When does electric stop costing more than diesel?
An electric vehicle costs more to buy and less to run. So the honest question is not which is cheaper — it is how many kilometres it takes for the cheaper running to pay back the bigger loan. This works that out for five real vehicle pairs, financed the way fleets actually buy them.
Pick the pair you run
Five comparisons, each an electric vehicle against the fuel vehicle a fleet would otherwise buy.
How you run them, and how you pay for them
Financed as a loan at a flat annual rate, with the vehicle owned at the end of the tenure. Fuel and electricity prices are Bengaluru, August 2026 — change them to yours.
Cash out, month by month
Everything the vehicle has cost you by that month — down payment, every EMI paid, every unit of energy, every service, every insurance premium. Where the lines cross is the moment the electric vehicle has cost you less in total. Resale value is not in this chart; it only arrives at the end, and it is in the table below.
The whole tenure, line by line
How hard you run them changes everything
The electric vehicle only earns back its price on the road. Below is the same comparison at different daily distances — every other assumption held exactly as you have it.
Every assumption, and where it comes from
These are defaults, not claims. If you run a fleet you know your own maintenance cost per kilometre and your own real mileage far better than any published figure — put them in and the whole page recalculates. Energy consumption is quoted at the wall, including charging losses, because that is what your meter bills you for. Fuel mileage is real-world loaded, not the certified number.
The break-even point is where the argument starts, not where it ends.
Whether the charging fits your duty cycle, which routes to convert first, what happens to your cost per kilometre in year three — that is the actual project, and it is not a spreadsheet question. I have spent twelve years on the commercial side of exactly this.