Cheap miles are the closest thing an electric car has to a product nobody else sells, and today's five stories are five different forces acting on them. One company protecting them, one squandering them, one demonstrating them, one stress testing them, and one government preparing to tax them.
Start with the demonstration. Andersen EV put £5 of petrol in one car and £5 of overnight home charging in a Renault 5 and drove both down the Fosse Way until one of them stopped. The petrol car showed around 40 miles on the gauge. The Renault was still going with roughly 150 miles of route left to cover. That gap is the entire commercial argument for electric cars, and no amount of spec sheet nitpicking touches it.
The engineering question is who protects that gap. Audi's revived A2 is built around a 58 kWh usable pack and a drag coefficient of 0.24, on the theory that hunting down losses is cheaper than adding cells. The electric Lexus ES goes the other way. Auto Focus describes a car that keeps the tall centre console of the petrol version, a tunnel through the rear floor of a front wheel drive EV, and no front boot, with a range figure that reviewers on two continents have now struggled to defend at the price. One of those cars treats efficiency as the product. The other treats electric as a fuel type.
Then there is what happens when a real family loads up. The Silverado EV range test ran with two adults, a child, two dogs, cargo and climate control at both ends of the cabin, and returned 642.7 km. That is a good number, and it was bought with a very large battery. It is the expensive route to cheap miles, which is fine until somebody starts counting them.
Somebody has. New South Wales will charge EV drivers almost 3 cents a kilometre from July next year, because fuel excise raises around $15 billion a year in Australia and that base is shrinking with every sale. Every country with meaningful EV numbers arrives at this question eventually, and most will arrive before they have a fair answer ready.
What to watch over the next six months is how quickly per kilometre charges become normal, because the moment they do, efficiency stops being a running cost advantage and becomes only an energy cost advantage. The car that uses less still wins, but by a narrower margin, and every mile costs something regardless of what powers it. That makes efficiency led design more valuable, not less, and it makes converted petrol cars look worse than they already do.
Bottom line: the companies engineering for efficiency are quietly building the only defence against the tax that is coming. The ones converting petrol cars into electric ones are about to discover that a badge is not a business case.
Editorial commentary drawing on third-party video reporting linked above. Figures and claims are as presented in those sources and have not been independently verified. Spotted an error? Tell us and we will correct it.