A charging company set out to make a point about running costs and picked a format that is hard to argue with. Andersen EV put £5 of petrol into one car and £5 of overnight home charging into a Renault 5, then drove both down the same road until one of them stopped. The video reports the petrol car's gauge showing around 40 miles after the fill, while the Renault reached 100 percent and displayed 215 miles. The route was the Fosse Way, a Roman road the presenter notes is famously straight, running through open countryside. The result was not close. The petrol car pulled into a layby long before the drive was over, and the presenter says there were still around 150 miles of route ahead of her at that point.
The framing deserves a note before the numbers. The video is made by a company that sells home chargers, so it is a demonstration rather than an independent test, and the outcome rests almost entirely on the price of the electricity. £5 taking a Renault 5 battery to 100 percent implies an off peak overnight tariff of the sort available to households with a driveway, a charger and a smart meter. The presenter says as much, describing the result as conditional on pairing an electric car with the right tariff. That condition is the whole story for a large share of drivers. Anyone charging on a standard domestic rate pays noticeably more per unit, and anyone relying on public rapid chargers pays several times more again, which is where the comparison with petrol narrows sharply. The question this raises is not whether electricity is cheaper than petrol. It is whether the cheap version of electricity is available where you park. There are costs on the electric side the format does not capture either, including the price of installing a home charger in the first place, the standing charge on the electricity bill, and the energy lost between the wall and the battery.
The drive itself shows what those numbers feel like from the driver's seat. The video shows the petrol driver switching off the air conditioning to save fuel and coasting downhill, a technique the presenter jokes about and specifically tells viewers not to copy. In the Renault, she says she left the climate control running, did not need to select eco mode and did not have to think about braking gently, because regeneration recovers energy that would otherwise be thrown away as heat. By the time the petrol car's fuel light came on with around 20 miles showing, the video reports the Renault still had roughly 180 miles of indicated range in hand. The petrol car stopped shortly afterwards. Neither vehicle was run to a fully empty tank or battery, so this is a comparison of what £5 buys rather than a range test of either car, and both figures come from the cars' own displays rather than from measured consumption. The presenter also makes the point that she did not have to change how she drove to get the result, while the petrol driver spent the second half of his run managing the car to stretch the tank.
Bottom line: the result is real and so is the asterisk. If you have off street parking and an off peak tariff, this is the strongest argument for an electric car that exists, and it beats every range and charging speed statistic on the spec sheet. If you do not, the maths gets a great deal closer, and nobody making these videos is in a hurry to film that version. The fix is not a better battery. It is cheaper public charging and a route to an overnight rate for people without driveways, which is a policy problem rather than an engineering one.
Commentary on a third-party video. Figures and claims are as presented in the source and have not been independently verified. Spotted an error? Tell us and we will correct it.