Until recently, the vast majority of company cars were in favor of diesel, but now this type of car is gradually switching to electricity. However, a German study shows that electric cars are actually not as profitable for companies as they seem.
It turns out that the diesel engine, which has already been written off, performs significantly better. Decisive in this case is the “total cost of ownership“. Because of the elimination of incentives, this total price is no longer lower for electric cars and sometimes even higher than for cars with internal combustion engines.
A comparison published on the pages of Automobilwoche of 13 different diesel and electric models shows that: “Over a three-year period, diesels cost an average of €1,324 per month, while electric cars cost €1,331. This trend is also confirmed by ADAC specialists' calculations.
The bigger the cars and the higher the consumption, the more the electricity costs become more important. While the costs are still manageable when charging using a wallbox in your own or company garage, things look bad when it comes to fast charging.
With pure electric cars, it is the costs of fast charging that can defeat the expected savings. According to Germany's largest electric car portal EFAHRER, an average kilowatt-hour at a public fast charger costs 60 cents.
If an electric car driver is not careful when charging their electric car and always charges at expensive fast chargers on the highway, then any advantage of electric cars in terms of the aforementioned total cost of ownership will quickly be lost.
Also, there is a waste of time compared to diesel, petrol or hybrid cars due to frequent and slow charging processes. Range remains the main issue. Currently, no electric car stands a chance against an economical diesel car.
Deutsche Automobil Treuhand (DAT) is conducting a parallel survey of fleet managers. The result: Two-thirds of respondents do not accept that electric cars can cover all distances in the respective company using electricity alone.
Mileage fraud in electric cars is also having an increasing impact here: in practice, the mileage promised by manufacturers quite often falls significantly short of the real one. This is fully valid for extra-urban driving.
Even with a speed limit, as a current AutoBild comparison shows, of 130 km/h, 53 out of 61 models fail the test. Of course, fleet operators and company car users are increasingly experiencing this inconvenience, and company executives are beginning to abandon their EVs.
There is another problem: the high depreciation of current electric models. Especially in the case of leasing, a large part of the delivered vehicles are bought after the period for official use simply for nothing, which employers do not like at all.
The bottom line is that the superiority of diesel cars for long journeys is still great and for the foreseeable future more and more companies will abandon the purchase of electric company cars. This is what car fleet expert Mark Oliver Prinzing claims before “Automobilwoche“.