The cost of charging an electric vehicle to drive from Pretoria to Durban is about 27% cheaper than filling up a petrol car to cover the same route.
While electricity charges vary from one area to the next, the energy consumed in an EV is typically around 50% to 60% cheaper per kilometer of travel than using a similar petrol car if it comes from home charging. On our drive between Pretoria and Durban, we only used home charging to recharge the EX30’s battery back to the same level it was upon our initial departure.The remaining 264.43kWh of electricity — over 82% of the total energy consumed — came from public charging stations.If we could use our overnight accommodation to charge the EV, the overall cost would have been substantially less.
However, several options on the market have similar internal, comfort, and tech specifications and compete in similar pricing segments.The X1 comes with either a petrol or diesel engine, while the XC40 is offered with only a petrol engine. In fact, there is no commercially-available diesel model in South Africa that has as much power as the EX30.