Do you know what it costs to fill up an electric vehicle with a fast charger – $30, $40, $50? Do you even know what it costs to run your house each night?

Most people don’t, but we all know the price of fuel.

Do you know how far can you go on a tank of electrons in the average electric car – 300km, 400km, 500km? Most people have no idea, but they are suspicious it’s not far enough.

Let’s look at the numbers.

Let’s start by assuming you don’t live in Mosman Park and you don’t have a $50,000 solar battery system on your house that you top up the Tesla with overnight for free.

Let’s also assume you are aware that the cheapest electric cars start at $45,000, about $20,000 more than the cheapest petrol car.

Let’s add to the assumptions that you are also not a level 9 public servant working on the government’s climate change policy who has the advantage of flexi-time plus two flexi-days working at home struggling on a salary of $170,000 with a e-car thrown in and a charging station at work (when you bother showing up).

Rather, you are one of the battling 1.9 million Australians living in a unit with off street parking, rely on the local plugin at the shopping centre for your electrons, and have decided you can’t afford to keep paying for petrol.

If you hock yourself and buy a $45,000 EV, you can look forward to the following time and money savings.

Unfortunately, the time savings are non existent as, unlike a five-minute petrol stop, EV charging can take anywhere from 30 to 60 minutes.

As for the cost, for the slower 22kW public chargers, the price has recently increased from 35c per kWh to 50c, about double residential tariff rates, while fast charging at 150kW has increased from 60c per kWh to 68c.

Your vehicle has a 60kWh battery capacity and a real world energy consumption of 20kWh per 100km driven.

This means it can drive about 300km before having to be recharged. At 68c per kWh to recharge, it will cost $40.80 to charge your EV using a publicly accessible fast charger.

The petrol version of a $45,000 average car consumes 1 litre of fuel per 15km in real world environments.

Assuming a $2 per litre petrol price, if the owner filled up with $40.80 worth of fuel they would be able to drive 306km, all of 6km more than the EV.

In effect, it costs the same to run a small EV as it does a small car when it comes to the cost of energy.

So now lets look at it from a rural and regional perspective.

You are a keen regen farmer and want to make a difference.  You buy an electric car after carefully looking at the distances it can travel.

You are one of the early farmers to get one of the $300,000 Western Power installed solar battery standalone power units.

Then you should be in the market for an electric F 150 and a couple of Teslas as the government is subsidising your efforts to save the planet.

Just make sure you have a solar and battery set up in Perth or access to a fast charger, not to mention being within charge range without any stops on the way as you don’t want to be caught waiting in line to top up your charge.

Why? Because one of the hidden challenges is the time difference between a fast and slow charger. A BMW i7 fast charge claims (no voltage given) 38 minutes; wall socket charge time at 230 V is a whopping 52 hours 45 minutes.  A Tesla is similar, while a 2022 MG SZ wall socket charge time is 25 hours 15 minutes.

As for charging stations in country towns, good luck with that, they are few and far between, or just few.

At $40,000 a pop, they are not cheap and the petroleum companies are in no big hurry to install them, while country drivers are refusing to put themselves in a position when they need them.

Besides, who wants to wait for an hour while the two cars in front of you load up with electrons or worse, the flow of electrons is reduced as the power grid can’t handle the drain as all the charge stations across all the country towns are plugged in at the same time.

The problem with EVs is that without the range or cheap power they are rich peoples virtue-signalling toys, offering a lower luxury car tax, plus fully tax deductible on an EV up to $89,332 via a ­novated lease, plus they don’t pay fuel tax which funds road maintenance.

If electric vehicles are the future then we need to be frank about their pros and cons.

As all I can see are cons.