Should you buy an electric car? An honest decision guide

• If you can charge where you park overnight, the numbers usually work.
• If you can't, they usually don't — and that matters more than which car you pick.
• Depreciation, not fuel, is the largest cost in most ownership periods. Electric cars still lose value faster.
• High mileage and long ownership are what tip the balance to electric. Short ownership rarely does.
• Buying used changes the answer completely, because the first owner has already absorbed the steep part of the depreciation curve.

An electric car asks for more money up front and gives it back per kilometre. The rate of repayment is set by the gap between what you pay for electricity and what you would have paid for fuel. Private overnight charging makes that gap as wide as it gets. Public rapid charging can close it entirely.

In the Netherlands the difference is stark: DC rapid charging averages around €0.76 per kWh against roughly €0.29 at home. Street charging sits in between, and where you live decides which end it sits closer to. Dutch on-street charging density makes it genuinely viable; in much of Europe it remains a gamble.

This is why blanket claims in either direction are unreliable. The same car can be the cheapest or the most expensive option on the forecourt depending on nothing more than where it is plugged in.

Fuel savings are the headline, and they are the smaller number. Depreciation is typically seventy to eighty per cent of what an electric car costs you each year; energy is closer to fifteen.

Electric cars have been losing value faster than petrol equivalents. Research disagrees on how much — some sources put three-year depreciation at 38 to 42 per cent, others as high as 61 — but the direction is consistent, and it is the single biggest reason a new electric car can work out more expensive than a hybrid despite costing far less to run.

The corollary is the interesting bit. That same steep curve is what makes used electric cars such good value. BEUC's 2025 total-cost-of-ownership study found used electric cars already cheaper than petrol for second and third owners, by between twelve and twenty-eight per cent a year depending on segment. The first owner pays for the second owner's advantage.

A guide that never says no is advertising. These are the situations where we would not recommend one today.

You have no private, street or workplace charging. Rapid-charge-only ownership removes most of the running-cost advantage and adds friction to ordinary weeks.

You change cars every two or three years. Short ownership concentrates the steepest part of the depreciation curve, which is still worse for electric cars than for petrol.

You tow regularly over distance. Range penalties while towing are severe, and most charging bays cannot physically accommodate a car with a trailer attached.

You drive very little. Below roughly 8,000 km a year, neither the financial nor the carbon case closes within a typical ownership period. Keeping a working car running is usually greener.

In several of these cases a full hybrid is the pragmatic middle path: no charging infrastructure required, meaningfully lower consumption than pure petrol, and no range compromise. And the greenest car remains, very often, the one already built and still running.