We bought our first electric car 6 years ago. By now, we saved so much money on gas that the car paid for itself. Completely. How are electric cars presumably just now becoming competitive?
this post was submitted on 17 Apr 2026
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Yeah, I don't buy lifetime cost parity is only hitting now. That's long past.
Depending on the market segment, the price difference even just 5-6 years ago could be a few grand, or it could be like 20k. Depending on your location, electricity might cost nothing, or it might cost nearly as much as fuel. Also a lot of early EVs sold in Europe were Leafs, whose batteries tend to fail prematurely since they weren't cooled. A battery replacement is usually about half the cost of the car new (luckily nowadays, individual cell replacements are being done for at least some cars).
Also I don't have an EV, but I've done calculations, and if I'd use public chargers it'd cost almost as much as driving an ICE vehicle that isn't 20 years old (in terms of energy cost, anyway). If I charge at home, it's much cheaper. I have that option, but a lot of people don't.
Also the price difference thing is more or less gone now. EVs didn't get much cheaper (other than the low end of the market), but ICE vehicles did get more expensive once they realized people are willing to pay more. A BMW iX is nearly 100k new, but so is a diesel X5 now, so you're not really saving money on the purchase price by getting an ICE vehicle anymore.
Also the price difference thing is more or less gone now.
It's just always been hard to compare like for like, because pure EVs compete on different features than similarly priced ICE vehicles. Is a Tesla Model 3 more like a $30,000 Toyota Camry or more like a $60,000 BMW 3 series? Which is the nearest ICE competitor to the Rivian R1S?
In the past 5 years we've seen a lot of new models released by different manufacturers, we're also seeing more directly comparable models.
One interesting thing is that Toyota is soon releasing EV versions of vehicles they also offer as ICE vehicles. Sometime in the next month or so, the Lexus ES will be offered as either a pure EV or a hybrid, and the EV will actually be cheaper. And there's an EV Highlander coming later this year, with a price comparable to the hybrid Grand Highlanders.
And obviously my comment is very much U.S.-centered because that's the market I know, but most of the ICE manufacturers rely on global manufacturing and supply chains so that we can try to see patterns and trends more broadly. European brands like VW, BMW, Volvo, Mercedes, etc., have also been pushing electrified models that sit somewhere in the long spectrum between cheap economy cars and expensive luxury/sport cars.
I'd never compare a Tesla with anything, it's a piece of shit anyway. I'm pretty sure the $30,000 Camry has a nicer interior than a Model 3 lol. The Rivian's cool, but not even being sold on the continent this article is about (which incidentally is also where I live).
I've only ever done EV to ICE price comparisons in a particular company's range rather than between different manufacturers, and I've never particularly cared about anything in the super low end of the market (I'm sorry, but a Hyundai Kona is not for me, EV or not), nor the super high end (As much as the Mercedes-Benz S-Class is my favourite car in the world (older models, anyway - not a huge fan of the W223), I'll never be buying one new or even lightly used). So it's always been things like the 5 series, X5, E-Class, GLE, etc. Executive cars, essentially.
So 5-6 years ago, there weren't many comparison points. But you could compare the EQC to the GLC and you'd find out that the minimum to shell out for a GLC was about 20k less than the EQC, but of course the EQC's base model had better performance.
Now, Mercedes still makes their EVs more expensive than their ICE vehicles, but there's finally another German manufacturer making decent EVs and that's BMW, who will sell you a base iX for roughly the same price as the base X5 and again, the electric base model has much better performance than the diesel. They will also sell you an i5 for just 7 or 8k more than the base 5 series diesel, and that is actually the same model of car (iX and X5 are same size, but different platform).
You lose comparability again when you go to Audi because those bastards renamed their E-Tron to Q8 E-tron, whereas the E-Tron was actually a much lower-end model. They also haven't made anything worth calling a car in 5-10 years unfortunately, EV or not.
Volvo still makes EVs look unfavourable in their lineup while also phasing out ICE vehicles. The EX90 starts at significantly more than the XC90 and the base EX90 is RWD whereas the base XC90 is AWD. There's also a pretty big gap in favour of ICE in their smaller vehicles (XC40) and of course they've entirely done away with all sedans besides the ES90 and all wagons altogether, which is amazing, because the V90/V90CC was super popular here. 6 decades of great wagons and now they're telling you "SUV or GTFO".
It's probably about how much you have to drive. And remember this is for new cars, it implies second hand has been ahead for a while.
What did a new EV cost 6 years ago? Maybe $40k USD? So you need to save over $6000 in gas each year. This needs to be $6000 more than the electricity cost of charging your EV. It feels like you must do an above average amount of driving for the savings to pay for the car in 6 years, or otherwise I'm off with my price guess or you get free electricity (e.g. solar).
In europe gas is expensive and electricity can be quite cheap because of rapid renewables adoption. In addition, you also have to factor in that gas cars need regular oil changes, engine maintenance and their brakes usually wear out much faster too.
Yeah there is quite low maintenence on EVs but they are said to go through tyres faster (on account of the weight). I figure any maintenance difference is probably not that big compared to not using fuel though.
We bought an almost-new (ex-demo) EV about 6 months ago. We get free power (due to accidentally OPing our solar it's use or lose) and we paid a little over half the price of what the car would be new.
With mostly free power (still have to pay when we travel away from home) it's going to take about 16 years to pay it off in fuel savings for us - and that's not accounting for the interest on borrowing the money or the opportunity cost of investing the money elsewhere. If we had paid full price it would have been more like 25 years. This is based on before times fuel prices though, right now the numbers probably look better.
I think you have to do a lot of driving for a new car to pay for itself. We do a lot of WFH and when we commute it's with public transport so I think that really eats into any savings because we only do like 12 000km a year.
I'm not a long distance driver (only 5 or 6 times a year I drive more than 200 km in a day) and in 2 years my car is over 40000 km. Charging at home means a savings of more than 4000€ with the old gas prices. With 2€/l it's even more. And I'm doing the maths with diesel numbers (more km/l).
That's the part that I forgot about, I save about $480 a month because I get free charging at work. We used to refill my wife's car twice a week for our commute. I can't imagine what it would cost for gas now at close to $7 a gallon some days
Haha there you go. You still must do an insane amount of driving to go through $480 of power a month though.
(not OP) We have 2 tier electricity prices here for consumers...
I'm just going to skip the 1st because a bill of $480 would put them into tier 2 so fast.
Tier 2 is $0.1408 CAD/kWh
That's 3,409kWh.
An Ionic 5 has 63kWh/220miles for a standard range.
That's 54 battery cycles a month, or 11,880miles a month.
Account for some losses along the way and lets just call it 10k miles a month.
At least that's what it would be here.
Yeah 10k miles is more than what I drive in a year and they're doing it in a month 😅. I am thinking that $480 may be at retail DC charging prices rather than home power usage prices because I'm not sure who would drive that much and not be driving for work (which would then be an unreasonable comparison to others buying EVs).
Ah, ya maybe there's no home charging. Electricity rates here are pretty cheap though, they could be somewhere where it's much more as well which would bring the miles down a lot. California would be more than double what I pay for example.
What did a new EV cost 6 years ago? Maybe $40k USD?
6 years ago I paid 23k€ for my factory new Ioniq (that I am very happy with and already out 190k km on)
Damn I think we are getting fucked over on EV prices. I don't know about 6 years ago but now an Ioniq 5 costs $70k NZD for the cheapest model, that's 35k€.
The original Ioniq was a very different car with a tiny battery. The Ioniq 5 is a significantly improved beast and starts at 46k € where I live (we're a lower income country within the EU so our car prices have been adjusted to be higher than many other EU countries, accordingly).
That's similar to what an Ioniq 5 costs here at the moment as well, but that's also a significantly better car than the classic Ioniq. A better comparison would be the current Hyundai Inster, which is smaller but has similar range
Paid 20k€ for a new eGolf. We drive about 25000 km per year. Gas is about 2 euros per litre, previous car needed about 7 litres per 100 km. Makes 3500€ per year for gas. The car uses 12 kWh per 100 km, by now we're on solar, but we previously paid about 20 cents per kWh. That's about 600 euros per year. That's a bit more than 6 years, but we own the car for a bit more than six years, so there's that.
Ah nice, that 25000km would be way above average where I live but sounds like it has worked out for you!
20k is also less than I was expecting, I don't think we had many options for new EVs where I live 6 years ago. Tesla, Ioniq, Atto, Leaf. I wasn't looking back then so maybe there were others I didn't know about.
Might be a result of the assumed yearly driven distance.
I found 12000 and 10000 km in the report (for first and second buyers l think).
If you drive more, the reduced fuel cost will have an bigger impact.
E.g. I calculated it some time ago for our family's yearly <10000 km distance, and it wasn't favorable yet for the electric car.
In the us the average driver is doing a bit over 20'000km per year. I have no idea what eu numbers are but those look small and in turn mean a longer payoff. Of course average never applies to you, only a community.
I guess those are "city numbers". If you live outside big cities the distance goes up quickly.
long distances traveling is the only thing ICE has over ev, other than that not much.
Not really when you have the support infrastructure for charging.
I've done multiple 1800km trips and charging only added a 4 hours compared to driving non stop. If you add bathroom and food breaks it is basically the same amount as an ICE trip. And this is with a small car with relatively low range. I get maybe 150km between charges.
I personally would be worried about battery deg causing your ranges to significantly. But I'm not on the market for an EV, I'm a motorcyclist!
I do think the strides we're seeing in EV tech outside of Tesla is fucking awesome and that this tech problem will absolutely solve itself in the future.
This is nonsense and reads like a petrol industry propaganda post to deter people from buying an EV now because they only might get good in the future.
For both our cars, degradation is not an issue, and both are first or second gen EVs, with the smaller one not even having a battery cooling system. People are not returning car batteries, just because they last so much longer than anticipated and because once you got used to EVs you realise that battery degradation is not an issue for everyday driving.
It's not a problem that'll be solved in the future, it's not an issue right now. Don't scare people off by repeating fossil fuel industry propaganda.
I'm not repeating propaganda. I'm repeating my personal concern. Like I said, I'm a motorcyclist. I know that batteries in general, can degrade over time, and it's something that I personally rank on my list of concerns.
I'm fine driving a bike still for the time being. Don't get so self-defensive, dude.
Ask yourself why you think it concerns you. Because car battery degradation is genuinely so minimal there's no real concern at all.
I don't think you can truly love ICE engines and the engineering that makes them work without realizing that an Electric Vehicle will always win as an everyday beater engine. Hands down. No contest.
ICE engines are cool because of how complex they had to become in order to become even as remotely as reliable as Electric Engines are fundmanetally. Like a Mechanical Clock vs a much more mechanically simple Digital Clock.
The only reason we are even having this discussion in 2026 and it things haven't flattened in favor of Electric Vehicles long ago was batteries used to suck. It is that simple.
ICE engines are cool because of how complex they had to become in order to become even as remotely as reliable as Electric Engines are fundmanetally.
I remember in the 90's when a lot of carmakers were developing variable valve timing where the valve timing would adjust based on RPM, using the different parts of the camshaft for each cylinder's timing, so that it could maximize performance/efficiency for a wider range of RPMs without trying a one size fits all approach for the whole range. And each carmaker used a slightly different approach, trying to do something to squeeze out just a little bit more performance out of the same size engine.
Or consider the nature of the transmissions, and the rise of the automatic transmission, which allowed carmakers to start going into 6-10 gears (or the continuously variable transmission) because shifting gears could be abstracted away from the driver's perspective.
The history of a lot of the other engineered functions (getting power from the engine to 2 or 4 of the wheels while allowing different rotational rates, getting fuel into the cylinder, cooling and lubricating the engine, getting the fuel/air mixture right, etc.) shows that it's so many different things to worry about just to make the car go, reliably and safely.
In contrast, this is a complete electric motor, it was created for demonstration purposes but it is still fundamentally the same technology as an electric motor in an electric car.
Although they were used only for teaching, in 1828 Jedlik demonstrated the first device to contain the three main components of practical DC motors: the stator, rotor and commutator. The device employed no permanent magnets, as the magnetic fields of both the stationary and revolving components were produced solely by the currents flowing through their windings.
Yeah, ICE engines are an absolute marvel of engineering, whilst reliable electric motors are really simple to build
That's true, although a fuel tank is also really simple to build while a rechargeable battery and related charging controllers/equipment get pretty complicated to manufacture. Some of the complexity gets pushed elsewhere.
Batteties still suck. Just a bit less.
The best electric vehicles are grid tied. We've had them for generations.
If those motherfuckers try to reinvent trains again I'm gonna lose my shit.
It's cheaper to install a hanging electrical wire above a road, close of 4 lanes, and run a bus than to install train tracks.
This is very common in poorer countries. Maybe not as nice as trains, but it's 90% as good and doesn't need petrol.
Internal combustion engine engines?
yeah ok kay?
Just making sure I understood understood.
But what about the vroom vroom noises?
Some EVs add them on the speakers inside to please that crowd lol.
BMW even partnered with acclaimed composer Hans Zimmer to make custom sounds on certain of their more expensive EVs.
That's where you know that they're dumb: people don't want lane assist or touchscreen air control, but to be able to have Lambo noises!
I thought new EVs hit lifetime price parity over 5 years ago.
Depends on usage.
Second or third owner? These cars being sold every 4 years or something?