Electric vs diesel van: total cost of ownership

Fuel and maintenance dominate every published electric-versus-diesel comparison, and both usually favour electric. What is frequently absent is the depot. A diesel van refuels at a pump somebody else built. An electric van refuels at infrastructure you paid to install, and that infrastructure has to be carried by the vehicles that use it.Amortise it properly and it splits into two very different assets. The underground work — trench, conduit, pads, distribution — has a service life measured in decades and does not go obsolete. The chargers on top of it turn over much faster. Carrying the whole depot on a vehicle-length horizon overstates the annual cost; carrying none of it understates the project by an amount that can decide the comparison.The practical approach is a straight-line allocation over the life you actually expect from the equipment, split by asset if you want precision, and expressed per vehicle-year so it can sit beside fuel and maintenance in the same column.

One port per vehicle is the assumption most models make and it is often wrong. If the vans dwell for ten hours and need six hours of charging, ports can be shared on a schedule, and a ratio well below one is achievable without touching the morning dispatch.That ratio is the single largest lever on the infrastructure line in the table above, because it multiplies straight through. Going from one port per vehicle to two vehicles per port halves the number. It costs software, scheduling discipline and a certain tolerance for exception handling on the days a route runs long.The limit is dwell time, and dwell time is a fact about your operation rather than a preference. A depot where vehicles turn around in ninety minutes cannot share ports and will need a higher ratio, faster chargers, or both — which is exactly the case where the infrastructure line gets large enough to decide the comparison.

Do not accept a number for any of these from a vendor deck on either side of the comparison. Six of the seven are measurable at your own operation or published by a public body, and the seventh is a design choice.Annual miles per vehicle comes from your own fleet records, and it should be the median rather than the mean if you have a few outlier routes. Kilowatt-hours per mile comes from telematics once the vehicles are running and from manufacturer or federal fuel economy data before that; expect it to be worse in winter. Miles per gallon for the diesel comparator comes from your fuel card data, not from the manufacturer.Diesel price is published weekly by the Energy Information Administration, by region, and using this week's number rather than last year's is the difference between a live model and a stale one. Your effective cost per kilowatt-hour is energy rate plus demand charge allocated across the kilowatt-hours you actually consume — not the rate sheet number, and frequently far above it at a depot with a sharp peak.The purchase price gap is quotes in hand, and it got wider this year: the clean vehicle credits under Sections 30D and 25E ended for deliveries after September 30, 2025, so a model still netting those against electric vehicle capex is overstating the electric case. The maintenance gap is the one variable where your own history cannot help you yet; be conservative and revisit it with real data after the first year.

You will find pages that say an electric van beats a diesel one above some annual mileage. Ask which tariff that number is attached to. In almost every case there is not one, and the demand-charge term has been dropped entirely, which is the term that varies most between depots.The same van on the same route at two depots on different rate schedules can differ by more than double on cost per mile. A break-even mileage calculated at one of those depots is not merely imprecise at the other; it can point the opposite way. Publishing it as a national figure is how a fleet ends up defending a business case it cannot reproduce.So the honest form of the answer is a method rather than a number. Build the comparison from your tariff, your telematics and this week's diesel price, write the tariff into the model header with the date you read it, and re-run it when any of those move. The result belongs to your depot and will be right for it.

Battery electric vehicles were about six percent of new US vehicle sales in the first half of 2026, down from about seven percent a year earlier, according to the Energy Information Administration. Cox Automotive reported roughly 247,000 US EV sales in the second quarter of 2026, an EV share of about 5.8 percent.That is context for residual value assumptions and for how quickly the service network around your vehicles is likely to thicken. It is not an input to your depot's economics. A parcel fleet running fixed routes from a yard with a favourable overnight tariff has the same arithmetic this year as last, regardless of what the retail market did.The practical consequence is narrow and worth acting on: be careful with resale assumptions written during a period of rising volumes, and build the case so it stands without an aggressive residual. A comparison that only works because of the assumed value of the vehicle in year seven is a comparison about used-vehicle markets, not about operating a fleet.