Regular car maintenance is mandatory. The ADAC has carried out a new study into what maintenance actually costs and how electric vehicles compare to combustion engines.
The ADAC conducted a sample analysis in Hamburg, Cologne and Munich and their surrounding areas examines how expensive maintenance costs drivers. The result is pleasing for many electric car owners: on average, the inspection costs for electric cars are significantly lower.
With one exception, the maintenance costs for combustion engines were at least the same across all cities and brands examined a third higher than comparable electric vehicles. This reflects the technical structure: Electric cars have fewer mechanical components and do without many classic wear parts such as engine oil, oil filters or spark plugs, which have to be changed regularly in combustion engines.
E-car drivers should also compare offers and identify brand-dependent differences
Nevertheless, the ADAC comparison shows that cheaper does not automatically mean cheap. With a total of 120 cost estimates requested from branded workshops – 94 of which were included in the evaluation – the prices fluctuated significantly in some cases. That’s why you should too as an electric car driver compare several offers with each other. Because without comparison, you risk paying unnecessarily much, even if you already drive an electric car.
The cost advantage for electric cars became particularly clear for the brand BMW: Here the inspections for electric vehicles were on average around around 58 percent cheaper than comparable models with combustion engines. Other manufacturers also confirmed the trend: Bei Mercedes Benz the electric vehicles were on average 45 percent lowerat Volkswagen around 44 percent and at Hyundai by 39 percent.
An exception is made Dacia: There, owners of combustion engines paid on average around around 43 percent less as the owner of a comparable electric car.
Clear urban-rural divide visible
In addition to the differences between the brands, the study also shows a clear urban-rural divide. Workshops within a radius of up to 60 kilometers around Hamburg, Cologne and Munich often offered noticeably lower prices than branded companies directly in the cities. If you’re willing to drive a bit for the service, you can often save.
The example of BMW shows how big the difference can be: for a BMW M440i with a combustion engine, the average inspection price in Hamburg was around 10 percent higher than in the surrounding area (1,054 instead of 955 euros). With the electric BMW i4, the difference was even more serious: the inspection cost an average of 527 euros in the city and only 373 euros in the surrounding area – a price advantage of around 41 percent in favor of rural workshops.
This trend was confirmed across the board at Volkswagen, while Mercedes-Benz showed a relatively consistent price level across all locations. Overall, the offers in Cologne tended to be slightly lower than in Hamburg or Munich.
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Incomprehensible: higher hourly rates for electric car maintenance
What is striking, and from a technical point of view incomprehensible, is a different result from the ADAC’s point of view: in almost half of the workshops that had broken down their calculations in detail, the hourly rates for electric cars were higher than for comparable combustion engines.
On average, this “electric surcharge” was around 17 percent. This means: You often pay more for the individual hour of work on the electric car, even though there is less maintenance required overall. It is conceivable that workshops would base their employees on the necessary qualifications for working on high-voltage systems.
Please provide a detailed cost estimate
However, this surcharge cannot be justified technically. The lower number of wearing parts and maintenance points suggests that customer service costs for electric cars could be even lower than they already are. That’s why transparent offers are crucial in order to recognize such differences. Please specifically ask for a written and as detailed cost estimate as possible, in which material costs, working hours and hourly rates are shown separately.
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