Today is World EV Day and there’s never been a better time to save money while driving an electric car, says Ohme, a UK smart home EV charging company.
Ohme believes EV owners can make much bigger savings on their energy bills if they charge ‘smarter’.
So for this landmark day, Ohme has put together five top money-saving tips when driving an EV:
Saving tip 1 – Drive an EV
It sounds obvious, but if you’re driving an electric vehicle, then the great news is that you’re already saving money compared to running a petrol or diesel car.
With the average driver spending more than £1100* a year on fuel costs alone, just switching to an electric car and charging it at home could more than halve your costs to just £416.50 for an entire year for the same annual mileage.
Saving tip 2 – Choose a dynamic home electricity tariff
If halving the running costs of your car isn’t enough of a saving, then how about running an EV for less than £10 a month? It may sound too good to be true, but that’s the reality if you switch to a dynamic home electricity tariff from the likes of Octopus or OVO.
Thanks to its dynamic tariff integration, with an Ohme EV charger you can access all of the UK’s cheapest electricity tariffs, meaning you can reduce the running costs even more. The same typical UK driver mentioned above doing 6800mls a year could spend just £119 for an entire year of driving.
Saving tip 3 – Cheaper overnight electricity
Some dynamic home electricity tariffs can mean that all of the electricity coming into your home is at the cheap rate at certain times – usually overnight.
That means that any household appliances you can also use during those times will be at the same reduced rate, increasing your savings on your household electricity bill as well as for your EV.
Saving tip 4 – Get an EV company car
If you have a company car, then you need to get an EV. It’s really that simple. Electric vehicles pay just 2% Benefit-in-Kind company car tax for 2024/25 – that’s less than a tenth of a car even with 100g/km emissions.
Another popular alternative is to get an EV on salary sacrifice from your employer. With salary sacrifice the leasing payments are taken from your gross income before you pay tax rather than after it as with a traditional company car scheme leaving you with more disposable income.
Saving tip 5 – Take part in a grid flexibility trial
This summer, Ohme has been involved in an Ofgem project called the CrowdFlex energy trial. This project was to incentivise EV drivers to plug in their cars more frequently to get a better understanding of the role EV drivers can play with balancing the electricity grid of the future.
By participating in the trial, drivers earned rewards by simply plugging-in whenever they were parked at home. Ohme is involved in a similar trial from this month until April 2025. Grid flexibility services such as these are estimated to save consumers £10 billion a year in energy costs by 2050.
* Based on £1.45/litre and efficiency of 40mpg
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