About ChargeCost

What this site is

ChargeCost is a one-person, independent site. I don’t review cars and I won’t pretend to have driven them — I track the numbers. Every published figure comes from the same pipeline: a specification checked against the manufacturer’s own published data, priced at the current Ofgem cap, with every assumption shown on the page. When the price cap changes, every page on this site recalculates.

Where the numbers come from

• Electricity prices use the Ofgem price cap unit rate (GB average, Direct Debit), updated each quarter when Ofgem publishes new figures. Example off-peak rates come from the public Octopus Energy API, refreshed daily and labelled as a regional example.
• Vehicle specificationsare compiled by hand and checked against manufacturer spec sheets before a model page is published — currently 23 of 45 models in the dataset have passed that check; the rest stay unpublished. Each model page shows its data source, including the honest caveats (for example, Tesla does not publish usable battery capacity, so those figures are labelled as estimates).
• Charging losses: home AC charging typically loses 10–15% of the energy drawn from the meter. We assume 12% and show that assumption next to every result.

What this site is not

We do arithmetic on published prices. We do not recommend tariffs, suppliers, or financial products, and nothing here is advice. Always check your own tariff. WLTP figures are lab figures — real-world costs run higher, especially in winter, and every page says so.

Corrections

If a figure here doesn’t match the manufacturer’s current spec sheet or Ofgem’s published rates, tell me and it gets fixed. The site’s only asset is being right.