Octopus Energy is offering more tariff choice to EV drivers with its new Intelligent Drive Pack subscription package for £30 a month.
Until now, EV drivers have been predominantly used to a couple of different types of home tariff when charging their cars.
EV-friendly tariffs tend to either take the form of a bolt-on such as OVO’s Charge Anytime which gives a discounted price of electricity through the charger or alternatively a dynamic/ off-peak style tariff that gives a reduced price of electricity for a set amount of hours (and sometimes more) such as Octopus Go or Intelligent Octopus Go.
And now Octopus is offering further choice with its Intelligent Drive Pack. In essence, this is a bolt-on package which is a flat rate of unlimited smart EV charging for £30 a month.
There are a couple of caveats to the Intelligent Drive Pack which are that you need a compatible EV as well as a compatible charger. Also, it’s only the electricity going through your charger that goes through the subscription, not the whole house. So current EV drivers on Intelligent Octopus Go or Octopus Go who ‘game’ the system by running household items such as washing machines, dishwashers or even water heaters, won’t get a discounted rate for running those.
Plus, your ‘ready by’ time needs to be between 4am and 11am. Customers can still choose to charge their car outside of the unscheduled hours via a boost function, but they will be charged at their normal home energy rate. So if you need to quickly charge your car in a hurry, then it will cost you more.
While we always applaud offering consumers more choice and, on the surface at least, this one-off monthly fee might look attractive, the reality is that many EV drivers will be better off on one of Octopus’s other tariffs unless you do quite a high monthly mileage.
On Intelligent Octopus Go, that monthly £30 is equivalent to 428kW of electricity at 7p/kWh. At three miles per kWh that’s 1284 miles. At four miles per kWh that’s 1712 miles in a month. Every month. And that’s just to break even. To make it a better deal than IOG, you’d have to be doing more than that. That’s some target when you consider that the average UK annual mileage is 6800 miles a year, equivalent to 566 miles a month. Plus, of course, you don’t get the benefits of any reduced cost on your household electricity either.
Working out your existing monthly spend and your typical monthly mileage in your car is a good way of checking which tariff works best for you and whether it’s worth switching to this new type of tariff.