Bests electric cars for your money
By Melroy van den Berg
- 3 minutes read - 555 wordsCurrently, I’m also searching for an electric car. Of course when you are buying a car for yourself, you are judging your bare minimal requirements. Like what is the minimum range (for electric cars), the type of car or what is your budget you want to spend on a car.
Aside from all those factors, those cars were hitting the marked and I couldn’t choose any more. The cars have huge differences in both range and starting price. This gave me the idea to come up with some similar calculation what is used in the IT; to compares hard-disks/solid state disks. Namely the cost of of 1 Gigabyte.
So, instead of dividing the cost price by the amount of total storage. I came up with an easy alternative for the current electric car revolution.
Namely, divide the from price of the electric car by the battery size (in kWh):
$$ratio = \frac{\textrm{car price (in euros)}}{\textrm{battery size (in kWh)}}$$
The ratio number will tell you something about the price/quality of the range of the car (not the quality of the car itself).
However, this does give you a very good indication whether or not its a good deal and thus more bang for the buck.
Car List
Knowing this simple formula above. I can now calculate this ratio for several cars I was personally interested in (most of which will release soon-ish). As well as some other cars for reference.
That gave me the following table (ordered by most expensive to least expensive) in € / kWh.
Disclaimer: Some cars are official not yet released within Europe (or The Netherlands for that matter). Therefore use these numbers as a guideline. Actual prices of some cars may be different once they are officially out!
| Brand | Model | Price(€) / battery(kWh) |
|---|---|---|
| Tesla | Cybertruck (single motor) | 450 |
| Skoda | ENYAQ | 482 |
| Aiways | U2 | 538 |
| Seat | El-Born | 646 |
| Renault | Zoe ZE50 R110 | 646 |
| Opel | Corsa-e | 652 |
| Volkswagen | ID.3 1st (58kWh) - Standard model | 655 |
| Ford | Mustang Mach-E SR RWD | 659 |
| Volkswagen | ID.3 Pure (45 kWh) | 666 |
| MG | ZS EV | 696 |
| Sono | Sion | 742 |
| Peugot | e-208 | 763 |
| Polestar | Polestar 2 | 824 |
| DS | DS 3 Crossback e-tense | 909 |
| Jaguar | I-Pace | 956 |
| Hyundai | IONIQ | 965 |
| Tesla | Model 3 (standard range) | 1087 |
| Honda | Honda-e | 1109 |
| BMW | i3 | 1111 |
| MINI | Electric | 1207 |
| Volkswagen | ID.3 Pro (58 kWh) | ? |
| Volkswagen | ID.3 Pro S (77 kWh) | ? |
Do you want to know the ratio for another electric car brands/models?
Let me know in the comments, and I’ll add that car to this list!
Update: Extended with VW ID.3 versions & MG ZS EV.
Conclusion
Some cars were already removed from my personal list; by the fact the range is not good enough for my daily journey, like the Mini electric range has way too little range. I want at least around 35 kWh battery (~250km WLTP range) for my daily commuting trip. Next to that, you can see the Mini electric car in this example is also way overpriced, with cost of more than €1200 per kWh of battery!
To conclude this overview shows me quite some interesting facts. Gave me a good indication whether or not a car is pretty good deal or when I get ripped off hard. Let me know what your findings are below in the comments.