Petrol vs electric: which is the cheaper car to run in 2026?

If you've been paying attention, you'll know that the rampant scaremongering around en-route EV charging is basically just that. To find a quick-enough, handy-enough charge post on a journey anywhere in the UK and western Europe is, with only a little advanced planning, basically a solved problem. That used to be the number one objection to a switch to EV.

So what's the next barrier? The one most commonly mentioned: the price of an EV. Have we not got to the point where buying or financing an EV and running it – or a PHEV – is cheaper than a petrol car?

Only a few new-car private buyers put down the whole price at the dealer. Most use PCP or lease. The industry has ways of pulling levers so that the finance payment isn't actually proportional to the list price. If they want to shift extra EVs to meet the requirements of the Government mandate, or they've simply got their predictions wrong and have too many of any car (EV or ICE) they'll fiddle with the interest rate or give an upfront discount – which they coyly call a 'deposit contribution' because overt discounting harms residual values.

For example, Renault is currently charging 6.9 per cent interest on an R4 PCP, but has zero-interest deals on a Captur.

There's more obscurity because even though the Government gives grants for European-made EVs, many of the manufacturers who don't qualify simply offer their own. For instance the 'Suzuki Granted' £3,750 on an e-Vitara, or an MG EV Car Grant of £1,500. Another form of discounting. So looking at list prices doesn't tell the full story, whereas those factors are covered in the advertised lease or PCP rates.

Don't, by the way, obsess over differences in parking, maintenance, insurance or home-charger installation. They aren't enough to sway it one way or the other. It comes down to the car payment and the fuel or electricity. Several carmakers will give you a home charger, so will the leasing branches of the electricity providers such as Octopus.

Many local councils charge more for a residents' parking permit for a petrol car than an EV. That might save a tenner a month. Insurance might be similarly weighted in favour of the petrol car – a VW Golf GTI as the GTI is group 31 and an ID.3 GTX group 34. EVs are sometimes cheaper to maintain: BMW's service plans for EVs are between £6 and £9 less per month than the equivalent petrols.

Finance deals keep changing, but here's what we found in April 2026. If you do the UK average of 7,000 miles a year, and you put down a £7,000 initial payment on a three-year PCP deal, you can have a Golf GTI for just under £500 a month and an ID.3 GTX for about £50 more. If the EV is £50 cheaper to 'fuel' than the petrol car, it wins. Otherwise the GTI is cheaper.

Most people who buy a new car have a driveway. Or they can charge at work. Many of the rest, living in cities, have access to nearby street chargers – in lamp posts or kerbside boxes or car parks. If you use them, functionally it'll be similar to home charging: plug in the car there, stroll home and it'll be charged in the morning. But those sockets cost perhaps six times as much as home overnight electricity, and that sways the economics.

Charge at home and it can be as little as 8p/kWh, which means at an energy consumption of 3m/kWh (accounting for charging losses and real-world energy consumption) the cost is around 2.7p per mile. The 35mpg Golf GTI at today's spiked petrol price is 21p per mile. The EV is £16 a month to do your monthly mileage; the petrol car £122. Even if you buy some expensive motorway rapid recharges, that saving in energy cost more than offsets the extra in the monthly finance price. But if you have to charge on public AC chargers, it levels out. They're about 50p/kWh at the moment, bringing the per-mile cost to 17p, little short of the GTI's 21p.

Buying used, more people pay the list price rather than using the manufacturers' finance instruments. And used EVs are a bargain, even if prices are hardening as the current oil price fear takes its grip. Used long-range rear-drive BMW i4s are cheaper than four-cylinder petrol 430is. Three-year-old Audi Q4 quattro e-trons are cheaper than ICE Q5 quattros. It's not hard to find a sub-30k mile Renault Megane electric for £16k and it'll be a terrific car, and usefully quicker and better equipped than the equivalent three-cylinder petrol 308s and Focuses.

If you get a new company car, the EV always wins because of benefit in kind (BIK) tax. You pay tax – an actual monetary deduction from your income – according to the car you've been given, and that BIK depends on the car's price and its WLTP CO2. Simple example. You're doing nicely, and you're in the 40 per cent tax band. You also have that aforementioned Golf GTI as a company car. The BIK is nearly six grand in extra tax a year, almost £500 a month. If you have the ID.3 GTX, the list price is higher but as it's an EV the BIK is tiny. So the annual tax is £925, or £77 a month. That's why EVs do so well on the company car market.

As a coda, we should look briefly at PHEVs. Again, they're mostly bought for BIK advantages, which are not as strong as full EVs but still attractive to drivers who still want an engine. Some recent ones can do 50+ miles on pure-electric, but they're not as efficient as pure EVs when doing so. This means on any kind of public charging you'll be spending as much per mile as a petrol car. If you can home-charge, there are advantages – you can do local journeys all on electric and save, or you can use the battery charge to reduce the petrol engine's fuel use over a longer journey. 

PHEVs are posited as a stepping stone to an EV. But given they make sense only if you have a home charger, why not just go all the way and get the EV anyway? Away from home, PHEVs are painfully slow to charge, never exceeding 50kW, in an era when 200kW+ is common for EVs. They're heavy and not so good to drive as pure-petrol. They mostly cost very nearly as much on finance as much as EVs. They're not for private buyers, then.

Image credit: Magictorch