HOW MUCH ?!?!
Last week I went to visit my grandson who lives in Wiltshire. On my way home along the M4 I passed Leigh Delamere Services and I couldn’t resist a sideways glance at the advertised cost of diesel. It was 203.9 pence per litre!
HOW MUCH!?!? Yes that’s right – 203.9 pence per litre. Curiously, here in the UK we buy fuel by the litre, but still use miles-per-gallon to compare fuel usage. There are 4.55 litres in an Imperial gallon, so to get the cost per gallon you multiply the litre price by 4.55. 203.9 x 4.55 = 927.745. That’s £9.28 per gallon. At an average fuel consumption of 30 miles per gallon that’s approximately 31p per mile for fuel.
But here’s the good news – I have stopped using diesel.
About two years ago, after a long period of indecision, I went all-electric. I charge my electric car at home overnight at a cost of 7p per kilowatt-hour (kWH). A kilowatt-hour takes the car approximately 3.5 miles, so my fuel charge for this car is effectively 2p per mile.
Before I went electric, I heard all the arguments against electric cars. People said the range would be a problem. I was told that I would have problems finding chargers when I needed one, and that if I found a charger then the car would take hours to charge. Guess what? None of it turned out to be true.
So are there any downsides? Two things come to mind. Firstly, to make the prices work you MUST do the bulk of your car charging at home. Every electricity supplier will offer some deal for electric car charging. Mine is the cheap rate made available between mid-night and 7am when I pay 7p per kWH – outside those times the cost quadruples to 28p per kWH. Cost of electric car charging in the public network varies enormously from about 50p per kWH to over £1 per kWH on some motorway services sites.
And the other thing? As I said, to make it pay you MUST do most of your charging at home. And that means that you need to have an area where you can park your car OFF the road. It is currently illegal in the UK to run a cable to a vehicle parked on a public road (although that may change soon). And to charge the car you MUST have a proper car charging point installed by a registered electrician – which will cost another £1k – £1.5k. This means that at today’s prices you will save around 29p per mile, but you will need to drive about 4,000 miles to re-coup the cost of the charger.
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They certainly have their place. Unfortunately though, most of my journeys are to visit family 250 miles away, at least once a month. So in theory I could possibly just about make it there if I was very very careful, but then I’d be stranded because none of them have a driveway, or can park anywhere near their house most of the time. So it’s not a practical solution for me, if I could afford to buy an EV…which I can’t do anyway. My partner and I have a car each. Mine is 12 years old and hers is 20 years old. There are no plans to replace either in the near future and they serve us well. Both are ULEZ compliant for the trips as well. I did enter a competition online to win a Grande Panda EV though, but of course I didn’t win it. If I had, what then? I could use it locally (it has a very low range apparently) but that’s probably about all. Very quirky natty motor though.
30MPG for a diesel? Were you driving a van? I get more than 70MPG in my Citroen.
@lefthanded From a woman who has had any interest in the price of petrol/mph man stuff, I found your blog really interesting and thought provoking. We had ahybrid once that ran on liquid gas. Never understood it but it was well cheap.