Is a Gasoline or Electric Powered Car the Better Buy?

Earlier this summer, Senator Debbie Stabenow (D-Michigan) made news as she bragged high gasoline prices don’t matter to her because she drives an electric car, a Chevrolet Bolt EUV, which allows her to drive past gas stations without having to pay for petrol. Here’s video of her statement:

While high gasoline prices may not matter to the senator, they may matter to you if you’re considering following her example and buying an electric-powered vehicle. Do they provide a bigger bang for the buck for their owners than a petroleum-fueled vehicle?

To find out, we need to compare gasoline and electric powered vehicles that are as similar as possible to one another. Unfortunately, we cannot do that with the Chevy Bolt because there isn’t a gasoline-powered version of that vehicle. But we can do that with a Mini Cooper Hardback 2-Door, which comes in gasoline-fueled and electric-powered versions.

We’ve entered the data for both these vehicles as the default entries in the following tool. If you’re accessing this article on a site that republishes our RSS newsfeed, please click through to our site to access a working version to find out how different their costs of ownership, or the vehicles whose data you might enter instead, may be over three years.

Most of the default data in the tool comes from a Car and Driver article from 2020, which we’ve updated with early September 2022′s average gasoline cost and electricity cost data, both of which you can update as needed with more current gasoline and electricity costs that apply in your region.

The vehicle cost data comes from Edmunds, which we extracted during 2022′s Labor Day Holiday weekend. We should note that the electric version of the Mini Cooper Hardtop 2-Door appears to have increased by $4,115 since the federal EV tax credit of $7,500 was enacted as part of the Inflation Reduction Act. The manufacturer’s suggested retail price of the gasoline fueled version of the vehicle was unchanged. Other manufacturers have similarly hiked their electric vehicle prices in the weeks since the government subsidy for electric vehicles was passed.

For the default data loaded in the tool, we find the gasoline powered version of the Mini Cooper Hardtop 2-Door is the better buy. Playing with the tool, we found an average gasoline price of $6.37 per gallon with the electricity cost unchanged would be needed to make the electric vehicle a less costly choice over three years of ownership. But, as they say, your mileage may differ – take the tool for your own test drive!