Showing United Kingdom · real 2026 prices
EVs usually cost more to buy but far less to run. Enter both cars' prices and how you drive — we'll show the year the fuel savings overtake the purchase premium.
Adjust anything to match your situation.
Estimate only, not financial advice. Excludes depreciation, insurance, registration and resale differences, which can move the answer in either direction. Servicing saving is your own estimate.
One honest formula — the purchase premium divided by what you save each year.
The break-even point is very sensitive to how you charge: at off-peak or solar rates the same car can pay itself off years earlier than at a flat tariff. It's equally sensitive to distance — a 25,000 km/year driver breaks even roughly twice as fast as a 13,000 km/year driver. We deliberately exclude depreciation and resale value: EVs and fuel cars depreciate differently by model and market, and a guess would be false precision. Estimates only, not financial advice.
Quick answers about EV break-even economics.
For an average driver paying a mid-range electricity tariff, somewhere between 4 and 10 years is common — but the honest answer is that it swings enormously with the purchase premium, your annual distance and how you charge. High-mileage drivers charging off-peak or on solar can break even in 2–3 years; low-mileage drivers paying full price for both car and power may never reach it. That's exactly why this calculator makes every input adjustable.
Two things: the energy gap (fuel cost minus electricity cost for your driving) and an optional servicing saving you set yourself, since EVs skip oil changes, spark plugs and most scheduled engine work. It deliberately excludes depreciation, insurance and registration differences — those vary too much by model and market to average honestly.
It can, in either direction — some EVs hold value well while others have depreciated faster than fuel equivalents, and the picture changes year to year as battery tech and used-market confidence evolve. Rather than bake in a guess, we leave it out and tell you so. If you have resale estimates for the two specific cars you're comparing, subtract the difference from the purchase premium before reading the result.
Charging cheaply matters more than anything else you control: switching from a flat tariff to off-peak overnight rates typically doubles the yearly saving, and rooftop solar can triple it. After that it's simply distance — the more you drive, the faster the premium is repaid. Negotiating harder on the EV's purchase price shortens it too, dollar for dollar.
