Electric Vehicles – a No-brainer

The Tesla Model 3 is currently one of the most popular electric vehicles (EVs) on the market (Jolly, 2021). The base model of the Tesla Model 3 costs £45,990 (Tesla, 2022b), and it is purported to have a lifetime of at least 300,000 miles (Cristovao, 2021, Sendy, 2022). At an average of 7400 miles per year (Yurday, 2021) this equates to 40 years of usage. But lets assume we only get 20 years of usage, components might fail, technology might be superseded. Then it costs £3.78 to charge the Tesla Model 3 for every 100 miles (Wilkinson, 2021), and £17.91 per 100 miles to fuel a diesel car (petrol works out more expensive than diesel) (Nimble Fins, Yurday, 2022). Therefore over 20 years and the associated 148,000 miles, the Tesla cost £5594 for energy and the typical diesel vehicle costs £26,507 for fuel. The difference is £20,913. The average car in the UK as of 2021 cost £38,585, therefore the price difference between a ‘normal car’ and a Tesla Model 3 of £7405, is easily negated by the difference in fuel cost of £20,913 over 20 years. Each year the difference in cost between diesel and electric respectively is (£17.91 – £3.78)*74 = £14.13 * 74 = £1046. Therefore it takes £7405/£1046 = 7.08 years (7 years and one month) for the Tesla Model 3 to pay for the extra cost of its purchase. This is all assuming the prices of electricity and liquid fuel remain the same in proportion to where they are now; it is admittedly not easy to predict how costs of plug-in charging and diesel will vary over the coming years.