A typical new internal combustion (ICE) automobile costs the average American owner twice as much to fuel for a year as it would to charge a battery-only electric one, according to University of Michigan researchers.
Michael Sivak and Brandon Schoettle examined “the variation across individual U.S. states in the relative fuel cost of driving battery-electric vehicles (BEVs) and gasoline vehicles,” Renewable Energy Magazine reports. They found EVs were less than half as expensive to drive as the internal combustion models.
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Driving a typical new gasoline-fueled car for a year cost an average US$1,117, they determined, ranging from $993 in Alabama to $1,509 in Hawaii. By contrast, electricity for a typical new EV set owners back only $485 on average—with a range from $367 in Louisiana to $1,106 in Hawaii.
In an interesting twist on the data, the investigators also determined that for internal combustion vehicles to achieve the same economy for users as electric ones, they would need to get 57.6 miles per gallon of gasoline as an American average—and up to 90 miles per gallon in the state of Washington.
The Swiss Bank UBS has predicted that electric cars will reach total price parity with standard internal combustion models this year, based on the total cost for buying, owning, and operating a vehicle.
