People like to compare gasoline to electricity in the most flattering possible way for whatever they already bought. That is not useful.

The more honest version is to price the car the way you actually use it. In New England, that means winter range loss is real, home charging matters more than internet arguments admit, and the cheapest miles are the boring ones where the car is asleep in your driveway overnight.

My baseline

I care about a few numbers:

  • home electricity cost
  • average efficiency across the full year
  • how much of the charging happens at home versus on the road
  • what a comparable gas car would have burned in the same miles

If most charging happens at home, the EV usually wins the operating-cost argument pretty quickly. If the comparison depends on a heroic number of free chargers and a suspiciously optimistic winter efficiency estimate, the math is probably being staged for applause.

The part people skip

Public fast charging is not the everyday price unless your lifestyle makes it the everyday price. For most local driving, the boring overnight kWh is the whole game. For road trips, the EV tradeoff becomes less about raw savings and more about whether the charging stops feel like a break or a chore.

That is still worth writing down, because convenience has a cost even when the spreadsheet wants to ignore it.