Petrol double the cost to run
How much does an electric vehicle cost to run?
How long is a piece of string?
There are several factors that influence the cost or recharging such as the time of day you charge the car, how many batteries the car has and how many amp-hours they produce.
The batteries in the Ford Focus CL sedan I am driving require 27kW-hours to fully recharge them from flat. It is a process that takes about eight hours using a 15-amp power point and will give you a range of about 120km.
Domestic power charges range from 10c to 28c per kW-hour.
If you take an average charge of 22c per kW-hour (a figure used by government departments when calculating energy costs), it will cost you $6 to fully recharge the batteries.
This figure equates to $5 per 100km.
To give you a comparative figure, the 2.0-litre Focus sedan, the donor car, has an official fuel consumption figure of 7.1L/100km.
Related: PLUGGING INTO THE FUTURE | 45 BATTERIES | ELECTRIFYING RIDE
The average price of ULP in Perth last week was $1.35/litre which would mean it would cost $9.45/100km to run the petrol variant if you could achieve the sticker figure - something we know from experience is very hard to do.
In real-world driving the 2.0-litre Focus is more likely to use closer to 8.5L/100km which would lift the price per 100km to $11.47.
