About EV Running Cost

This is one of four sites covering Australia, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States. They are separate because the answers are separate. Running an EV costs a different amount in each of these countries, and not by a margin that a currency conversion would fix.

The cars are not the same. Our Australian list covers 65 models sold here, built around what Australians actually buy, so BYD, Tesla, MG and Kia feature heavily. Only five of those 65 also appear on the American list. A page written for a Vauxhall Corsa Electric is no use to someone shopping for a BYD Dolphin.

Neither are the costs. Australian figures are in dollars per kilowatt hour, distances in kilometres, and petrol comparisons in litres. The charging networks are Chargefox, Evie, Exploren and the NRMA rather than anything you would find abroad. Electricity plan prices come from the Australian Energy Regulator and cover New South Wales, Victoria, Queensland, South Australia, the ACT and Tasmania.

And some costs exist only here. The novated lease calculator is on this site alone, because novated leasing is an Australian salary packaging arrangement with no equivalent in the other three markets. The other sites carry their own such tools for the same reason.

I have always been into cars. I loved my V8 and my four wheel drive, and for a long time I did not think much of electric cars at all. I looked at hybrids first, and after enough reading came to the view that you get the best of both worlds and the worst of both worlds in the same vehicle.

What changed my mind was people, not marketing. Colleagues at work who had made the switch raved about them. So I went looking properly, and that is where the problem started.

There is no shortage of information about electric cars. It is just spread across a dozen places and rarely says the same thing twice. Ask what it costs to charge one and the answer depends on which site you landed on, and you end up digging through several to work out which is true. Worse, most of what is true in general is not true for you, because it assumes a car you do not drive and an electricity rate you do not pay.

That is what this site is for. Pick your car and set your own electricity rates once, and every calculator and every table on the site re-reads itself against your numbers. Work out what it costs to charge your own car, or compare that against the petrol car you drive now, and the figures are yours rather than someone else’s averages. No account, no sign-up, and nothing about you leaves your own browser, because the settings are stored there rather than with us.

I built the site I went looking for and could not find. If it tells you what you wanted to know in one place, it has done its job.

EV Running Cost is an independent Australian site. It is not owned by, funded by, or affiliated with any vehicle manufacturer, electricity retailer or charging network.

It is independently run and self-funded, not produced by a content agency or a commercial partner, and it carries no sponsored content.

The case for trusting what is here rests on the working being shown rather than on who wrote it. Every default figure the calculators use is listed on the methodology page with its basis and the date it was last checked, and figures that are assumptions are labelled as assumptions rather than presented as sourced fact. Where a number is an estimate, the site says so, and where a range is more honest than a single figure, it gives a range. If something here is wrong, tell us and it gets fixed.

Advertising, served by Google AdSense. There are no affiliate relationships and no sponsored content. The full position is on the disclosure page.

Nothing about how the site is funded affects the numbers in the calculators. Every default value is listed, with its basis, on the methodology page.

Almost every number you see on this site is calculated at the moment the page loads, not typed into the prose. Electricity price tiers, charger power levels, vehicle specifications, typical efficiency and the petrol price all live in a small set of central data files, and the calculators, the guides and the reference tables all read from those same files.

That has a practical consequence worth knowing about as a reader: the site cannot quietly contradict itself. A cost per 100 km quoted in a guide is produced by the same code and the same defaults as the equivalent figure in the calculator beside it. When a default changes, every page that depends on it changes at the same time. There is no separate set of hand-written numbers drifting out of date in the background.

Each page carries a last-reviewed date, and that date is updated when the figures underneath it are checked or changed. Where a default is an assumption rather than something sourced from a published figure, the methodology page says so explicitly instead of presenting all the inputs as equally solid.

What these numbers are, and what they are not

They are estimates good enough to plan and compare with. They are not a quote, and they are not advice. Electricity pricing in Australia varies by retailer, state, tariff and time of day; public charging varies between networks and between individual sites; and real-world efficiency varies with terrain, climate, load and driving style. Any tool that gave you a single confident figure for all of that would be easier to read and less honest.

This is why the calculators show every price tier at once rather than one answer, and why you are encouraged to replace the defaults with your own figures. The site is at its most accurate when it is using your car, your tariff and your measured consumption — which is the entire reason the My EV settings exist.

This site does not give financial, tax or purchasing advice, and it cannot tell you whether a particular car or electricity plan is right for you. For that, your retailer holds your actual tariff and your dealer holds the actual price.

Setting your vehicle and your electricity rates does not create an account and does not send anything to a server. Those settings are written to your own browser's local storage, which is why they survive between visits on the same device, why they sync between tabs, and why they disappear if you clear your browsing data. Nobody running this site can see what car you drive or what you pay for power. You can clear the settings yourself at any time from the My EV panel. The full detail, including what the advertising provider does independently of this, is on the privacy policy.

If a figure here is wrong, or a calculator gives a result that does not match your own bill, please say so. Corrections are made promptly and the review date on each page is updated when the underlying figures change.