As the summer moved into autumn, we’ve seen a rise in petrol and diesel prices. It’s only small at the moment for petrol, at just over 1p per litre more, but is more than double that for diesel and has tipped over the 140p per litre mark. Often the extra demand for fuel in winter increases the cost of diesel, and even with the warm weather in September the average has hit 142.2p – significantly higher than last October’s mark of 138.6p and November’s 140.0p. Whether this means we will have higher diesel costs this winter than the same time last year remains to be seen because oil prices are not markedly high at the moment, with Brent Crude around 25% lower than at the start of this year, and supply exceeding demand. At the same time as this, there has been a drop in the average cost of public charging, by 2p per kWh to 65p for the quarter. New providers on the Allstar network, increasing competition and late summer offers by some charging companies can all have contributed to this positive news. On the face of it, the cost of charging at home hasn’t changed at 24p per kWh, but these figures are based on hundreds of thousands of individual events and so without a seismic shift in UK energy prices, any change to the average takes a long time to happen. At Allstar, within the data for this year, we saw a marginal, but notable, drop: in Jan-Feb the average was 23.98p and in this quarter (July-Sept) had fallen to 23.67p. Also in Jan-March, the lowest cost paid was 3.66p per kWh and the highest 54.14p, while in this quarter the two extremes were 1.92p and 45.58p – 48 and 15% less respectively. What does this mean? It seems that generally across the board, electric vehicle drivers may be on cheaper tariffs, and there’s now a decent 2p-plus gap between the OFGEM price cap figure of 25.73p and what’s actually being paid. Depending on what effect the winter has on energy prices, we may see average domestic charging costs dip into 22-23p per kWh overall (from 23.67p). Because of the massive volumes of transactions involved and the time it might take for some drivers to move tariffs, this will be a significant moment as it will show electric vehicle drivers’ tariffs are on average 3-4p lower than the OFGEM cap charge. It would be the biggest disparity between the two we’ve seen, suggesting drivers are increasingly adopting EV-specific tariffs. Also, will the new dual domestic/public Advisory Electric Rates motivate drivers to shift to lower domestic tariffs over the winter? Find out what effect the rates could have on drivers and your business in our feature here.