We did the math, and yes, absolutely it does.
The PHEV will by far be your biggest consumer, assuming you charge it every two days. And no, i did of course not include the cost of the charging box, since that’s an investment not into the current car, but all cars coming after – i very much doubt that we’ll go back to full ICE cars. But even if we did, our savings are around £500-£600 a year, which means that the charger amortised itself within the first year, or shortly thereafter – depending on which charger we go with in the end.
It’s 65p per full charge, as i said. Or, if we go by your assumption (which might be correct, could be that we only charge 80%), it’s less. At our current tariff, it’s almost £2.80 per full charge, an increase of more than 400%.
Our next biggest consumers are the fridge, washing machine and tumble dryer, and then of course by far the car. The appliances will run in the same time window, reducing the energy cost even more, even though we’re using a heatpump tumble.
Obviously it’s gonna depend on how often you drive, and how often you drive in pure electric mode. I know how often we would, and it’s not even close. Yes, the “general electricity” goes up by 4p. We use around 3000kwh a year. Even if i’m charitable to your argument and say we only charge 10kwh instead of 13kwh, and then be more charitable and say we’ll only charge it on 100 days of the year instead of the every two days that we most likely would, that’s an additional 1000kwh just for the car. If you take out tumble/washer, it’s an additional (approx) 900kwh. On top of that, other major consumers like the fridge/freezer get partially reduced in price too. Yes, it runs 20 hours a day at 20% increased cost, but it also runs 4 hours a day at 75% reduced cost, including every other “permanent consumer”.
So, in the end, we get half our electricity cost slashed by 75%, and half of our electricity cost increased by 20% (actually less since, as mentioned, permanent consumers do get reduced for 4 hours a day as well).
It’s not even close, really. Of course it depends on driving habits and even your particular car. If you do much “long distance” driving, then it of course makes less sense, especially with the dinky range of the XC40 in the first place. We don’t. I do a 15-20 mile journey every day (well, at least 4 per week), mostly city traffic. I can do that mostly, if not entirely, electric. Assuming your car and distance driven, i’d probably had done 1800 of those 2200 miles electric (for clarification, we don’t drive that distance in that time though). That’s already 750kwh alone. In three months. At 20.5p per kwh, instead of 5p per kwh.
Speak for yourself. It’s not “a PHEV likely to use so much electricity” – it’s, if anything, yours that doesn’t, because you either don’t drive it efficiently or, probably more likely, your trips are too long to. So, sure. In your use-case, might not be smart to change. But that’s not because “a PHEV doesn’t use so much electricity”, it’s because your trips are too long to be able to fully benefit of the electric range (albeit, granted, we’d probably struggle with the XC40 E-only range too). If every trip, or every other trip, is over 30 miles, and you only charge it once a week, yeah it might not make sense.
For us, and i did look at the numbers, it absolutely does. Big time.
Out of curiosity. Does the XC40 log how often/much you charged it? Would be interesting to see the numbers. I know the Golf does (albeit through We Connect), no idea about the XC40. Would be interesting to see how many of those 2200 miles were electric.
As a sidenote, and i’d agree that it’s somewhat insignificant, the standing charge drops by 5p as well from Octo Flex to Octo Go. Still 20 quid saved.