A driver uses an electric vehicle fast charging station at a cell phone parking lot at John F. Kennedy Airport (JFK) on April 2, 2021 in New York City.
Spencer Platt | Getty Images
That’s been true for years: mile after mile, it’s cheaper – usually a lot cheaper – to recharge an electric car than it is to fill up a car with an internal combustion engine.
This has been a key selling point for Tesla and other electric car makers, especially in times when gas prices have skyrocketed, such as now. But there’s a catch this time: while gas prices did rise sharply after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, so did electricity prices, especially in parts of the US, which were big markets for Tesla’s electric vehicles.
The question arises: is it true that “refueling” an electric car is much cheaper? The charts below will help us find the answer.
The first chart, using nationwide data, provides a baseline. Others use data related to Boston and San Francisco, two markets where electric vehicles are popular and where electricity tends to be more expensive than the national average.
The answer in all three cases is that even with regional electricity price fluctuations, filling up a gas tank is still slightly more expensive than charging your electric car battery.
Electricity rates are roughly keeping up with rising gas prices in Boston and San Francisco. However, on average in the US, adding 100 miles to your ICE car has become more expensive compared to charging an electric car by the equivalent amount over the past couple of months.
Can this change? While oil prices will almost certainly fall in the coming months as manufacturers ramp up production, it is unlikely that the price of electricity will rise enough to make electric vehicles less affordable over their lifecycle than internal combustion engine alternatives.
Using data from February, Jeffries analyst David Kelly recently calculated that the total cost of owning an electric car is about $4,700 less than a car with an internal combustion engine. He said the cost differential is likely to widen as more electric vehicles hit the market, and as battery prices continue to fall, over the next few years.
How do we calculate the numbers?
When we made these diagrams, we had three questions:
- How much does it cost to add 100 miles to an average ICE car and an average electric car?
- How have these costs changed over the past three years? (If we go back three years to February 2019, we get the pre-pandemic baseline.)
- How do these costs vary in different parts of the US?
For gasoline, the EPA reported that the average new car sold in the US in 2020 had a combined fuel economy rating of 25.7 mpg. Driving 100 miles in this average car will use up 3.9 gallons of gasoline. (Figures for 2021 have not yet been released.)
For electric vehicles, the EPA Electric Vehicle Efficiency Rating, called “MPGe” in miles per gallon equivalent, gives consumers an idea of how far an electric vehicle can travel on 33.7 kilowatt-hours (kWh) of a charge. Why 33.7 kWh? This is the amount of electricity that is chemically equivalent to the energy in a gallon of regular gasoline.
The average MPGe rating for 2022 electric vehicles sold in the US is around 97, so this hypothetical average vehicle would use 34.7 kWh of electricity to drive 100 miles.
The charts above compare the price of 3.9 gallons of gas versus 34.7 kWh over time using monthly data from the US Energy Information Administration (for gas prices) and the US Bureau of Labor Statistics (for electricity rates). from February 2019 to February 2022.
– Crystal Mercedes of CNBC contributed to this article.