EV vs ICE Fleet Cost Calculator
An electric van costs more to buy and less to run. Those two facts meet at a distance, and that distance decides whether electrifying a duty cycle makes commercial sense. This calculator finds it, using your energy prices rather than a press release.
Your numbers
How many units on this duty cycle you would switch.
Be realistic. Battery vehicles are often kept longer, which changes the answer.
At the end of the holding period. Residuals for combustion vehicles are the known quantity here.
Servicing, brakes, exhaust aftertreatment, tyres. Take it from your own workshop history if you can.
Anything that reduces the price at the point of purchase. Leave at 0 if none applies.
The weakest number in this model. Nobody knows what a seven-year-old battery vehicle fetches.
Real-world, including charging losses and cabin heating in winter.
Your blended rate. Depot overnight and public rapid charging are different businesses.
Fewer moving parts, same tyres, heavier vehicle.
Charger, groundworks and your share of any supply upgrade. The line that sinks most business cases.
Result
EV saving per vehicle over the period
26,932
Positive means the electric vehicle costs less across the whole holding period. Negative means the combustion vehicle wins on cost.
- Break-even distance
- 146,783 km
- ICE total per vehicle
- 128,058
- EV total per vehicle
- 101,126
- ICE running cost per km
- 0.261
- EV running cost per km
- 0.100
- ICE depreciation
- 46,000
- EV depreciation after incentive
- 66,000
- Diesel or petrol spend
- 53,708
- Electricity spend
- 15,876
- Fleet-wide difference
- 269,315
The formula
- Total distance = Distance per vehicle × Holding period
- ICE depreciation = Purchase price − Resale value, floored at 0
- Diesel or petrol spend = (Total distance ÷ 100) × Consumption × Fuel price
- ICE maintenance = Total distance × Maintenance per km
- ICE total per vehicle = ICE depreciation + Diesel or petrol spend + ICE maintenance
- EV capital = EV purchase price − Grant, floored at 0
- EV depreciation = EV capital − EV resale value, floored at 0
- Electricity spend = (Total distance ÷ 100) × EV consumption × Electricity price
- EV maintenance = Total distance × EV maintenance per km
- EV total per vehicle = EV depreciation + Electricity spend + EV maintenance + Charging infrastructure
- EV saving per vehicle = ICE total − EV total
- Running cost per km = (Energy + Maintenance) ÷ Total distance, for each vehicle
- Capital gap = EV depreciation + Charging infrastructure − ICE depreciation
- Break-even distance = Capital gap ÷ (ICE running cost per km − EV running cost per km), reported as 0 when there is no capital gap or the EV never runs cheaper
- Fleet-wide difference = EV saving per vehicle × Vehicles being compared
Assumptions and limits
- EV residual value is a guess and it dominates the result. Nobody has a deep second-hand market for seven-year-old electric commercial vehicles yet, and battery health will price them. Run this three times with pessimistic, middling and optimistic residuals before you believe any of it.
- Energy and fuel prices are held flat for the whole period. Both will move, and they will not move together. Electricity is exposed to a different market than diesel, which is the strategic argument for switching and also the reason a single-price model is fragile.
- Charging infrastructure is entered per vehicle, which hides the real shape of the cost. A depot supply upgrade is a large step change that the first vehicle triggers and the twentieth does not. If a substation is involved, this field cannot represent it.
- Range, payload and duty cycle are entirely absent. The model will happily tell you an EV is cheaper on a route it physically cannot complete, or that ignores the payload lost to battery weight.
- Taxes, road user charges, congestion and clean-air zone charges are excluded. In some cities these decide the case on their own, in either direction.
- Depreciation is straight-line and financing is excluded, so a comparison between an outright purchase and a lease will be wrong in ways this tool cannot see.
The break-even distance is the whole decision
The electric vehicle starts behind by its capital gap: the price premium plus the charger, less any grant and less whatever residual it retains. It claws that back a fraction of a currency unit at a time, every kilometre, on cheaper energy and lighter maintenance.
Divide the gap by the per-kilometre advantage and you get the distance at which the two vehicles cost the same. Below it, the combustion vehicle is cheaper. Above it, the electric one is.
This is why high-mileage urban routes electrify first and why a van doing eight thousand kilometres a year does not, however green the intent. The vehicle needs distance to repay its premium, and a vehicle that barely moves never gets there.
The two numbers everyone gets wrong
The first is electricity price. Depot charging overnight and public rapid charging on a bad day are not the same commodity, and the gap between them can be several times over. A business case built on the depot rate, run by drivers who top up on the network, dissolves. Enter a blended rate that reflects what your drivers will actually do at four in the afternoon with a low battery.
The second is residual value. Combustion residuals are backed by decades of auction data. Electric residuals are backed by opinion, because the vehicles have not aged yet and the market will price battery degradation in ways nobody has settled on.
Because residual sits inside depreciation and depreciation is usually the largest single line, a wrong guess there swamps every careful estimate elsewhere. Change that field alone and watch the answer flip.
What cost comparison cannot settle
A cheaper vehicle that cannot finish the route is not cheaper. This model has no idea about range in winter, about the payload the battery consumes, about the hour a driver waits at a charger, or about the depot that can support four chargers and not twelve.
It equally ignores the reasons to switch that are not costs. Clean-air zones, customer tender requirements and corporate targets are real constraints, and they sometimes make an expensive answer the correct one.
Use the arithmetic to size the gap, not to make the decision. If the electric option loses by a small margin, the non-cost factors are probably worth more than the margin. If it loses badly, no amount of framing fixes that this year.
Frequently asked questions
There is no general answer, which is exactly why the calculator asks for your figures. The break-even distance falls out of your capital gap and your energy prices, and both vary enormously. A fleet with depot charging and a large grant can break even quickly. A fleet on public rapid charging with no grant may never reach it within the holding period.
Two different reasons, and it is worth knowing which. Either there is no capital gap to recover — with a large grant or a strong residual the EV can start ahead, and it simply wins — or the EV does not run cheaper per kilometre, usually because the electricity price entered is high relative to fuel. In that case there is no distance that rescues it. Check the running-cost-per-km rows to see which case you are in.
On the drivetrain, yes. There is no oil, no exhaust aftertreatment, no clutch, and regenerative braking is gentle on friction brakes. But the vehicle is heavier, so it eats tyres faster, and specialist repairs can be slower to arrange with fewer workshops able to do high-voltage work. The maintenance field is a per-km input rather than a claim, because your workshop history is better evidence than our opinion.
It is not, deliberately. Most commercial batteries are warrantied beyond a typical holding period, and a replacement inside that window is a warranty event rather than a cost. If you plan to run the vehicle past its warranty, the risk shows up in the residual value instead — that is the field to mark down, not the maintenance line.
This one compares two options on the lines where they differ: capital, energy and maintenance. It deliberately leaves out insurance, tax and downtime, because carrying identical figures on both sides adds noise without changing the ranking. Once you have chosen a vehicle, run the full TCO calculator on it to get an absolute cost per kilometre for budgeting.
Stop estimating. Measure it.
EV vs ICE Fleet Cost Calculator gives you the arithmetic. Fleet Analytics Software gives you the live numbers from your own fleet.