Plug or Pump

Prices come from the ProjectZeroThree (11-Seven) API. A GitHub Actions workflow snapshots the API once per day and commits the result; the page reads that static file. We pick the cheapest price for the selected fuel grade in the selected state. You can override it manually.

Snapshot taken: —

Default 9.0 L/100km. Real-world fuel use runs roughly 15–25% above WLTP. Australia's new-vehicle sales-weighted WLTP average is ~7.3 L/100km (skewed by Ranger/HiLux/Prado etc.); 9.0 is a reasonable real-world figure for that mix. Smaller cars do better; utes and large SUVs do worse. Pick the preset that matches what you drive.

Default 18 kWh/100km. WLTP figures (often quoted as 14–16) underestimate real-world energy use because they ignore charging losses, heater/AC loads, highway speeds and Australian conditions. Owner-reported lifetime averages from EV Database, ABRP and AEVA logs cluster at 16–22 kWh/100km depending on vehicle and use.

Note: this figure is energy delivered to the wheels per 100km from the wall. Where possible we include AC/DC charging losses in the public-DC rate by being explicit about delivered-to-car energy, not battery-net.

The default home import rate follows the regulated retail price for the selected state: what a household pays if they don't shop around. That's the floor that the regulator publishes as a benchmark.

• Public DC fast charging defaults to 67¢/kWh (Tesla Supercharger member rate). Ampol AmpCharge sits around 75¢, Chargefox 60¢, Evie 65¢, BP Pulse 60¢, premium or regional sites up to 79¢.
• The 80/20 home/public mix matches EV Council owner surveys: about 80% of charging energy is delivered at home.
• Off-peak, solar, and Amber rates are available as preset buttons. They aren't the default because each one requires a specific tariff, hardware, or behaviour most households don't have.

The widely-shared 8.6× headline uses 14.4¢/kWh (Amber's cheapest 18h average, a wholesale-pass-through retailer most households aren't on) and a fallback of 4¢/kWh that requires $10–15k of home battery plus solar. Both are real prices for households that have set them up. They're not what the average Australian household pays at the meter.

The free-home-kWh slider models the slice of your home charging that effectively costs nothing. Two real-world sources for that slice:

• Rooftop solar self-consumption. If you charge while the panels are producing, the marginal cost is the foregone feed-in tariff (~5–7¢/kWh). We treat it as 0¢ because the panels are sunk cost; the EV is just absorbing surplus that would otherwise be exported. How much of your charging this covers depends on whether the car is home during the day and whether your charger has a solar-divert mode.
• Solar Sharer Offer (SSO). From 1 July 2026, retailers in the Default Market Offer jurisdictions (NSW, SA, SE QLD) must let households opt in to at least 3 hours of free electricity per day around midday, capped at 24 kWh — enough to cover roughly 130 km of typical EV driving every day at no cost. Requires a smart meter; available to renters and households without solar.

Where the 25% "typical EV owner" preset comes from. The EV Council State of EVs 2025 report (drawing on the 2024 Ownership Survey, n≈1,500, run with the University of Sydney) finds that 80% of households that charge an EV at home also have rooftop solar, and that solar households save on average 33% on their home charging costs. Blended across all home-chargers that's ~26% of home kWh delivered effectively free — almost double the national rooftop-solar uptake rate, because EV ownership and solar ownership correlate strongly. The slider's 25% preset rounds that to a clean number; nudge it higher if you actively schedule charging into solar hours.

For the underlying load shapes, the ARENA-funded Origin Smart Charging trial (n=200 chargers, 28 months) and the Amber wholesale-EV trial (n=1,000) publish hourly meter reads instead of survey-only estimates. Both show a noticeable share of charging moved to midday when price signals line up.

The slider stays at 0 by default so the headline ratio doesn't inflate just because the feature exists. Click a preset to see what an EV-owner-typical setup costs.

• Capital cost differences (purchase price, depreciation).
• Servicing, registration, insurance.
• Tyres (EVs can be heavier on tyres; ICE has more consumables overall).
• Road-user charges (currently uncertain federally; some states had them, some didn't).
• Battery degradation over vehicle lifetime.

This page measures only energy cost per km. Get the inputs right and the comparison is fair.