vehicle owners don't have as many garages (probably synonymous with the ability to easily and securely charge at home) as owners on the west coast of the U.S. https://worldofsynonym.com/qa/what-percentage-of-uk-homes-have-a-garage.html https://worldofsynonym.com/qa/what-percentage-of-uk-homes-ha...
  - cjrp 4y ago
    You don't need a garage, just a driveway. Plenty of people with chargers mounted on an outside wall.
    - throwawayapples 4y ago
      Then you also run into this: “Car chargers are particularly appealing to thieves because they can be sold for up to £200 and they are selling them everywhere – eBay, Facebook, and to dodgy scrap dealers,” says divert.co.uk spokesman Mark Hall. “They can be pretty costly and inconvenient for you to replace, so it’s best to keep it locked away from the crooks.” https://www.whatcar.com/news/electric-car-charging-cable-theft-could-be-the-next-car-crime-wave/n23149 https://www.whatcar.com/news/electric-car-charging-cable-the...
      - ajross 4y ago
        This bit of journalism amuses me. Headline reads (emphasis mine): "Electric car charging cable theft could be the next car crime wave". And the evidence? "There has been a recent rise in reports of thefts of cables for EVs and plug-in hybrids (PHEVs)". No numbers. No link, just a statement. The fact that there has been a "recent rise" in purchases of EVs and plug-in hybrids seems plausibly related, no? Not covered. That's just awful, sorry. I mean, all journalism has perspective, everyone disagrees about some stuff, truth is hard, but that's just completely shameless.
bb123 4y ago
I know diesel owners overbrim with smugness reading these articles but I've driven 14,0000 miles in the UK in my electric car this year and the total cost was £280. That's 10x less than even the most efficient mid size car before you even factor in service costs. The reality that these articles obfuscate for the sake of clicks is that most electric car owners are still massively in front on fuel costs.
- cjrp 4y ago
  Presumably most of the charging done at home? It seems to be when you're reliant on premium (fast) public chargers that the costs add up. At home you can take advantage of things like the Octopus EV tariff and pay 10p/kWh overnight for EV charging.
  - ben7799 4y ago
    The article is talking about public chargers. I don't have an EV.. but my driving pattern would put me at 99% home charging. Basically I'd never need to use a public charger other than 4-5 road trips a year.
  - bb123 4y ago
    That's correct. It's like arguing that food is too expensive when you only eat premium take-out. For most people it's something you do maybe once a month.
- Kon-Peki 4y ago
  Is it safe to assume that you have a small, relatively inexpensive EV? For a lot of the big luxury EVs that manufacturers prefer to advertise, the upfront cost difference means that it will take 5+ years to catch up if you "only" drive 14,000 miles per year.
  - bb123 4y ago
    I have a Tesla Model 3. Your reasoning only holds true if you assume that the alternative to buying an electric car was to buy no car at all. In reality if it wasn't a Tesla it would have been an ICE car in a similar market segment such as a BMW 3 Series. That means similar initial cost + all the fuel and servicing it needs. It ends up way more expensive.
cicerox 4y ago
Was on my way to visit the family 180 miles away yesterday and so I pulled in to a supercharger with about 8% left, got it up to 65% when it told me I'm good to continue the trip, and paid £32.55 for the pleasure. Jesus christ.
- Symbiote 4y ago
  For occasional use, that doesn't seem like it would be a problem? It's still a chunk less than a ~180 mile train ticket.
  - throwawayapples 4y ago
    There are actually a lot of reasons why a train ticket won't work for many types of trips, but the biggest ones are that you need to carry more than one person which multiplies the price, the train doesn't go where you need to go, or that it's quite inconvenient in that it doesn't leave or arrive when you need to.
    - Symbiote 4y ago
      The price was just given as a comparison. A poorer person, who can't afford a car at all, has a £40 per-person advance-booked direct train as the optimum case. Their real cost is likely to be more with connections, or the time could be a lot more with a bus (£15-20) instead.
  - pontilanda 4y ago
    Even cheaper than a flight and chump change compared to a private helicopter. Apples to oranges.
    - blitzar 4y ago
      Somewhat cheaper than a personal jetpack.
    - amalgamated_inc 4y ago
      You can fly in Europe for $20. Not all destinations, obviously.
rektide 4y ago
It's a perpetual frustration to me thay electricity is so much more expensive than gas. It feels like we have to be doing something wrong that processing & trucking fuel out to people os so much cheaper a form of energy than what we get from the electrical grid. If we take the EPAs 33.4 kWh to a gallon equivalency, and say gas costs $5/gallon, that'd be $0.15/kWh. A good portion of America doesnt even have power to the home at that rate.
- starkd 4y ago
  Does this factor in the energy loss in transmission?
- prottog 4y ago
  > that'd be $0.15/kWh. A good portion of America doesnt even have power to the home at that rate. The majority of Americans pay less than that for retail electricity to the home: https://www.eia.gov/electricity/state/ https://www.eia.gov/electricity/state/
  - mikeyouse 4y ago
    Right... basically Hawaii, California, and New England pay more than that - most of the rest of the country is at or under $0.10/kwh. I worked for a small business in Texas that used a fair amount of electricity and we were paying $0.04/kwh peak and $0.035/kwh overnight..
    - hcurtiss 4y ago
      News to me. My PGE bill in Oregon totals out to 14.3 cents per kwh.
  - lathiat 4y ago
    $0.21 USD/kWh here in Australia.
- Symbiote 4y ago
  That converts to 8.82 kWh per litre, since this is about the UK. Average petrol price is currently £1.50/L, so the figure is £0.17/kWh. £0.17/kWh was a typical price a few years ago, but nowadays you'll only get that at night (with a suitable meter to measure time-of-day usage). Another comment claims 10p/kWh at night on a special tariff for EV owners.
throwawayapples 4y ago
It's quite possible that British vehicle owners don't have as many garages (probably synonymous with the ability to easily charge at home) as owners in the US: https://worldofsynonym.com/qa/what-percentage-of-uk-homes-have-a-garage.html https://worldofsynonym.com/qa/what-percentage-of-uk-homes-ha... Even home electric prices are very high now: 34p per kWh: https://www.nimblefins.co.uk/average-cost-electricity-kwh-uk https://www.nimblefins.co.uk/average-cost-electricity-kwh-uk Most electric in the UK is green now, and with the continued forced elimination in fossil fuels' for home heating, it's going to keep going up. Of course, being green is literally cold comfort to old age pensioners who can't afford to heat their homes anymore.
- cwmma 4y ago
  you don't need a garage though though, you just need a driveway and that might be very unrelated to garages.
- iso1631 4y ago
  18 million, 65%, of Britain’s households have – or have the potential – enough off-street parking to accommodate at least one car or van The reason electricity is so expensive at the moment is due to high fossil fuel (mainly gas) prices.
waffletower 4y ago
The costs in this article do not apply to using the Tesla network in Oregon and Washington of the United States. Using the supercharger network frequently in 2022, charging costs were still significantly lower than gasoline.
- amalgamated_inc 4y ago
  It is a British website talking about Britain.
Mountain_Skies 4y ago
It's interesting how much more variable "fuel" costs are for EVs than for ICE vehicles. In Georgia, you can get residential EV charging for as low as 1.5¢ per kwh overnight. I've heard some areas you can get it for free overnight. But not every power company offers EV rates, and residential rates over 25¢ per kwh aren't uncommon in some parts of the country. Then there's retail charging which can be over 40¢ per kwh. That's quite a spread compared to gasoline, which appears to currently range from about $2.40/gallon to $4.50/gallon. Even when accounting for taxes and meter fees on residential EV charging, the cost spread for charging is still much larger than that of gasoline.
- amalgamated_inc 4y ago
  That's probably because electricity costs themselves are extremely variable. And that is likely because electricity cannot economically be stored or transported, unlike oil or gasoline or even (natural) gas. Thus, every electricity market is its own little thing, there is no "global market for electricity."
  - simfree 4y ago
    This is why we need Tres Amigas, higher capacity high voltage lines, and further grid connectivity improvements. Many energy generation projects are stranded due to the grid in their county being unable to transport the power generated to ratepayers with need. Larger grids result in lower costs, as scale and the ability to lean on many diverse energy sources lowers the cost and increases reliability for each grid operator.
    - amalgamated_inc 4y ago
      Which we're not gonna get cause NIMBY
phkahler 4y ago
The problem is that fast chargers are being installed by companies whose goal is to make money from their charging networks, and they are doing exactly that. I think the end-state for EV charging will be installation of chargers at places people want to stop on longer trips. It takes long enough for a good charge that the human(s) will need something to do, which means bathrooms, restaurants, or maybe shopping. I predict EV road trips will be economical in the US when McDonalds installs chargers at their locations along the interstates, as a convenience to customers rather than a primary revenue source. IMHO this will require next-gen DC fast chargers as well, as the current models are still rather clunky and expensive for McD's.
- lm28469 4y ago
  > companies whose goal is to make money from their charging networks Yes but remember, nationalisation is bad, public infrastructure are bad, only the invisible hand of the free market can bring you salvation !
- WorldMaker 4y ago
  > I predict EV road trips will be economical in the US when McDonalds installs chargers at their locations along the interstates, as a convenience to customers rather than a primary revenue source. I've been offering it as free advice for a while that the company wanting the most to be the next McDonald's for the All American Road Trip will be the fast food chain that goes all in on electrifying their parking spaces. (I think one of the businesses that could most easily push into that is actually the Sonic chain. They already electrify most of their parking spots, they just need to add charger cables. There's some interesting retro irony in how their outdated/outmoded throwback diner style becomes relevant in a new way there.) > IMHO this will require next-gen DC fast chargers as well, as the current models are still rather clunky and expensive for McD's. Expense seems to be a matter of scale. A chain making a big enough (risky enough) bet at a large enough national scale would have all manner of power to bring in economies of scale with current models. I think a lot of the same applies to clunkiness. I think a lot of the clunkiness is "intentional" by the current purchasers of chargers. They aren't pushing back hard enough on the user experience because they win a little by chargers still seeming "exotic" and "new" and "exciting" and the clunkiness seems to me as much an accident of charging still trying to compete with old business models and new early adopter customers rather than just being boring parts of everyday life than an inhereent technology problem. Something like a restaurant making a big bet on charging, wanting to roll it out to every parking lot they own, with as few maintenance/OpEx costs as possible, and wanting to make sure that it is the least hassle possible to their customers to encourage even more money to be spent inside on food: that would have a lot of incentive power to eliminate a lot of clunkiness really quickly.

62 points by clouddrover 4y ago

Well, yes. We're in an energy crisis in the UK and the commercial rate for energy was about 75p/kwh at the start of the year. Domestic is lower due to government intervention. The prices have risen accordingly. They should fall when the market allows them to. At least this article is more honest than most when they point out "using public rapid chargers" - the most expensive way you can - because charging at home is still vastly cheaper than petrol.

sebazzz 4y ago

If you actually need to fast charge the majority of the time, then an EV is probably not the best option right now. The difference is that you can easily drive to a cheaper petrol station near the highway while fast chargers are always expensive regardless. I'm saying this as an Opel Ampera-e owner whose wife who doesn't drive has permanent range anxiety anxiety though I don't ;-)

timbit42 4y ago
If you would need to fast charge an EV a lot, look at a PHEV instead.

ajross 4y ago

Article spends all its time talking about a ~40% increase in electricity costs, when the headline is just as related to oil prices having crashed in the past few months. Indeed, electrical generation in Europe remains high right now due to the disruption in the gas market. That's newsworthy and deserves coverage, but it's got nothing to do with "Electric Vehicles". Also, article spins badly trying to conflate charging at DC fast chargers with "charging an EV". In fact most EV charging happens at home at residential rates, not at fast chargers which need to charge a premium to provide high-amperage service to remote locations. FWIW: my Model Y in the west coast of the USA (an area much more heavily reliant on long road trips and thus fast charging) has received just 27% of its total energy from superchargers. I'd expect British cars to use them even less.

throwawayapples 4y ago
> Also, article spins badly trying to conflate charging at DC fast chargers with "charging an EV". In fact most EV charging happens at home at residential rates, not at fast chargers which need to charge a premium to provide high-amperage service to remote locations. Contrary to your point, the article actually addresses that directly: "The RAC data shows that those charging from a slower home charger are paying just £17.87 for the same 188 miles of range." > my Model Y in the west coast of the USA (an area much more heavily reliant on long road trips and thus fast charging) has received just 27% of its total energy from superchargers. I'd expect British cars to use them even less. It's quite possible that British vehicle owners don't have as many garages (probably synonymous with the ability to easily and securely charge at home) as owners on the west coast of the U.S. https://worldofsynonym.com/qa/what-percentage-of-uk-homes-have-a-garage.html https://worldofsynonym.com/qa/what-percentage-of-uk-homes-ha...
- cjrp 4y ago
  You don't need a garage, just a driveway. Plenty of people with chargers mounted on an outside wall.
  - throwawayapples 4y ago
    Then you also run into this: “Car chargers are particularly appealing to thieves because they can be sold for up to £200 and they are selling them everywhere – eBay, Facebook, and to dodgy scrap dealers,” says divert.co.uk spokesman Mark Hall. “They can be pretty costly and inconvenient for you to replace, so it’s best to keep it locked away from the crooks.” https://www.whatcar.com/news/electric-car-charging-cable-theft-could-be-the-next-car-crime-wave/n23149 https://www.whatcar.com/news/electric-car-charging-cable-the...
    - ajross 4y ago
      This bit of journalism amuses me. Headline reads (emphasis mine): "Electric car charging cable theft could be the next car crime wave". And the evidence? "There has been a recent rise in reports of thefts of cables for EVs and plug-in hybrids (PHEVs)". No numbers. No link, just a statement. The fact that there has been a "recent rise" in purchases of EVs and plug-in hybrids seems plausibly related, no? Not covered. That's just awful, sorry. I mean, all journalism has perspective, everyone disagrees about some stuff, truth is hard, but that's just completely shameless.

bb123 4y ago

I know diesel owners overbrim with smugness reading these articles but I've driven 14,0000 miles in the UK in my electric car this year and the total cost was £280. That's 10x less than even the most efficient mid size car before you even factor in service costs. The reality that these articles obfuscate for the sake of clicks is that most electric car owners are still massively in front on fuel costs.

cjrp 4y ago
Presumably most of the charging done at home? It seems to be when you're reliant on premium (fast) public chargers that the costs add up. At home you can take advantage of things like the Octopus EV tariff and pay 10p/kWh overnight for EV charging.
- ben7799 4y ago
  The article is talking about public chargers. I don't have an EV.. but my driving pattern would put me at 99% home charging. Basically I'd never need to use a public charger other than 4-5 road trips a year.
- bb123 4y ago
  That's correct. It's like arguing that food is too expensive when you only eat premium take-out. For most people it's something you do maybe once a month.
Kon-Peki 4y ago
Is it safe to assume that you have a small, relatively inexpensive EV? For a lot of the big luxury EVs that manufacturers prefer to advertise, the upfront cost difference means that it will take 5+ years to catch up if you "only" drive 14,000 miles per year.
- bb123 4y ago
  I have a Tesla Model 3. Your reasoning only holds true if you assume that the alternative to buying an electric car was to buy no car at all. In reality if it wasn't a Tesla it would have been an ICE car in a similar market segment such as a BMW 3 Series. That means similar initial cost + all the fuel and servicing it needs. It ends up way more expensive.

cicerox 4y ago

Was on my way to visit the family 180 miles away yesterday and so I pulled in to a supercharger with about 8% left, got it up to 65% when it told me I'm good to continue the trip, and paid £32.55 for the pleasure. Jesus christ.

Symbiote 4y ago
For occasional use, that doesn't seem like it would be a problem? It's still a chunk less than a ~180 mile train ticket.
- throwawayapples 4y ago
  There are actually a lot of reasons why a train ticket won't work for many types of trips, but the biggest ones are that you need to carry more than one person which multiplies the price, the train doesn't go where you need to go, or that it's quite inconvenient in that it doesn't leave or arrive when you need to.
  - Symbiote 4y ago
    The price was just given as a comparison. A poorer person, who can't afford a car at all, has a £40 per-person advance-booked direct train as the optimum case. Their real cost is likely to be more with connections, or the time could be a lot more with a bus (£15-20) instead.
- pontilanda 4y ago
  Even cheaper than a flight and chump change compared to a private helicopter. Apples to oranges.
  - blitzar 4y ago
    Somewhat cheaper than a personal jetpack.
  - amalgamated_inc 4y ago
    You can fly in Europe for $20. Not all destinations, obviously.

rektide 4y ago

It's a perpetual frustration to me thay electricity is so much more expensive than gas. It feels like we have to be doing something wrong that processing & trucking fuel out to people os so much cheaper a form of energy than what we get from the electrical grid. If we take the EPAs 33.4 kWh to a gallon equivalency, and say gas costs $5/gallon, that'd be $0.15/kWh. A good portion of America doesnt even have power to the home at that rate.

starkd 4y ago
Does this factor in the energy loss in transmission?
prottog 4y ago
> that'd be $0.15/kWh. A good portion of America doesnt even have power to the home at that rate. The majority of Americans pay less than that for retail electricity to the home: https://www.eia.gov/electricity/state/ https://www.eia.gov/electricity/state/
- mikeyouse 4y ago
  Right... basically Hawaii, California, and New England pay more than that - most of the rest of the country is at or under $0.10/kwh. I worked for a small business in Texas that used a fair amount of electricity and we were paying $0.04/kwh peak and $0.035/kwh overnight..
  - hcurtiss 4y ago
    News to me. My PGE bill in Oregon totals out to 14.3 cents per kwh.
- lathiat 4y ago
  $0.21 USD/kWh here in Australia.
Symbiote 4y ago
That converts to 8.82 kWh per litre, since this is about the UK. Average petrol price is currently £1.50/L, so the figure is £0.17/kWh. £0.17/kWh was a typical price a few years ago, but nowadays you'll only get that at night (with a suitable meter to measure time-of-day usage). Another comment claims 10p/kWh at night on a special tariff for EV owners.

throwawayapples 4y ago

It's quite possible that British vehicle owners don't have as many garages (probably synonymous with the ability to easily charge at home) as owners in the US: https://worldofsynonym.com/qa/what-percentage-of-uk-homes-have-a-garage.html https://worldofsynonym.com/qa/what-percentage-of-uk-homes-ha... Even home electric prices are very high now: 34p per kWh: https://www.nimblefins.co.uk/average-cost-electricity-kwh-uk https://www.nimblefins.co.uk/average-cost-electricity-kwh-uk Most electric in the UK is green now, and with the continued forced elimination in fossil fuels' for home heating, it's going to keep going up. Of course, being green is literally cold comfort to old age pensioners who can't afford to heat their homes anymore.

cwmma 4y ago
you don't need a garage though though, you just need a driveway and that might be very unrelated to garages.
iso1631 4y ago
18 million, 65%, of Britain’s households have – or have the potential – enough off-street parking to accommodate at least one car or van The reason electricity is so expensive at the moment is due to high fossil fuel (mainly gas) prices.

waffletower 4y ago

The costs in this article do not apply to using the Tesla network in Oregon and Washington of the United States. Using the supercharger network frequently in 2022, charging costs were still significantly lower than gasoline.

amalgamated_inc 4y ago
It is a British website talking about Britain.

Mountain_Skies 4y ago

It's interesting how much more variable "fuel" costs are for EVs than for ICE vehicles. In Georgia, you can get residential EV charging for as low as 1.5¢ per kwh overnight. I've heard some areas you can get it for free overnight. But not every power company offers EV rates, and residential rates over 25¢ per kwh aren't uncommon in some parts of the country. Then there's retail charging which can be over 40¢ per kwh. That's quite a spread compared to gasoline, which appears to currently range from about $2.40/gallon to $4.50/gallon. Even when accounting for taxes and meter fees on residential EV charging, the cost spread for charging is still much larger than that of gasoline.

amalgamated_inc 4y ago
That's probably because electricity costs themselves are extremely variable. And that is likely because electricity cannot economically be stored or transported, unlike oil or gasoline or even (natural) gas. Thus, every electricity market is its own little thing, there is no "global market for electricity."
- simfree 4y ago
  This is why we need Tres Amigas, higher capacity high voltage lines, and further grid connectivity improvements. Many energy generation projects are stranded due to the grid in their county being unable to transport the power generated to ratepayers with need. Larger grids result in lower costs, as scale and the ability to lean on many diverse energy sources lowers the cost and increases reliability for each grid operator.
  - amalgamated_inc 4y ago
    Which we're not gonna get cause NIMBY

phkahler 4y ago

The problem is that fast chargers are being installed by companies whose goal is to make money from their charging networks, and they are doing exactly that. I think the end-state for EV charging will be installation of chargers at places people want to stop on longer trips. It takes long enough for a good charge that the human(s) will need something to do, which means bathrooms, restaurants, or maybe shopping. I predict EV road trips will be economical in the US when McDonalds installs chargers at their locations along the interstates, as a convenience to customers rather than a primary revenue source. IMHO this will require next-gen DC fast chargers as well, as the current models are still rather clunky and expensive for McD's.

lm28469 4y ago
> companies whose goal is to make money from their charging networks Yes but remember, nationalisation is bad, public infrastructure are bad, only the invisible hand of the free market can bring you salvation !
WorldMaker 4y ago
> I predict EV road trips will be economical in the US when McDonalds installs chargers at their locations along the interstates, as a convenience to customers rather than a primary revenue source. I've been offering it as free advice for a while that the company wanting the most to be the next McDonald's for the All American Road Trip will be the fast food chain that goes all in on electrifying their parking spaces. (I think one of the businesses that could most easily push into that is actually the Sonic chain. They already electrify most of their parking spots, they just need to add charger cables. There's some interesting retro irony in how their outdated/outmoded throwback diner style becomes relevant in a new way there.) > IMHO this will require next-gen DC fast chargers as well, as the current models are still rather clunky and expensive for McD's. Expense seems to be a matter of scale. A chain making a big enough (risky enough) bet at a large enough national scale would have all manner of power to bring in economies of scale with current models. I think a lot of the same applies to clunkiness. I think a lot of the clunkiness is "intentional" by the current purchasers of chargers. They aren't pushing back hard enough on the user experience because they win a little by chargers still seeming "exotic" and "new" and "exciting" and the clunkiness seems to me as much an accident of charging still trying to compete with old business models and new early adopter customers rather than just being boring parts of everyday life than an inhereent technology problem. Something like a restaurant making a big bet on charging, wanting to roll it out to every parking lot they own, with as few maintenance/OpEx costs as possible, and wanting to make sure that it is the least hassle possible to their customers to encourage even more money to be spent inside on food: that would have a lot of incentive power to eliminate a lot of clunkiness really quickly.