Every way to charge, ranked

There are only four places electricity can come from, and they rank differently depending on whether you're optimising for cost, speed, or still having a car when the power's out.

The overall ranking

For the ordinary case — you have a driveway, a grid connection, and a daily commute — this order holds and it isn't close:

Notice the last column inverts the ranking. Everything cheap depends on infrastructure that fails; the only method that works when the grid is down is the most expensive one. That's not a flaw, it's what insurance costs. Run your own numbers →

Home grid charging — the default, and correctly so

If you can charge at home, roughly 80–90% of your charging should happen there. It's the cheapest per mile, it happens while you sleep, and the car is full every morning rather than "full enough to reach a charger."

Off-peak rates are where the real money is. Many utilities price overnight power at a third of daytime rates, and an EV is the ideal off-peak load because you genuinely don't care when it charges — only that it's done by morning. If you take one action after reading this page, check whether your utility has a time-of-use plan.

Public charging — for trips, not for habit

DC fast charging is a travel tool. Using it as your primary method is expensive, harder on the battery than slow charging, and involves waiting somewhere you don't want to be.

The honest caveats nobody puts in the brochure:

• Rated speed is a ceiling, not a rate. Charging tapers sharply above roughly 80%, and a cold pack accepts far less until it warms.
• Pricing varies wildly. Per-kWh, per-minute, idle fees, subscription tiers. Per-minute pricing punishes slow-charging vehicles severely.
• Reliability is the real complaint. Broken stalls, payment failures, and blocked spaces are common enough to plan around. Always have a second option identified.

Public Level 2 is a different animal — slow, often cheap or free, and genuinely useful if it's where you were going to park for three hours anyway.

Off-grid solar — cheapest per mile, hardest to build

Once installed, sunlight has no marginal cost, so the per-mile figure approaches zero. The catch is everything else: capital cost, weather dependence, and the fact that a standard grid-tied solar system shuts down in an outage unless it's specifically built to island.

That last point surprises people every winter. Panels on the roof do not mean power in the house when the lines are down — not without a hybrid inverter and storage configured for it. The full off-grid picture →

Generator — worst per mile, only one that always works

The most expensive electricity you'll ever put in a car, and the only source that doesn't care what the utility is doing. A gallon of gasoline holds around 33 kWh; a portable generator turns 5–8 of those into usable power and the rest into heat and noise.

Judge it as a backup plan, not a charging strategy. On that basis it's excellent. Sizing → · Why inverter only →