Motoring: Does it make sense for you to switch to an electric vehicle?

21 Mar 2026, 07:00 by Paddy Comyn, https://www.thejournal.ie/author/paddy-comyn/ · TheJournal.ie

DIESEL PRICES IN Ireland are now at a record level.

Even the last time we had price increases, at the height of the war in Ukraine, petrol was the fuel that saw the largest jump, but diesel had, thankfully at the time, still lagged behind.

Back in 2008 when the then-government changed the taxation laws on cars from one based on the engine size (the cubic capacity, or cc) to one based on CO2 when they, like everyone else, believed that purely lower CO2 meant cleaner (we know better since), we all moved in droves from a petrol-biased car parc to a diesel one.

So the €2.20 in some forecourts at the time of writing is certainly stinging a huge amount of buyers. If you are driving a very average family car now over the CSO average of 17,000km per year, it is costing you about €2,000, give-or-take, per year to fuel it.

So a bang-average Hyundai Tucson diesel, which was a top-seller for a number of years with a 54-litre fuel tank is costing you just shy of €119 for a fill. Something like a Volkswagen Passat with a larger tank is now an eye-watering €154 to fill from empty.

The Irish government is taking about €1.40 per litre in tax, or roughly €93 of that €154 fill. We are likely to see measures in the coming week to give drivers some respite, probably in the form of excise duty cuts, but what is clear is that more and more people are now starting to take moving to an EV more seriously.

On DoneDeal cars, we have seen a 33% increase in searches specifically for EVs. There has been a 36% increase in sales of new EVs so far in 2026. But there are people who are understandably still nervous of making the move to an EV, especially a used one, but let’s take a cold look at this to see if it makes sense for you to switch to an EV, be it new or used.

I have an EV as my own, personal car. It is a Volkswagen eUp, which is a small car with a 32.6 kWh battery. It has a range of about 220km from a full charge. I can get more if I drive it carefully and in the summer months.

I have had it from new and it has 36,000km on the clock now. I tested it last Sunday with an Aviloo device to see how much battery capacity it had after three years of pretty tough driving. For a time, I was only driving at motorway speeds during a commute between Drogheda and Dublin daily but more recently I’ve been driving from Dublin to Cork frequently.

It isn’t an ideal car to drive from Dublin to Cork because it does require stopping, but when I lived in Drogheda and commuted to Dublin it served me perfectly well.

So the Aviloo device, named after the Austrian company who sells the service, told me that it had 96.4% of the battery capacity left. The battery is in perfect health but like your three-year-old mobile phone it no longer has full capacity.

At this rate, in another 3 years I will have around 93% battery capacity left. If I charged that at home on a night rate of €0.15 it will cost around €5 for a full charge, so the 220km will cost me €5.

The Volkswagen Passat driver who spent €154 to fill a 70-litre tank can expect around 900km from a full tank (possibly more in some cases) but at this performance and fuel cost the same 220km will cost €37.60.

So if I am in my eUp on night rate, it’s around seven times cheaper to “fuel” my car. Charging an EV at home is always the cheapest option. Even paying full rate for electricity, charging that eUp to 100% will have cost less than €10. If you have solar panels it could be nothing.

But it isn’t all rosy. If you have to use the public charging network, prices dramatically skyrocket and aren’t far off petrol and diesel prices.

If you use the high-powered IONITY chargers you see on some main routes, if you don’t have a subscription deal with them, you can be paying €0.81 per kWh, so charging my car from 0-100% will cost €26.50.

If you drive something larger, like a Volkswagen ID.4 it would cost you €62. If you cross the country at some point this will be pretty unavoidable. The likes of Applegreen and Circle K offer similar charging points for slightly less, but not far off. It is a similar story for ESB fast chargers, but these are closer to €0.65 per kWh.

Most EVs come with a pretty healthy warranty on the battery of around 160,000km or seven years, which is longer than the warranty on the car. But there is no doubt that when things do go badly wrong in an EV that it can be pretty spectacular.

Think of the battery in an EV not as one large block, but as made up of a series of modules and cells. I like to use the analogy of a box of After Eight mints, the wafer thin mints that your granny probably had tucked away next to the good china for when guests came. In an EV there might be five or six boxes of After Eight mints (modules) and in these are the cells (the wafer thin mints).

When things go wrong in an EV, it is very unlikely it is the whole thing that has gone wrong. It can be one cell (or wafer thin mint) that has had an issue. Usually this requires one of the modules (an entire box of After Eights) that needs to be replaced and this could cost around €3,000.

Under warranty this isn’t your problem, but outside of that it would be. If you have managed to keep up with my strained confectionery-based analogy, reward yourself with a sweet. A box of After Eights costs about a fiver.

Another charge levelled at the EV is that they don’t hold their value. And this for a time has had a lot of truth to it, but there are some nuances to this story.