Hybrid vs Electric Car: Which Is REALLY Cheaper?

As some of you have spotted, the cost for charging an EV for 10,000 miles at the 32.42ppkwh rate should be £1,134 not £1,296. The VAT rate for domestic electricity is charged at 5%. -Rory

I have a Toyota hybrid and I love it, I never thought I would get one but I love the file economy and the extra power the electric motor gives me. I can honestly say all my cars moving on will be full hybrids.

My rav4 phev average around 150mpg

It cannot compare to Toyota hybrids. I could achieve more than 80mpg in an old Lexus ct200h from 2011

In Australia the Toyota Hybrids are popular and most of the Taxis are Toyota Hybrids as for plug in hybrids there are a couple sround anf full electric cars are lesser in Australia the hybrid are more numerous than EVs also from a that Honda Hybrid 80 mpg excellent fuel economy no wonder the Taxi drivers like hybrids a lot better than our Suzuki Beleno GLX straight petrol car at 40mpg around town and 50mpg on the highway

Wrong cost for charging a plug in hybrid. If you consume 12.4 KwH battery daily it will run about 41 miles considering 3.33 miles per Kwh. (IMO the efficiency will be higher since it's a lighter less powerful car than the compared/typical EV). At that rate you'd be driving 15 k miles in the given cost of electricity it works out to be 509 £ per 10000 miles. More practical way to estimate would be the miles you'd be out of range for the 43 mile electric only range of the voxel and taking it at 35 MPG. Doing some back calculations at the estimated 256 mpg only 15% distance is covered at 35 mpg.
Hence the total cost would be (263 £+ 509/15000 x 8500 miles)= 675£
It would be helpful if someone can rephrase this to be easily understood by British audiance since English is my 3rd language and gallons, pounds or miles are not the units we use around here.
It would be hard to recover the additional interest/opportunity cost of the more expensive 🫰 technologies at the 3-4 hundred pound savings per year let alone the principal. So doesn't really change the conclusion all that much. Only thing that could is I can't think of any reason why it would be 35 against the 60-80 of a civic.

The absolute cheapest option for me is to buy a used diesel.

Even with high road tax and even with high maintenance cost.. the price of the car is so low that hybrid and ev can't compete

Well balanced argument and spot on

EV way cheaper when you account for service. Oil changes alone push it above EV charging. Once you add brakes, timing chain, etc. you're looking at a lot higher operational cost.

Think you will loose hair when the battery runs out of life and you have to buy another one. It's like they are expensive. More than the aged cat at that time.

Since you are operating with pounds AND based on your accent, I assume you are in GB so you most likely deal with GB-made car, and that's the BIGGEST red flag - no sane person would ever buy a car made in GB, the source of some of the worst vehicles. Think jag and rover. Moreover, 30+ years ago, there was "British Sterling", an exact copy of Acura Legend but built in GB. The darn thing managed to stay on the road minutes between breakdowns.

If the govt pushed hybrids like they pushed evs i wouldn't be surprised if there would be hybrids pushing 80-100 mpgs like clockwork. Charging/ battery/ engines would be refined and wouldn't have to worry about finding a charging station on long road trips. California wants to go full ev by 2035 and our grid can't contain the demand now lol with rolling blackouts... imagine everyone charging their car. It's impracticable.

80 mpg sounds too good to be true. Im guessing it has to do with imperial vs American gallon?

Please don't do the math and disturb the Tesla cult! Let them think they save the Planet or things like this...I have a lot of Tesla shares and I need to make money so I can buy a Honda eHEV.

Hybrid alway better convenience

I'm not so sure, a diesel will get the same

Why dont we compare apples with apples -WLTP consumptions of hybrid, plugin hybrid and electric?
Octopus night rate with smart meter is 10p not 19p, OVO same 10p to charge.
Why conpare civic tonEQS and not to huindai ionic?

Good for entertainment but confusing

Seems Honda may have trumped the 2.0 litre Toyota Corolla

Don't forget the cost of DEPRECIATION and REPAIR or BATTERY replacement after 8y/warranty expired. Most regular hybrid cost less than £3000, but plugin C class is easily $12 000 or more and $26 000 on the BEV Benz. I know that TOYOTA HSD has 15 years/unlimited BATTERY Warranty.

Over the 2.8 years I have had PHEV Golf GTE I have averaged 98 MPG, my Octopus Go Tariff is 9.5p per kWh at night ( 72p for 25 miles Travel) up from 4.5p this March 2023, 35p per 25 miles. If like me you have solar, sometime free day time charging. Mike

EV will always be better. Best move on then.

I feel very sad that saving a few bucks is more important than saving our childrens future.

When considering the cost of a car, it's crucial to look beyond just the annual price. Why not compare a car that offers hybrid, plugin-hybrid, and electric options over a 4-year period with standard PCP and 10,000 miles? For example, if you compare a Kia Niro petrol hybrid priced at £28000 to the plugin-hybrid at £33000 and electric at £36000, it's essential to note that you may not save £8000 in the 4-year period if you choose the petrol option over electric. It's important to make an informed decision based on each option's long-term costs and benefits.

Rory mentions purchase price but not sale price. Does anyone know of a calculator (eg spreadsheet) where you can enter ALL figures for a real cost of each vehicle and scenarios to enable a real best guess personalised comparison?

2023 Honda Civic hybrid or Toyota Prius are the cars of the year for ordinary people or taxies. But because of insane dealer mark up, I hope I can get one of them next year at MSRP

The best solution is the one that does the most with as little resources as possible.

90% of car owners on this planet do not have the infrastructure or the budget to develop an infrastructure for EVs. Neither do they have the technical capability or talent to service EVs.

Hybrids are the way to go, they require no infrastructure and can be easily used in any setting or environment.

Toyota and other Japanese hybrids have proven to be solid and super reliable and are used in so many developing nations for well over a decade now.

Autortrader: Everything you you said.
Hydrogen: Hold my beer.

I can say, for my experience, a Toyota Corolla runs 500 km with 25 l of gas (5 l/100 km) at 120 km/hour of speed.

for a PHEV running in hybrid mode, whats the max range where you get great fuel economy before the battery runs out? No one seems to quote this, it would be useful to know.

I'd buy a hybrid civic anyday

I’m on Intelligent Octopus and pay 7.5p per KWh.

How did you set your parameters? Limiting to 10,000 miles per year? Maybe in England, but NOT in USA. And the idea that anyone drives around 30mph is a joke.

Run the same comparison for 20k/year at 45mph, and include estimated maintenance costs- then we can talk. Or is Honda one of your advertisers?

If you're making videos on this t'interweb thingy, you are going to an international audience, so why not use litres and kilometres? Apart from the UK and the US, that's what everyone else uses. Even the UK and the US can't agree on the size of a gallon!!!

Forgotten, is that hybrids MUST run on only one fuel. EVs will run on energy created from coal, gas, wind, solar or hydro; whatever is the cheapest at the time which is why long term, hybrids must be phased out. Only a stop gap and some a good stop gap BUT the earliest adopter country is showing the future since 80% new cars are full EVs with 10% hybrids because they see the future. As efficient as the Honda is, it WILL produce 30,000 lb of CO2 and 1000 lb of toxins dumped into the air we all must breath; the cost of that exceeds the cost of the Hybrid so taking the narrow view, maybe works for individuals but NOT for all of us.

While people rail at Lithium mining, it can be recycled for centuries where Fossil Fuel is burned once. Cannot change that no matter how renewable our grid gets.

While Hondas are low maintence, they’re nowhere as good as nearly NO maintenance of EVs. I expect my brakes to last 1M km which cannot never occur on a hybrid.

As the fuel prices get higher, electricity prices lower, emission taxes higher, and EV prices lower, then the question of which type of car to buy gets clearer.

new viewer. Love seeing Rory again, haven't seen you since Top Gear.

Of course you did not compare the best case scenario, i.e the most economical EV on the best tariff. My EV charges exclusively at 7.5p per Kwh with Octopus and in good weather I exceed 4 miles per kwh meaning it cost less than half the cost of your best case example. I save in excess of £2000 per year in fuel costs over my previous car. Also coparing a Tesla or Mercedes to a Honda Civic I mean cmon! At least do a like for like, An MG4 to a civic would be more comparable then there is no price difference.

Thirty six years of driving the EV to offset the initial 10 k extra cost of purchase.
None of the EV fans are good at maths so they keep touting how they are saving on Gas !!

Hello

I cancelled my purchase of 2 different types of EVs over the last 18 months.Purchased the Honda civic ehev advance. What a great move.
Fuel economy brilliant, and on longer journeys don't have to worry about that charging hassle.ie.will there be a queue and will the charger work😮. Let's be realistic, who wants to hang around a service station for 45 mins every 300kms, get real. Honda gives me 800kms and 5 mins to refill. It's a no brainer

Loved this comparison! One other quite important factor to consider is the availability of cheaper used hybrids, like the 2008 Prius amd 2012 Prius V that my wife and I have. We bought the 2008 Prius for $11,000 Canadian dollars back in 2014, and the 2012 Prius V in 2016 for $15,000 Canadian. Both are still running beautifully, with only expected wear items like tires and brake pads needing replacement, and of course, I had to find the only body shop in the Ottawa area that actually cuts out rust and welds in new metal to do a patch on each of them, but even so, the cost for this was only $650 Canadian for a spot on the 2012 Prius V's left rear wheel well, and $460 for a spot on the 2008 Prius' door well, but the rust repairs are probably more of a Canadian issue, with all the salt they have to put on our roads. Cheers!

madness

How much do you value the waiting time and attention effort you have to put in plug-in and EV daily use to get to their best use case?

Can't order one though, try again in 2024 said the dealer.

We've got a Honda Crosstar eHEV and a Seat Mii EV. The Seat is cheaper to run but they are both quite frugal on costs, the Honda has the advantage of over 500 miles range on a tank of petrol so we tend to use that for longer trips. The UK government have said they are going to reduce taxes on electricity and increase tax on fossil fuels so the EV option will be significantly cheaper in future and the hybrids will probably disappear once EV's start to have ranges above 400 miles so that public charging will not normally be necessary for owners with a driveway.

I think this is the better alternative to plug in hybrids. They only work if you have to drive really short distances and even then you need to plug it in every night unlike an ev which has much more range so you might be able to go a week without charging. These hybrids won't replace Ev's but they're alot better than plug ins imo, which just don't really make slot of sense with the hybrids Honda and Toyota can build.

3 miles per kw/h thats terrible efficiency. I understand that the car is heavy and so on but how can Mercedes have so great engineers and be so rich but be so bad at their only job.

Nice work on the math but it should be emphasized that you've chosen to compare the energy cost of an extremely efficient example of a Hybrid to the energy cost of a not very efficient example of an EV. How about comparing the Honda to a lower cost, more efficient EV like the Tesla Model 3? It's a more enjoyable driving car than the Honda and well more efficient than the Benz.

Intelligent octopus is now 7.5p/ KWH … so a bit less than half of the full electric price calculated here …

I work for an OEM and had the opportunity to borrow many different electric cars to test over an extended amount of time. If you can't charge at home, it's not even worth considering an EV. They're not cheaper than an efficient gas car when charged publicly and you waste so much time finding and waiting for a public charging station. Also, not all electric cars are equal. When I borrowed the eTron, a horribly inefficient EV with half the efficiency of a Tesla Model 3, I spent $28 to charge 80 miles at a public fast charger (66 cents/KWh). That's around 2.5 times the cost for me to drive my non-hybrid Civic for the same amount of miles. Ridiculous! If things don't change, way fewer people will be able to afford to drive in the future, which I think might be the real intention behind the EV push.