Let’s face it, if you can afford to drive a Porsche, you probably aren’t going to get too excited about saving a few pounds every time you fill the tank. However, what if choosing an electric Porsche rather than a broadly equivalent petrol Porsche could leave you £30,000 better off over the next five years?
At that point, even a Porsche driver should probably start paying attention, because we are no longer talking about saving a few pounds on fuel. We are talking about a fundamental difference in the total cost of having that car on your drive.
Take a three-year-old electric Porsche Taycan and compare it with a three-year-old petrol Porsche Panamera. They are not identical cars, but for most people they serve a very similar role.
Both are large, luxurious, high-performance four-door Porsches suitable for the daily commute, business trips, weekends away, or simply because you enjoy driving a Porsche. The key difference is not what they do, but what they could cost you over the next five years.
A three-year-old petrol Panamera can easily cost around £60,000. Keep it for another five years, and you will own an eight-year-old Porsche that will then be worth only £20,000–£25,000, depending on specification, mileage and condition. That is a massive loss of £35,000–£40,000 in depreciation before you have even considered the cost of running the car. If you borrowed the money to buy it, you also must factor in the cost of financing £60,000.
Then there is the petrol cost!
At 10,000 miles a year, a large petrol Porsche could easily consume £12,000–£14,000 of fuel over five years. Add insurance, servicing, tyres, MOTs, road tax and the repairs that inevitably become more likely as an expensive performance car gets older, and the numbers start to become quite frightening. Put everything together, and buying and running the Panamera will likely cost £60,000–£65,000 over five years, even before you add finance costs.
Now consider leasing a three-year-old electric Taycan, because this is where the current collapse in second-hand EV values suddenly becomes your friend, not your enemy. A Taycan that might have originally cost close to £90,000 can now be picked up for a bargain £40,000 at three years old. That has obviously been painful for the first owner, but if you are the second driver, someone else has already absorbed a massive chunk of the depreciation before you arrive.
More importantly, rather than buying the Taycan for £40,000, imagine taking it through a second-hand EV Salary Sacrifice scheme. CheapEV can deliver you an all-inclusive package costing around £700 a month before tax and includes the car, insurance, servicing, maintenance, tyres, breakdown cover and road tax; a higher-rate taxpayer achieving an overall Salary Sacrifice saving approaching 50% could see the effective cost fall to a ridiculously low £375–£400 a month after allowing for EV Benefit-in-Kind. At £390 a month, the five-year cost is £23,400.
The other major difference is what it costs to drive it.
Charge a Taycan overnight at home using a cheap EV electricity tariff and, even though it is a large and powerful electric car, you could be driving it for around 3–4p per mile. At 10,000 miles a year, that could mean spending only £1,500–£2,000 on electricity over five years, compared with perhaps £12,000–£14,000 putting petrol into the Panamera. Even if we add £1,000 to install a home charger, our illustrative five-year cost for the Taycan comes to around £26,000.
Compare that with £60,000-plus to buy and run the petrol Panamera, and you begin to see why I think three-year-old EVs represent such a massive opportunity. The exact saving will obviously depend on the car, Salary Sacrifice quote, tax position, mileage and future values, but even allowing plenty of room for those assumptions to move, the potential difference could still comfortably exceed £30,000 over five years.
This is why I think people need to stop viewing the collapse in second-hand EV prices as bad news. It was bad news for the person who bought the Taycan new, but it could be fantastic news for the person taking it at three years old. Someone else has taken the initial depreciation hit. Salary Sacrifice can dramatically reduce the effective cost of leasing it, and cheap overnight electricity then transforms the cost of driving it.
So, if a three-year-old petrol Panamera and a three-year-old electric Taycan were parked next to each other, I’d ask what idiot would pay £30,000 more over the next five years to drive the petrol one? Are you an idiot, or should you be visiting the CheapEV site now?