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The 10 UK cities with the lowest electric vehicle operating costs have been revealed.
Many people are choosing to get an electric vehicle, as the UK tries to be greener in the future.
To determine the cheapest locations, Vanarama measured and ranked five of the UK’s 25 most populous cities across five cost categories related to electric driving – from the obvious charging costs to the wages needed to lease an electric car, from the cheapest to the most expensive, based on their overall index value.
Their findings came up with the following top 10
Coventry – total index score 77.6
Stoke-on-Trent – total index score 74.4
Portsmouth – total index score 70.4
Glasgow – total index score 66.4
Reading – total index score 66.4
Birmingham – total index score 65.6
Southampton – total index score 64.0
Manchester – total index score 61.6
Bradford – total index score 60.8
Leicester – total index score 60.0
Research by Vanarama found that Coventry was the city with the lowest electric vehicle operating costs, with a score of 77.6. Once known as the Motor City, thanks to its high concentration of car factories, it offers by far the cheapest public Electric Vehicle charging in the UK and £1 per hour parking.
It is followed by another West Midlands town, Stoke-on-Trent, which costs the same for public and household charging. However, it was Stoke’s more expensive parking fees that caused them to miss out on the top spot.
The average cost of parking there is £1.30 an hour, which is 30% higher than in Coventry.
In third place is Portsmouth with a total score of 70.4. Charging Electric Vehicles using public charging costs significantly more at £15.25 – a difference of £3.05 per charge compared to the two cheapest cities combined.
However, to lease an Electric Vehicle in Portsmouth is cheaper when compared to the city’s average salary. With an average yearly salary of £32,810, leasing an electric vehicle accounts for just 13.4% of this salary – the joint-lowest of any cities featured in the top 10.
Glasgow and Reading are fourth and fifth with 66.4 points respectively. As Reading also shares the highest joint wages with Portsmouth (£32,810), leasing an electric car also makes up 13.4% of a person’s salary in the city.
However, it was their higher hourly parking rates (£1.55) that prevented Reading from getting a higher overall score. As for Glasgow, they have the second cheapest car parking at just £0.90 an hour.
In other news; Norwich high-tech Electric Vehicle charging station opening date announced.
With the help of new charging centres in cities, drivers of state-of-the-art electric vehicles can recharge.
Gridserve has set up a swanky site at Broadland Gate Business Park near Postwick.
The high-tech site is part of the company’s £1bn investment across the country.
Now the company has announced that the site will open next week on April 22.
Toddington Harper, chief executive of Gridserve said: “Gridserve’s Norwich electric forecourt will prove there is another choice for drivers.
“We’re creating an electric vehicle charging experience that is fundamentally better than filling your car with carcinogenic petrol or diesel.”
The forecourt is only Gridserve’s second in the country.
Newly designed to provide high-power charging up to 350 kW for 22 vehicles.
There will also be six low-power charging bays and a further eight bays for the Tesla supercharger network.
Mr Harper added: “We believe that the forecourt will become a catalyst for behaviour change in Norfolk, sparking an increase in uptake of clean electric vehicles – just as we saw with the opening of our first electric forecourt in Braintree, Essex.
The Norwich electric forecourt is the sort of facility that people who are nervous about making the switch to electric vehicles are looking for, and we hope that the people of Norwich, and indeed Norfolk, will now look at electric vehicles in a new light.”
With the development and opening of the new forecourt, the initiative has created more than 25 full-time jobs in the design, engineering, construction and operations phases.
A Gridserve spokesperson said: “All of the power delivered on site will either be zero carbon or net zero carbon energy.
“Gridserve saw electric vehicle registrations in the local area where the first forecourt was set up, in Braintree, Essex, within the space of a year surpassing any national average increases.”
The announcement comes as a £500,000 investment is planned to study a potential zero-emissions zone in central Norwich.
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