Electric Vehicle Ownership Costs: Today’s Electric Vehicles Offer Big Savings for Consumers
10
These filters on the data were used to eliminate outliers and keep the sample within the range of
reasonably likely consumer experience while retaining as much of the original data set as
possible. While 60,000 miles is a lot of driving for one year, it’s within the range of possibilities
for, for example, a salesman with a large territory, or someone who drives full-time for a ride-
hailing company, such as Uber or Lyft. Similarly $20,000 is a lot to spend on vehicle repairs but
may represent the cost of major repairs on a luxury vehicle.
The final data set was then sorted by total vehicle mileage. Average maintenance costs were
estimated in three mileage bins: 0 to 50,000 miles, 50,000 to 100,000 miles, and 100,000 to
200,000 miles. For each bin, a vehicle-miles-traveled (VMT) weighted average repair and
maintenance cost per mile was calculated. To account for any bias in the data based on the
brands of vehicles purchased by CR members, for ICE vehicles the estimates were reweighted
based on calculated average maintenance costs for each automaker and the average market
share over the past five years for each brand, using data from auto industry analyst Wards
Intelligence.
The sample size for PHEVs and BEVs was not large enough to do a similar
automaker weighted average calculation, but for ICE vehicles the difference between the
automaker weighting and the total average sample for each mileage bin was negligible.
Detailed Findings
The results of the analysis are shown in Table 2.1, binned by mileage range and averaged over
a 200,000-mile vehicle lifetime. Notable results are that estimated lifetime average repair and
maintenance costs for BEVs and PHEVs are approximately half the cost for ICE vehicles. This
is generally consistent with other sources that have estimated the relative repair and
maintenance costs of EVs at 40 percent
and 47 percent.
The data show that repair and maintenance costs are slightly higher for PHEVs than for BEVs
until the 100,000-mile mark, and slightly lower beyond 100,000 miles. It should be noted,
however, that there is a higher degree of uncertainty in these numbers because of a lower
sample size: A little over 200 PHEV vehicles with more than 100,000 miles, and only 55 BEVs.
Furthermore, the 55 BEVs with more than 100,000 miles were predominantly early versions of
the Nissan Leaf and Tesla Model S, suggesting that our projections may overestimate the long-
term maintenance costs expected from current-generation BEVs as automakers learn from their
early models. These estimates will continue to be refined over the next few years as more data
Wards Intelligence, U.S. Vehicle Sales by Company, 2015-2019 data series.
https://wardsintelligence.informa.com/WI060875/US-Vehicle-Sales-by-Company-20152019.
https://neo.ubs.com/shared/d1ZTxnvF2k.
https://www.2degreesinstitute.org/reports/comparing_fuel_and_maintenance_costs_of_electric_and_gas_
powered_vehicles_in_canada.pdf.