How much more expensive are electric cars these days, compared to gasoline cars? Most articles are this topic compare the averages, and some look at the box plots. But I would argue that the best way to compare is to look at the entire statistical distribution of the two.
I looked around on the Internet, but could not find any. So I took the matter into my own hands and went to work.
First I need the data. This took a while, but I finally found some reasonably good data on insideevs.com. They collected MSRP after rebate, battery size, range, energy consumption, among other things. Different configurations of the same model count as different data points.
After much cleaning and importing, here is the result:
There are some obvious takeaways:
- There is a price range where most EVs reside, and that is around $36K~$53K
- EV prices have a long right-tail. That is, many EVs are expensive ones (over $8K)
- There are some cheap EVs that cost less than $35K
So what are those least expensive EVs? Drum roll, please…