EVs cost 33% less to drive in Europe, unless you have nowhere to park

The number doing the rounds this week is 33 per cent. That is how much cheaper it was to drive an electric car than a comparable petrol car in the EU last year, according to the second edition of the ICCT's EV Transition Check by Marie Rajon Bernard and Alexander Plummer.

It is a real number and it is well evidenced. It also hides the single most important thing in the report, which is buried in a bracket on page eight.

The 33 per cent figure describes a driver who splits charging between a home wallbox and public infrastructure. For a driver who charges exclusively in public — because there is no driveway, no allocated bay, no landlord willing to run a cable — the ICCT puts the saving at five per cent.

Five per cent. On energy costs alone, before you touch depreciation or insurance or the difference in purchase price.

The report is direct about the cause: “public chargers are sufficiently available on roads across Europe, although public charging remains significantly more expensive than charging at private chargers.” Availability was the problem the last decade solved. Price is the one this decade has not.

That gap has a distributional shape everyone in the industry recognises and few press releases mention. Households with off-street parking bank most of the running-cost advantage. Flat-dwellers and terraced-street residents get a rounding error. Any policy conversation about affordability that starts and ends at the sticker price is measuring the wrong half of the problem.

Battery prices, adjusted for inflation, have fallen about 35 per cent globally in five years. In Germany, Europe's largest car market, that has pushed real BEV prices down roughly 18 per cent once you correct for inflation and for the fact that the cars themselves got better — average electric range is up about 30 per cent over the same period. Petrol car prices went the other way, up two per cent.

Model choice quadrupled: roughly 160 battery-electric models on sale in Germany, of which about 35 sit under €30,000. In the medium, upper-medium and luxury segments, electric cars have already reached upfront price parity with equivalent combustion models. The small end is still behind, which is the part that matters most for the people the public-charging penalty already hits hardest.

Peter Mock, who directs ICCT Europe, argues the discount has further to run. “We've observed that car prices haven't fallen as quickly as battery costs have, which tells us there is more room for electric cars to get cheaper in the coming years,” he said. “This is a critical moment for carmakers globally. Rather than reversing course, European carmakers will need to sustain and deepen their investments in electrification. The competition in this market will intensify.”

Rajon Bernard, the report's lead author, put the demand side plainly: “EV electric car drivers in Europe are paying about a third less than those with gasoline cars. Those savings are hard to ignore. They also explain why the car market keeps moving in one direction.”

The 33 per cent gap was measured on 2025 data, which now looks conservative. Energy costs for combustion cars rose between 12 and 36 per cent in early 2026 as the oil market tightened. Costs for battery cars stayed broadly flat. The ICCT expects that divergence to hold or widen through 2035.

Battery cars already on European roads are, by the study's reckoning, saving the EU around €4.5 billion a year in fossil fuel imports.

Battery-electric cars took 22 per cent of new EU registrations in the first half of 2026. The spread underneath that average is enormous: Denmark 80 per cent, Netherlands 37, Belgium 36, France 28, Germany 26, Spain 10, Italy 8. Manufacturers, collectively, sat less than 2 g CO2/km short of the 93 g/km fleet target for 2025–2027 as of June.

Public charging points reached 1.16 million across the EU by June 2026, nearly eight times the 2020 count. Chargers of 150 kW or more now cover 92 per cent of the trans-European road network. But 55 per cent of all EU public chargers sit in three countries — the Netherlands, Germany and France — which is a distribution problem dressed as a total.

Trucks did better than most people would guess. Medium-duty electric trucks hit a 21 per cent share of new registrations in the first half, heavy-duty 2.3 per cent, and buses and coaches 28 per cent. In Germany, where CO2-based road charges and toll exemptions apply, both regional and long-haul electric trucks are already cheaper to own and run than diesel. The EU-wide long-haul crossover is projected for around 2030, conditional on those policy levers spreading.

The loser in the report is the plug-in hybrid. Real-world CO2 emissions from EU plug-ins run 4.6 times their type-approval values, and the gap is widening even as electric ranges get longer. Their official figures are not reflecting actual use. Over a full life cycle the ICCT puts a battery-electric car at 73 per cent lower emissions than a petrol equivalent, and a battery-electric long-haul truck at 86 per cent lower than diesel.

If you can charge at home, the report finds a substantial energy-cost advantage. If you cannot, the 33 per cent headline is not your number. Yours is five per cent, and closing that gap depends on public charging tariffs moving closer to the cost of private charging.