EV payoff calculator

This form allows you to do a rough calculation of the time it takes to pay off buying an EV now.

Many people know that they want to buy an EV as their next car, but they're waiting until their current car dies until they make that choice. This form aims to show that this behaviour actually loses money. The question is really down to how many years it takes to pay off, which depends mostly on the up-front expense of the new car and the distance you drive each year.

Fields in italics are optional. We provide sensible defaults for those based on normal driving.

New car price	$	Current car resale price	$
Kilometres travelled per year		km/yr
Cost per kilowatt-hour	$/kWHr	Cost per litre of fuel	$/litre
Distance per kilowatt-hour	km/kWHr	Distance per litre of fuel^[1]	km/litre
Reduction in service cost		$/yr


Cost of EV per kilometre	$/km	Cost of ICE per kilometre	$/km
Cost of EV per year	$/year	Cost of ICE per year	$/year
Cost of new car investment		$
Saving of EV per year		$/yr
Years to pay off

Notes

[1] Many cars seem to prefer to read this as litres per hundred kilometers. To convert l/100km into km/l, divide 100 by the l/100km. I'm keeping this form as km/l because it simplifies calculation. Cars give you l/100km because as it gets lower it's increasingly insensitive to small behaviour changes - you have to drive a lot more carefully to get from 7l/100km to 6l/100km, whereas getting from 17l/100km to 16l/100km requires only a slightly lighter accelerator. So once you achieve your general average it's not really obvious when your driving behaviour changes.