Most EV-versus-gas arguments end at the pump, but the garage and the resale lot decide as much of the money. An electric car is cheaper to keep running — fewer parts to break, no oil to change — and it’s more expensive to let go of, because it loses value faster in its early years. Those two facts pull in opposite directions, and which one wins comes down to a single question the sticker price can’t answer: how long do you keep the car? This page works through both sides, using the same figures our EV vs gas calculator runs on, so the numbers here and there agree.

Maintenance: the EV’s quiet, durable advantage

A gas engine is thousands of moving parts that wear, leak, and need servicing — oil changes, spark plugs, timing belts, exhaust, transmission. An electric drivetrain skips most of that. The result shows up in the data, not just the brochure.

Consumer Reports analyzed its members’ real-world reliability survey data and found that EV owners spend about half as much on maintenance and repair over a vehicle’s life as owners of comparable gas cars — roughly 3 cents per mile for electric versus 6 cents for gas. In lifetime dollars, that’s an average of about $4,600 saved on maintenance and repairs. AAA’s Your Driving Costs research points the same way, ranking EVs as the lowest-maintenance vehicle type it analyzes.

Two honest caveats on that figure. First, the core Consumer Reports survey data is from 2019–2020 — still the most-cited number and corroborated since, but not a fresh 2026 reading, and EV repair prices (when something does break, especially battery or electronics work) can run higher even though repairs are needed less often. Second, “about half” is an average across many models; your actual maintenance depends on the specific car. But the direction is consistent across every credible source: over a full vehicle life, an EV costs meaningfully less to maintain. This is the EV’s most durable money advantage — it doesn’t depend on gas prices or your charging setup, just on having fewer things that wear out.

Depreciation: the EV’s early-years penalty

Now the other direction. The advantage an EV gives back is in resale value — it tends to depreciate faster than a comparable gas car, especially in the first few years.

By five years, EVs have generally retained a smaller share of their original price than gas cars — roughly 43% for EVs against about 58% for gas, the iSeeCars-anchored figures our calculator uses. On a car that cost the mid-$50,000s new, that gap is real money: a larger slice of the purchase price is simply gone by year five. Several forces drive it — rapid model-year improvements that date older EVs, battery-life uncertainty in the used market, and the way past purchase incentives depressed used prices. Some of these are easing as the used-EV market matures, but as of now the faster early depreciation is real, and it lands hardest on buyers who sell within a few years.

This is the mirror image of the maintenance story: maintenance is where the EV quietly saves you money year after year; depreciation is where it costs you, concentrated in the early years when the value drop is steepest. For the full picture of how any car sheds value over time, see car depreciation by year.

Putting them together: hold length decides it

Here’s where the two sides resolve, and it explains a genuine confusion in EV-cost coverage — why one source says EVs save you thousands and another says gas is cheaper. Both can be right, because they’re measuring different lengths of ownership.

Consumer Reports’ own ownership analysis found that popular EVs under $50,000 typically cost $6,000 to $10,000 less to own over their full lifetime than comparable gas cars — fuel and maintenance savings, compounding over 150,000–200,000 miles, eventually swamp everything else.

And yet our EV vs gas calculator, at its default assumptions, shows the gas car cheaper at five years. That isn’t a contradiction — it’s the same story at two different timeframes:

  • Short hold (around five years or less): the EV’s higher purchase price and faster depreciation dominate. The fuel and maintenance savings are real but haven’t yet added up to enough to overcome the value lost to depreciation. Gas often comes out cheaper. This is the window the calculator’s default lands in.
  • Long hold (toward the full life of the car): depreciation is a one-time hit that’s mostly behind you, while the fuel and maintenance savings keep compounding every year. Past some crossover point, the EV pulls ahead — and by the full lifetime, it can be thousands ahead, which is where Consumer Reports’ $6,000–$10,000 figure comes from.

So the honest answer to “does an EV save money?” is it depends on how long you keep it — and the breakeven is the whole question. An EV is a long-hold value: buy one and keep it, and the maintenance and fuel savings have time to win. Buy one and trade it in at five years, and the depreciation can erase the advantage before it pays off. The purchase-price gap is at least narrowing — the average new EV recently sold for about $55,300, roughly $6,500 over the average gas car and the smallest premium on record — which moves the crossover earlier than it used to be, but the principle holds: time is the EV’s ally.

Finding your own crossover

Whether an EV saves you money is a question of your own numbers against your own hold length:

  1. How long you’ll keep it. The single biggest lever. Under five years tilts toward gas; a decade or more tilts hard toward electric.
  2. How many miles you drive. More annual miles means the per-mile fuel and maintenance savings compound faster, pulling the crossover earlier.
  3. What you’ll pay to charge. Mostly-home charging keeps the fuel advantage large; heavy public fast-charging shrinks it — the full breakdown is in EV charging vs gas: the real cost per mile.

The EV vs gas calculator puts all of it together — purchase price, fuel, maintenance, and depreciation — over the years you actually plan to keep the car, which is the only horizon that answers the question for you. For everything else that goes into a car’s cost, the full cost of owning a car lays out the rest.