Imagine you're on taxable income of £120k and have two chidlren in nursery. Currently you get no help with childcare costs from the government. From my own experience it's ~£6000 subsidy per child.
You can currently take out an EV salary sacrifice scheme for ~£600 per month (pre tax), and that brings your taxable income down by £7200. Put another £13k in pension. Boom, you're now getting £13k in pension p/a, and your car is effectively free, because you get £12k back in childcare subsidies.
It still might be desirable, but it isn't free.
Perhaps it is the "London bubble" on HN as I feel that no-one is registering that 100k+ is a really, really small minority...
Obviously if you don't need a new car, it's a really bad financial decision to buy one.
And even if you do, it might be a bad financial decision to buy one.
It's almost always a bad financial decision to buy a new car. The first-year depreciation is unreal.
We just bought a 1 year old Audi Q5 in the US for ~30% discount over new. And with the Audi CPO program, the warranty is just as long as a new model.
I dunno ....
At least two EV manufacturers offer a 7 year warranty on new cars on all parts INCLUDING the battery.
> total vehicle sales in March 2026 was 269,483 units
So BYD market share is 5.5% in Brazil.
https://www.globalchinaev.com/post/byd-edges-out-vw-to-becom...
1. Unlike the rest of the world, EVs were sold in the US as muscle cars for rich people (e.g. Tesla). Everywhere else they're cheap cars for urban commuters (e.g. BYD).
2. Republicans sabotaged every attempt from the Democrats to get EVs going on.
3. Space and demography: EVs do very well in small countries (e.g. Europe) or big countries with a concentrated population (e.g.Brasil, Nigeria). They do poorly in countries with big distances and a spread out population.
A large portion of the population is well served by 120V charging and don’t need more than that. And for what it’s worth, parts of Brazil also run on 220V, so they’re even more set in that regard.
Brazil does not "fuel" cars on sugarcane any more than the US fuels its cars with corn. No one is missing any forests or trees. What you are missing is that the cost savings in fuel are so large with any EV that by itself, the money saved is an extremely compelling incentive to many people.
Wrong because Brazil DOES fuel cars on sugarcane alcohol. Most petrol stations in the country have pumps for sugarcane alcohol, nearly all the ICE cars sold in the last two decades have a flex engine (in the past you had to chose when buying the car if you wanted a alcohol engine or a gasoline engine, now the engines just takes whichever you trow at it and adjusts the injection accordingly), and roughly half the personal vehicles in the country run daily on alcohol. That fact has softened this oil crisis a tiny tiny bit in the country (when oil is expensive many people just pump alcohol instead of gasoline).
And right that electricity is much cheaper than gasoline or alcohol, so people are changing to EVs because of the cost savings in fuel. In fact electricity was already much cheaper even when the price of oil was down, what was holding back EV adoption in the country was never the price of oil, but the relatively high purchase prices of EV vehicles (the average upper-middle-class Brazilian can't afford a Tesla like an American or European can), but the latest batch of basic EVs (like the BYD Dolphin-mini/Seagul) started to break that barrier about one or two years ago, and are now on the top sales charts.
In Brazil "ethanol" is sold separately from normal gasoline, and as far as I know it's entirely made from sugar cane, without fossil fuels. It's why flex cars are so popular there, since they can use either fuel depending on what's cheaper.
Meanwhile, you can't buy 100% corn-based fuel in the US.
Even though you cannot buy 100% ethanol in the US, the US alone is responsible for over half of global ethanol production, mostly from corn.
Regardless, any EV will almost certainly be cheaper to operate on electricity, rather than using corn, petroleum, or sugarcane for fuel.
lol
> Brazil does not "fuel" cars on sugarcane any more than the US fuels its cars with corn.
Brazil has been building cars which can run on 100% ethanol since the 1970s.
These are not obscure facts; this is common knowledge the US teaches to schoolchildren.
In the US gasoline is a 10% ethanol blend, sometimes 15%. E85 is available only in some midwestern states (I've NEVER seen it for sale anywhere on the west coast) and it's only good for flex-fuel vehicles, which most manufacturers stopped building ~ 10 years ago when the free money from the government shifted towards EV incentives.
Sugarcane-based ethanol does have a strongly negative carbon footprint and positive energy but ICE engines are notably less efficient overall that large utility scale cogen plants, even after you factor in transmission and distribution losses.
Making sugarcane into ethanol is good. It's less clear that distributing that chemical feedstock to a zillion people is a net benefit. Just send the electrons and keep the fuel at the plant.
It is about as good as gasoline (or better), Brazil has been running a good chunk of its personal car fleet on sugarcane alcohol for decades. Yes, EVs are better than ICVs, but there is nothing uniquely bad about ethanol that makes it worse as a fuel source for a personal vehicle than any other combustive fuel.
There may be places where grid access is impractical, in which case chemical fuels are a decent alternative, but as africa has shown solar microgrids are also quite effective and enable a ton of additional economic activity.
EV utility vehicles match quite well to the second and third world, when they benefit from sufficient economy of scale. I don't know if we're there yet but we're very close. These things are getting quite cheap.
We never wanted their “electric cars” … we wanted their cars, but electric.
The basic Seat Leon combi is currently 22.000€ on promotion. And that's a spacious family car. No EV car exist at that price point in that size with a range that most people would be comfortable with it.
Yes they will exist in the future but we are still a decade away from that at least.
How much will you spend on fuel during that decade? Seems likely it will be more than today's upfront cost differential. Possibly a lot more.
For example Hyundai Kona EV differs inside from the Kona ICE and hybrid models by having the shifter on the column instead of on the center console and the floor is flatter from not needing to accommodate the transmission tunnel.
A mix of Googling and LLMing suggests that BMW, Genesis, Mini Cooper, Volvo, and VW also have some EVs that are very similar to their non-EV cars.
The salesman aren't knowledgeable about them, they don't have ownership experience with them, and EV's generate dramatically fewer lifetime "service" visits and parts sales.
This was common with the f150 lightning, where salesman were pretty much "If you want it I can do the paper work, but let me show you the regular F150's we have here if you like to drive places without headaches."
Even within each sub-brand of the group, they often work with different manufacturers.
Though Sytner (the biggest) tend to have single-manufacturer dealerships.
Probably a mix of both on both sides of the pond I imagine?
And there's less rigmarole during the process. Less aggressive sales tactics I believe
It is interesting with the current oil shock what will happen to US automakers that have all but abandoned fuel efficient cars.
Even the F-series popularity is kinda overstated by this because other cars are more fragmented.
B = Battery
H = Hybrid
PH = Plug-in hybrid (Same as a hybrid but you can charge up the hybrid battery at home)
And, in practice, the battery tends to be much, much bigger. Some PHEVs are basically mediocre-range electric cars which happen to have a petrol generator.
In practice, most are mediocre range, low-speed only evs that effectively no one bothers to charge regularly because its impractical and annoying. The manufactures claim 80% reductions in emissions, and use those credits to allow them to sell more gas cars in the EU market. But real world emission reduction is 20%. They know this, they've known for years. Its a scam.
https://electrek.co/2026/02/19/biggest-study-yet-shows-plug-...
Some newer toyotas, newer BMWs and the coming EREVs will actually be able to be electric cars most of the time, and might live up closer to the claims. Doesnt change the fact the category has been mostly fraud until now.
Something with a 60 mile electric range will likely satisfy all of their day-to-day driving. The generator means they don't have to charge though, so they can still take road trips without worrying about electric range.
In practice though, they're somewhat impractical. You still need an entire ICE drivetrain AND a moderately sized battery and electric motor, driving the price up.
This has been a perfect car for my use case, but the big caveat is my short commute. If your daily commute fits inside that short range (or one way commute if there's a charger at your workplace), this can be a great fit. A+++, highly recommended.
If your work commute is significantly longer than a PHEV's battery range, or if you don't have a convenient place to charge it, then it's a much less attractive proposition.
Most people don't end up charging their battery because it still has an ICE so why bother? So now they have the worst of both worlds. Complex ICE machinery that needs regular service and heavy battery that doesn't end up being used.
You can also have a much smaller engine for a much bigger car, since you only need to cover average not peak power usage.
You also in most designs eliminate the gearbox.
Data collected across 600.000 vehicles in Europe show that most people don't and that emissions are just a smidge under typical ICE vehicles. If you factor in the high emissions produced during battery productions it looks to be an overall bad package.
The idea itself is certainly good but the real world simply doesn't show it.
https://www.evshift.com/368695/do-people-actually-charge-the...
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/feb/18/plug-in-...
https://electrek.co/2026/02/19/biggest-study-yet-shows-plug-...
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/oct/16/plug-in-...
the link to the underlying most recent fraunhofer study referred to by the first two seems broken sadly, so i cant get the breakdown by manufacturer anymore. But the data on aggregate is clear - on average the PHEVs cars out there today spend very little time on average in pure EV mode. If they did there would be more than ~20% reduction in emissions.
It just doesn't have much range: only about 25 miles on my 2018 model. Newer models advertise up to 44 miles on EV.
I had a PHEV Honda and I put 20 gallons of fuel in it over 6 years. The system works in the niche for which it was designed.
A colleague drives a BMW 3something hybrid and as far as i know has a 14kWh battery..
Thats good for about a 100km, but i very much wouldn't consider that a "fully" electric car by any means (edit: did you edit your post? couldve sworn you said "fully electric" instead of "mediocre range"?)...
Also, what most people don't realize: if you're only (or mostly) driving it electric, you're putting many more cycles onto that tiny battery.
...which usually costs as much as a "regular" EV battery, x times the size.
https://evclinic.eu/2024/09/05/bmw-hybrid-repeated-battery-f... for example...
https://carnewschina.com/2026/05/01/byd-deploys-new-heyuan-h...
> Realistically how many people are actually plugging those in?
Answer: almost no one. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/oct/16/plug-in-...
Considering the battery and motors for these tiny EV's is only 100 lbs or so, it is probably still worth having.
https://www.nimblefins.co.uk/best-car-insurance/average-car-...
> The average car journey distance in the UK is approximately 8.2 miles
You can, but in practice most people don't. And I can understand why -- it's inconvenient to have to plug in after every short trip, and the short electric range of most PHEV's means you do have to plug in after every short trip.
I plug in my EV around once a week, and it's more convenient than going to the gas station, but I'm not sure I'd want to have to plug it in every time I come home from even a short trip to the supermarket.
Surely that's the "same as a battery but you can use petrol on long journeys"
The only energy input for a "hybrid" is from petrol. It's slightly more efficient. A Toyota Yaris 1.5 hubrid gets about 65mpg rather than the 45mpg on a Skoda Kamiq
https://www.honestjohn.co.uk/realmpg/skoda/kamiq-2023
https://www.honestjohn.co.uk/realmpg/toyota/yaris-cross-2021
Not really. The petrol drivetrain takes up so much room there's no space for a large battery, so the much smaller battery will only take you a short distance if you used it alone, plus now it's much less efficient because you're carrying around a heavy engine with you.
IIRC, the latest Honda Civic Hybrid has the ICE decoupled from the drivetrain most of the time (even if it is running to generate power), but it can couple to the drivetrain under some conditions?
Almost certainly why nearly all hybrids have been parallel hybrids up to now. What is changing, I think, is that a significant number of people are warming to the idea of a BEV, and want all of the benefits of that, but want to fall back on gasoline in a pinch. Thus EREV, or series hybrid, which provides that crutch. Expensive, though.
They put tiny batteries in a lot of plug-in hybrids. Unless you live very close to work, you’ll struggle to use it as primarily an EV
Which is ~enough to cover the vast majority of commutes, and the majority of US commutes.
Keep in mind that even if 20% of your commute is done on petrol, the other 80% isn't.
---
[1] Yes, there are PHEVs with shorter ranges, but those tend to be weird luxury models that for some compliance reason have a battery strapped to them.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/oct/16/plug-in-...
No, that would be an EREV.
It seems to be a US thing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Partial_zero-emissions_vehicle
> In California, PZEVs have their own administrative category for low-emission vehicles. The category was made in a bargain between automakers and the California Air Resources Board (CARB), so that automobile makers could delay making mandated zero-emission vehicles (ZEVs)—battery electric and fuel-cell electric vehicles.
You could easily turn those terms in the article into hyperlinks to definitions.
You could even have the links go to definitions hosted on your own website to boost page reads and ad counts if you really wanted to
ICE cars come with a variety of add-ons and schemes to improve efficiency: fuel injectors, ECUs, braking energy capture systems (aka hybrid), small batteries for short trips that no one plugs in (aka plug in hybrids), etc.
The slight compromise is at constant highway cruising speeds, it may let the engine take over, since the efficiency calculus likely is more favorable in those conditions. It uses a clutch to do this, and only has a single gear ratio, rather than the messy setup of typical parallel hybrids.
Given they are a relatively gutless car to begin with (1 litre 3 cylinder 70hp tinpot engine) I did wonder what the zigzag/lightning icon was on the dash so I googled it.
Turns out the system uses a 11Ah lithium battery that lives under the driver/passenger seat that charges through regenerative braking. It gives a small boost during acceleration (mostly at low speeds so it's more for stop-start urban driving), I think it's not much more than a glorified belt around the crankshaft giving a few extra hp.
No appreciable benefit to it that I could feel, but if it's helping us burn fewer dinosaurs then that's all good. (It's still a car but much better than a massive wankpanzer.)
The road to electric - in charts and data - https://www.rac.co.uk/drive/electric-cars/choosing/road-to-e...
Electric car charging prices at public chargers - https://www.rac.co.uk/drive/electric-cars/charging/electric-...
Makes EVs quite appealing.
As someone who lives near a busy road, I'm 100% all for them for this reason alone
The boy-racers doing 2x the speed limit with their loud exhausts and poppin can go do one
ffs why can't we have nice things??
The amount of 'eco' things that turn out worse...
Hence my perspective is different. To have everyone priced off the roads is going to make the cycling so much faster and pleasant.
I have considered getting an electric car in the past, but, one look at the traffic, and I decided against going that slow. So I thought about getting an electric bicycle, only to come to the same conclusion, a normal bicycle is all I want or need.
There is a similar story with food. No fertiliser? No problem! I only eat plants, with no processed food or dead animals. Soon the 'grow crops to fatten animals so fat people can eat them' idea will be too costly.
Of course, the world isn't going to stop eating animal corpses at every occasion or ween the adults off milk, so we will see what happens. Nonetheless, plants only is a good starting point.
I don't see electric cars as a solution except for boomers, particularly in the UK context, where the goal is to have 50% of urban journeys taken with active travel by 2030. Active travel means walking or cycling, and I am all for it.
If you are obese, car dependent and eating burgers, the situation is not good. However, if free from car dependency and able to cook from scratch with plants, then the situation is somewhat different, previously unpopular lifestyle choices make sense.
I also don't see what right I have to West Asian oil, it is not a birthright to have access to all the fuel one can afford. My view is that it is best left in the ground.
But that's assuming we're just running power plants off of petrol and fuels. Coal is much cheaper than petroleum in some cases. There's also a lot of people who get their power from nuclear, hydro, solar, and wind. In many cases, your electric prices are not at all affected by the increases in petrullium prices, because most of your electricity is coming from something else. In fact, I doubt there's any place in the world that all your electricity is coming from petroleum fuels. Even if that's the major input, there are almost undoubtedly other sources in the mix.
Over 25% of this is then lost in transmission and distribution[0] (down to 45%). Then 10-25% of that lost in charging the car[1] (down to 40%). Finally, the car itself loses about 10-15% of that[2] (down to 35%).
[0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/322834/transmission-dist...
[1] https://go-e.com/en/magazine/ev-charging-losses
[2] https://evreporter.com/understanding-the-complete-efficiency...
Furthermore, if you're going to include distributional losses, then let's also drop the available petrol by 10-15% to account for refining etc.
Finally, on anything resembling a sunny day, my car charges entirely of rooftop solar, so what efficiency do we assign to that?
25TWh annual distribution losses off of ~300TWh usage per year is 8% loss.
If you charge at home, and you don't have a car tariff, it'll be ~25-30p per kwhr
If you get a car charging tariff then you'll be paying ~9p a kwhr.
if you are brave then you can use an agile prices which depends on the weather you can be paid to charge (my record was -11p a unit) however in winter it can be a lot high, like 45p a unit.
Charging on the street can be around 50p a kwhr up to 98p a kwhr
In Canada most of that is pretty opaque. Electricity tariffs are not really something that most households would worry about. Businesses and Industrial usage do though
Most places I lived had this set up.
(Nowadays smart meters offer many more options.)
Many people choose a single fixed or variable rate tariff, but there are also off-peak tariffs that are very cheap at night but slightly more expensive in the day (designed for EV users), or even tariffs where the rate changes every 30 minutes depending on what is being generated - in this case when there is excess solar and wind generation then sometimes the rate even goes negative and you are paid to use the excess power.
You can base it on the wholesale price, great if you have battery storage
https://octopus.energy/smart/agile/
Or just an overnight rate
https://octopus.energy/smart/intelligent-octopus-go/
Again if you put in a £5k 10kWh battery you are golden, as you put 8kWh into your car and 8kWh into your battery every night, dropping your electric cost to £38 a month (plus the standing charge, which is far higher)
For sure, EVs are far more efficient at converting a kwh of energy into forward motion, but if we assume 35 mpg (9.25 miles/litre) for the gas car, we need about 970wh to travel 1 mile. A modern EV can manage a mile on ~260wh, almost a quarter of the gas requirement.
There are public charging networks in the UK averaging 92p/kwh - we know we need much less energy to move the more efficient EV, but even with this adjustment fuel cost per mile looks like:
petrol at UK average today: 17p/mi
Electric at very expensive public charger: ~24p/mi !!
At many chargers, there are no savings at all. For comparisons sake, that 92p kwh would be just 28.6p on the most expensive domestic electricity supply, and charging at home would be ~8p per mile on the worst possible tariffs.
I've probably done some bad math somewhere here, but I think the broad picture is correct.
Which is 21p per mile, for my petrol car
at 98p a kwhr its 20p per mile.
but in practice the electric car is 3 pence a mile for me (average car charging price for me is 15p a kwhr)
Of course, thats why I've been clear all my assumptions are for 260wh/mi, which I think is a very fair middle ground figure to compare to a 35mpg car - one can pick far more fuel efficient gas cars for this comparison too, the possibilities are endless.
I think your numbers still illustrate the same point though; if you can't charge at home, an EV is not necessarily cheaper to fuel, and the gap between the public charger price and the cost to a private consumer with home charging is still far too big. 98p vs 15p is staggering.
> https://getneocharge.com/a/blog/identifying-your-240v-dryer-...
Almost everyone I know with an EV charging at home just reused the 240v dryer socket to avoid paying for a dedicated fast charger. It's often cheaper too to have an electrician fit a new 240v socket instead of the dedicated charger as well.
Let me guess, you live in Germany? :)
Three phase power is definitely not 100% in the EU. Not even in Germany, though adoption does tend to be higher than neighboring countries.
And FWIW, I find that my induction cooktop works wonderfully on plain old 240V 40A, so I do not think it is a requirement to get three-phase for that ;-).
Unless you are regularly doing upwards of 150 km/ day, it's fine.
It's used for dryer, stove etc.
[0] Okay, technically 240V did not become official until around 1967, but the split-phase design was there from the beginning. They capped it at 240V to stop the creeping up that had been going on in the earlier part of the century. This is why you still have a lot of people (not all of them old enough to have been alive in 1967, oddly enough) that refer to 240V as 220.
https://www.racfoundation.org/research/mobility/still-standi...
Wales – 75% of households have – or could have – off-street parking and EV charging England – 68% Scotland – 63%
In London, sure, most homes don't have off-street parking and ev charging, but then only half the households in London have a car
https://content.tfl.gov.uk/travel-in-london-2024-car-ownersh...
Even in Wales, 25% can't. This isn't a figure you can ignore.
And that's a hypothetical, it relies on landlords playing ball etc. then there's the social issues. On the north of England we have lots of terraces built for mill workers, these aren't owned by the richest on society. So then you're in the situation of charging the poorest more for transport. And these are necessarily on towns with good transport links (think 1 bus and hour).
In 2022 is was £1.89 a litre and spent most of the year over £1.60 a litre
Adjusted for inflation that would be most of the year at £1.85, and a high of £2.18 a litre
https://www.racfoundation.org/data/uk-pump-prices-over-time
From 2011 to 2014 petrol was about £1.30 a litre. Adjusted for inflation terms that's £1.80-£2 a litre -- far less than current "highs".
The average UK car does 8000 miles and about 45mpg (uk gallons), or about 10 miles per litre. It thus costs 800 litres, or £1,260 a year.
Last year petrol was £1.35 a litre, and thus £184 a year less for the average car.
Fuel is insanely cheap in the UK in historic terms, just not as cheap as it was last year.
Why are you choosing the 2022 energy crises as your baseline? Not only your choice was arbitary but you managed to choose the year fuel was at its highest as a reaction to the war in Ukraine.
That price was not representative or typical, it was a spike. You can see it here.
https://www.ons.gov.uk/economy/inflationandpriceindices/time...
"Insanely cheap" for the UK to feels really strange for those of us way over here who tend to forget how good we have it.
That is an interesting perspective. We do not forget how good we have it, because we choose not to put high taxes on gasoline and diesel. Do drivers in the UK tend to forget that taxes are more than half the retail price they pay at the pump? Sometimes way over half. That is a policy decision.
America seems to have a lot of large vehicles that use a lot of fuel. The UK less so.
The tax will have played a part in this (how much?).
We will see exactly the same thing again in a few years when people are 'shocked' that prices are rising again. And then expect the government to step in, even though on the interim they've bought a massive car on PCP rather than take some personal responsibility and buy a car that they can afford when inevitably something goes wrong.
Not saying new EVs aren’t pricey, but if you want into electric on a budget (i.e. because you don’t feel like you can afford to fill up on diesel) it can absolutely be done.
Also, my god, £22k for a petrol base Polo! That's about £4k above inflation-adjusted prices from ~15 years ago
These are all models under £20,000 - https://ev-database.org/uk/#group=vehicle-group&av-1=1&av-23...
There's also a large number of used EVs available. Here's a selection of 2024+ models between £8000-£10000
https://www.autotrader.co.uk/car-search?channel=cars&fuel-ty...
Diesel was traditionally the fuel of people who did high miles. Ie not the people that can't have an EV 'just in case they need to do 300 miles on a day's, because they probably legitimately are.
You kind of spoil that point by pull £80k out of your arse without looking at comparable diesels though.
Your money saving effort suddenly becomes a major inconvenience to fuel your car.
People use the mobility part of their PIP payments to lease a car from Motability which is an independent company, they could use the mobility payment to pay for taxi instead.
The scheme has cost billions in lost revenue and it's the only reason it can exist. The exact accounting is up for debate because it's complex but nonetheless.
You can't buy the car, and your limited on miles to 10k, and VAT is now payable, along with insurnace tax. plus you can't lease a landrover.
but like I just don't get it. its not like you have a choice to be on PIP. its fucking humiliating to get on PIP, and keep on it.
But the only reason it exists is because of government funds and government policy.
The scheme would collapse if the government stopped allowing benefit money to be used for Motability leases. The banks lent them money under the reassurance of the government funding.
But yes, they lease the vehicles, they don't sell them.
EDIT: my comment may have some minor inaccuracies. I just found https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201719/cmselect/cmwo... - a very detailed description of the company, charities etc
It’s not independent, because it derives all of its income from the government and uses it to buy people brand new top of the range cars.
You're gonna have to cite sources on that one, but I would sincerely doubt that £77 a week will allow you to lease an Audi.
Also the pip claimant has to be probed by a panel every three years to keep getting the benefit, unlike say a state pension (but I paid for that I mean possibly you did, its still a non means tested benefit, unlike PIP)
https://media.audi.com/is/content/audi/country/uk/en/find-an...
which on lease is about £80 a month more expensive https://www.gateway2lease.com/cars/audi/a3-saloon/22564/tfsi... (motobility is £308 a month)
so its not like its a luxury car, its a new car.
Personally I'm more pissed off about pensioners on final salary still getting state pension, even though they don't need it. Thats far more fucking expensive and doesn't serve a purpose, well apart from buying votes. means test that shit, right now.
Electric cars registered in countries with large land mass?
"..Electric car adoption , ranked by value of government incentives.."?
Eventually I just searched for
"... graphs relating to EV adoption"
" ..Relationship between country land mass and ev adoption rate.." ?