EV charging
What charging at home costs against filling a tank
Your electricity price and your pump price decide this, and they are not high in the same states. Washington has cheap power and expensive gasoline. Connecticut is the other way round. Pick your state and the answer changes.
Your driving
You save a year
$382
$32 a month
100 miles costs
$7.35
on gasoline, $10.19
Charger pays back in
3.1 yr
$1,200 to install
10 year saving
$2,623
after paying for the charger
What 100 miles costs on each fuel
What you have saved, year by year
Electricity you buy
4,545 kWh a year
Gasoline you do not buy
500 gallons a year
Gas would have to fall to
$1.99 a gallon
Driving 13,500 miles in Texas takes about 4,545 kWh from the wall, counting the roughly 10 percent lost as heat in the charger and the battery, which costs $993 a year. The same miles in a 27 mpg car burn 500 gallons and cost $1,375. Gasoline would have to drop to $1.99 a gallon before the gas car became the cheaper one to fuel.
Charging entirely at public fast chargers instead would cost $2,182 a year, more than the gasoline. A driveway and a plug are most of what makes an EV cheap to run.
Where switching saves the most
The same driver, 13,500 miles a year in a 3.3 mile per kWh car, replacing a 27 mpg gas car, charging 80 percent of the time at home. Only the state changes.
- Washington$1,270 a year, gas at $4.25
- Oregon$1,048 a year, gas at $3.95
- Nevada$964 a year, gas at $4.00
- Idaho$849 a year, gas at $3.40
- Utah$817 a year, gas at $3.35
- Montana$730 a year, gas at $3.25
At the bottom of the table the gap closes to almost nothing. Massachusetts is the worst state in the country for this, and the same driver saves $5 a year, which is a rounding error. Expensive electricity is only half the reason: that driver still buys a fifth of their miles at a public fast charger. Plug in at home every time and the same Massachusettsdriver keeps $164 a year.
The driveway is most of the answer
An EV is cheap to run because home electricity is cheap. Public fast charging is not: around 48 cents a kWh is normal, which is two to four times the residential rate, and at that price a mile on electricity can cost more than a mile on gasoline. Drag the home charging slider down and watch the saving collapse. That single control matters more than the car.
If you can plug in where you sleep, the numbers above are yours. If you park on the street, run the slider down to what you can actually manage before you believe any figure on this page, including ours.
One more thing this does not know about: many utilities sell power overnight at a lower rate for exactly this, sometimes half the daytime price. If yours does, the electricity price this page uses for your state is too high, and your real saving is larger.
Questions
- Is it cheaper to charge an EV at home than to buy gasoline?
- In every state, yes, if the charging happens at home. Home electricity in the United States runs from about 11 cents a kWh to about 43 cents, and even at the top of that range a home charged mile costs less than a mile on gasoline. Public fast charging is a different matter: at around 48 cents a kWh it can cost as much as gasoline or more.
- How much does a home EV charger cost to install?
- A Level 2 charger is a few hundred dollars for the unit. The bigger and more variable cost is the electrician: a short run from a modern panel can be a few hundred dollars, while a long run, a trench, or a panel that has to be upgraded first can pass two thousand. Twelve hundred dollars all in is a fair planning figure.
- Why does the calculator add ten percent to the electricity?
- A charger does not put everything it draws into the battery. Roughly a tenth is lost as heat in the charger, the cable and the battery, and your meter counts all of it. Manufacturer efficiency figures are measured at the battery, so they have to be grossed up before they meet an electricity bill.
- Does this include the price of the car?
- No, and that is deliberate. This compares the cost of fuel and the cost of the charger that makes the cheap fuel possible. What an EV costs to buy, what it is worth in five years, what insurance asks for it and what either car needs at a service are real questions, but they are separate ones, and folding them in here would hide the fuel answer rather than sharpen it.