About EVCostIQ

Last updated: July 2026.

EVCostIQ is an independent tool that answers one practical question honestly: over the years you'd actually own it, does an electric vehicle cost you less than a comparable gasoline car — or more? We publish dated, sourced total-cost-of-ownership estimates for 62 markets, including the United States, the UK, and several EEA countries.

What we do

We model the full cost of ownership — depreciation, electricity or fuel, maintenance, insurance, financing interest, registration and fees, minus any incentives — year by year, and show where one vehicle's running total crosses another's. Every page carries a "last refreshed" date tied to the underlying data, and every assumption is documented. You can read exactly how the numbers are produced on our methodology page.

Our independence

We are not paid by anyone to reach a particular answer.

• No manufacturer commissions and no utility or dealer arrangements that change the math.
• No referral or affiliate fees baked into a calculation. If we ever add a disclosed affiliate link, it will never alter a result.
• We tell you when gas wins. For many drivers and many vehicles, the gasoline car is cheaper over a typical ownership period — and when our numbers say that, that's what we show. We would rather be useful than flattering to EVs.

The site currently runs no advertising at all, and nothing about how it is funded pushes you toward any purchase.

How we keep it honest

• We publish the count of vehicles in our database, our data sources, and a per-source "last refreshed" date.
• We label estimates as estimates and never present a modeled figure as a licensed third-party value.
• We disclose things rivals often hide — for example, the roughly 12% energy lost when charging at home, and the fact that the U.S. federal $7,500 / $4,000 clean-vehicle credits expired on 30 September 2025.

Who runs it

EVCostIQ was founded in 2026 and is independently operated. We welcome corrections — see Contact or email [email protected].

Independence — the current facts

As of August 6, 2026: no manufacturer money — no commissions, sponsorships, placement fees or review vehicles from any carmaker or dealer; no affiliate links on verdict pages — no page that names a cost winner carries a link that pays us for the outcome; and advertising is currently switched off — this build of the site ships no ad code at all. If any of this changes, this page and the changelog will say so first.

How we work

• One cost engine. Every figure on every page — and in every live calculator — comes from the same open cost kernel; nothing is hand-typed, and the rendered arithmetic on every built page is re-checked against the engine before release.
• Sourced and dated. Each market's rates carry an as-of date, and the build fails outright rather than ship a market whose data has aged past our freshness limit.
• Honest verdicts. When the petrol or hybrid car wins the 5-year total — which it often does — the page says so in its title and headline, not in a footnote.
• A public change history. Meaningful changes are logged, dated, on the changelog (with an RSS feed); factual errors go in the corrections log below and are never silently edited away.

Who writes this

Ivan H. — owner of a service company in Canada. Running it — quoting repairs, pricing parts and explaining labour rates to customers who just want to know what something will actually cost — is where this site comes from. It treats maintenance, depreciation and the dull recurring costs as the main event rather than a footnote, because for most owners that is exactly what they are. EVCostIQ is the tool he wanted and couldn't find: one that adds up what a car truly costs to own over five years at your own local rates, and says plainly when the petrol, diesel or hybrid is the cheaper car to own. He takes no manufacturer money, and no number here is chosen to favour an answer.

Corrections

Factual errors we have published and then fixed — dated, in the open, never backfilled or softened.

• July 28, 2026 — /it/tesla-model-y-standard-rwd-cost/: We published wrong EV battery-replacement figures. Our battery data is matched to each car by model name, and one copy of that matcher treated a partial name match as an exact one, so it could not tell a Tesla Model 3 from a Model Y or a VW ID.4 from an ID.3. It put Model 3 pack prices on 22 Model Y pages, Hyundai Ioniq 5 figures on 3 Ioniq 6 pages, and ID.4 figures on 15 ID.3, ID.7 and ID.Buzz pages: 40 wrong out-of-warranty replacement figures across 20 markets. On this page it showed a replacement cost of 11,000-18,000 USD, which is the Model 3 LFP pack, not the Model Y's 12,000-18,000 USD. Found in an audit of the matcher on 28 July 2026. Fix: Fixed the same day. The four copies of the matcher were replaced with one shared implementation (scripts/battery-match.mjs) that requires every word of a battery record's model name to match the vehicle name as a whole word, so Model 3 can never match Model Y; where nothing matches, the page now shows no battery figure at all instead of a near miss. Every affected page was rebuilt with its own model's figure. No 5-year ownership total changed: an out-of-warranty battery replacement is never included in our totals, and each page says so.
• July 28, 2026 — /methodology/: Thirteen vehicles carried a per-model depreciation curve and a source citation in our published data while the row those were derived from was missing from data/model-residuals.json, the file we treat as the source of truth for resale values. The figures were shown as sourced, but the pipeline could no longer regenerate or re-check them from that source, so nobody could have verified them from our own files. Found on 28 July 2026 while auditing the residual pipeline. Fix: Restored all 13 entries to model-residuals.json with their source text, each flagged with the date it was restored, and added a check to scripts/apply-residuals.mjs that fails the build if any vehicle carries a residual curve or source with no backing row. The 5-year retained value — the figure every 5-year total on this site is built on — is identical for all 13, so no 5-year total, verdict or ranking moved. Rebuilding the curves from the restored rows did change the year-by-year running totals behind 12 of those models' cost charts; in one case the stranded curve was internally inconsistent, showing a year-4 running total higher than its year-5 total.