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What it costs to put a given number of miles or kilometres into the battery, at your own tariff and your own public rate. The energy you are billed for is more than the energy the battery keeps, and that difference is a field here rather than a number this page invented.
From the trip computer in the car, over a few hundred miles of real driving.
A label only. No rate is fetched and nothing is converted.
Off your own bill, on the tariff you charge on.
Share of metered energy that never reaches the battery. Replace this with your own measurement.
Usually smaller on a DC charger, which bypasses the on-board charger.
Connection or minimum fee, if the network charges one.
Only affects the fee, not the energy.
13.73 USD at home · 25.81 USD in public
44.12 kWh into the battery, 49.02 kWh off the meter at home
The loss figure is yours to set and nothing here treats it as known. It moves with the charger, the cable, the temperature, how full the battery already is and the car itself, and it is not the same on a home socket as on a rapid charger. Measure it once: compare the kWh your meter records against the kWh the car says went in.
A cost per usable kWh is the fair way to compare two rates, because it counts the energy you can actually drive on rather than the energy you were billed for. A cheap tariff charging inefficiently and a dearer one charging cleanly can land closer together than their headline prices suggest.
Charging is not a transfer with no leaks. Some of the energy the supply delivers becomes heat in the cable and connector, some is spent by the on-board charger turning alternating current into the direct current the pack accepts, and some runs the car itself while it charges — the cooling pumps, the battery management system, and any preconditioning of the cabin you asked for. What arrives in the battery is what moves the car; what passes the meter is what you are billed for, and the second number is always the larger.
That gap is why this calculator asks for the range you want rather than a battery size, works out the energy that has to reach the pack, and then grosses it back up to a metered figure using a loss you supply. Price a charge on battery energy alone and you will undercount every single time.
How much goes astray depends on the charger, the cable, the ambient temperature, the state of charge, how hard the pack is being cooled, and the car. Alternating-current charging at home passes through the on-board converter and loses more; a rapid direct-current charger feeds the pack more directly and typically loses less, though it works the cooling harder. Cold weather is worse than mild, and topping up the last few per cent is worse than filling the middle of the pack.
Because all of that moves, no honest single number exists to bake in, and the field above starts at a placeholder rather than a claim. Measure your own: charge once from a known point, compare the kWh your household meter or smart charger recorded against the kWh the car reports receiving, and the ratio is your figure. It is worth repeating in winter, because it will not be the same.
A domestic tariff is usually a flat rate per kWh, sometimes with a cheaper overnight window that makes scheduled charging worth setting up. Public charging is priced in more ways than one: per kWh, occasionally per minute, often with a connection fee, sometimes behind a monthly subscription that changes the per-kWh rate, and increasingly with idle penalties once the car is full and still occupying the bay.
The tool takes a price per kWh and a starting fee for each of the two, because those two cover most tariffs and because keeping them separate shows what the fee is really doing. A small session fee is nothing on a long charge and brutal on a ten-minute top-up: the same fee spread over 5 kWh costs ten times what it costs spread over 50.
The fair comparison between two ways of charging is what each costs per kWh that ends up in the battery, fees and losses included. That single figure absorbs the whole picture: a slightly dearer rapid charger that wastes less can land closer to a home socket than the headline prices suggest, and a cheap network with a standing fee can be the expensive option on a short stop.
Cost per mile or per kilometre is the other figure worth keeping, because it is directly comparable with what a fuel car costs to run. Both are shown above. Neither includes what the charging hardware cost you to install, the standing charge on your electricity supply, or the wear that frequent rapid charging is generally thought to add to a pack.
Because they are measuring at different points. The charger counts what left the wall; the car counts what reached the pack. The difference is conversion and thermal loss, and dividing one by the other gives you the loss figure to type in above.
No, but they move it. They bypass the on-board converter, so less is lost there, while faster charging generates more heat and works the cooling system harder. Give the public column its own loss percentage rather than reusing the home one.
Only if you would not otherwise be paying it, which for a home supply you would. Where a network subscription exists purely for charging, divide its monthly fee across the sessions you expect and add it as a starting fee.
Two effects stack. A cold pack accepts charge less efficiently, so a greater share is lost, and a cold car uses more energy per mile for heating and rolling resistance. Both push the cost per mile up, and neither is a fault in the car.