Here’s my experience of driving an electric car for two years
An article in The Next Web, “Here’s how to calculate the cost of driving an EV per km (or mile)”, got me thinking that it might be interesting, almost two years after I purchased my electric vehicle, to perform a few ‘napkin calculations’ to gauge the impact of my decision. I’m not trying to convince anyone to follow my lead (although I’m pretty sure the world would be a better place if more people thought about it).
The first thing I’ve noticed is that, compared to the numbers in the article, my vehicle is significantly more efficient than the average it quotes. In the image, a graphs of its consumption, an average of 184 Wh/km. When I bought the car, I changed my electricity tariff to an hourly rate. The vehicle is always charged at night, and the rate I pay per kWh is 0.099387 euros. This means that my cost per hundred kilometers is 1.83 euros, that is, less than two cents (0.018) per kilometer. But of the 21,372 km the vehicle has now traveled, a certain amount corresponds to trips where the recharges used the brand’s free superchargers, so the real cost would have been somewhat lower (specifically, I have consumed 2,544km in superchargers). If I ignore this factor, which was part of a promotion the brand was making at the time of purchase, the cost of all the kilometers traveled with my vehicle in its almost two years of life is about…
