- Some, but not all, manufacturers offer free charging when you buy a new EV.
- Our 2024 BMW i5 M60 comes with two years of free charging, with certain conditions.
- If you plan carefully, you can save thousands of dollars.
Free EV Charging Can Save You Thousands of Dollars
If you want a BMW i5, last year's model is the one to get
Electric vehicles are still a tough sell to many people; while the percentage is growing year over year, EVs accounted for just 7.7% of new vehicle purchases in 2024, according to Edmunds analysts. To entice prospective buyers to make the switch to electric, a number of manufacturers offer free charging incentives with the purchase of a new EV. Here's how you can use these programs to save a ton of money.
To illustrate how, I'm going to use data from recent charges from the 2024 BMW i5 that's currently one of the vehicles in our One-Year Road Test program. The 2024 version offers complimentary charging for the first 30 minutes of a session when using Electrify America DC fast chargers, good for two years. (For the 2025 i5, BMW offers a less valuable 1,000 kWh of free charging credits on the EA network.) In other words, if you only plugged in to EA stations for 30 minutes at a time, you're traveling for free for two years. Here's how much that's actually worth.
But first ...
This wouldn't be a numbers-driven story without a few caveats. Because charging sessions generally last longer than 30 minutes, I'm going to take the total kWh added in a charging session, divide by the number of minutes in that charging session to get the kWh added in a minute, then multiply to see how many kWh are added in 30 minutes. Then I'll multiply that by the cost of electricity per kWh to arrive at a dollar value. The actual dollar value in real life will be slightly higher because a car charges faster at the beginning of a session and then tapers off, so consider the following values a conservative estimate.
I also want to note that my charging sessions were all conducted at a nearby bank of EVgo chargers, and you'll only get free charging in the i5 when plugged into Electrify America stations. I've examined our team's previous i5 charges using the EA stations, and the cost per kWh is generally the same between EVgo and EA stations in the LA metro area. I also have the max charge limit set to 80%; beyond that, charging performance slows down considerably. One last thing to note is that the value benefit depends on two things: the cost of electricity in your area and the speed at which electricity enters your battery. If your car can accept a maximum charge of 150 kW but you're plugged into a station that can only offload 50 kW, you're only going to add about 25 kWh of electricity in a half-hour session. For my purposes, the station I plugged into can offload 350 kW, and the i5 supports a max charge of about 200 kW.
What is free charging actually worth?
Over the past month or so, I've traveled a total of 728 miles and plugged in six times. (As we've already noted, the i5 doesn't have great range, and my 80% charge limit doesn't help.) Using the above methodology and a cost of $0.64/kWh, the total cost for the first 30 minutes for those charging sessions works out to be $182.15 — that's how much I would have saved, thanks to the BMW i5 free charging program, if I had plugged into an EA station.
That's a lot of money saved in one month, but the benefit is even more apparent when you extrapolate that over the benefit period. In my case, I traveled 728 miles in one month and the benefit worked out to $182.15. Maintaining that average, this equates to $4,371.60 over the course of two years and 17,472 miles. No wonder why BMW switched to a 1,000-kWh cap for the 2025 model year; at a cost of 64 cents per kWh, this works out to a benefit of $640.
Pay attention to your benefits
Until EVs came along, one of the most enticing perks you could get on a new car was free maintenance. But even for BMW — which offers a fairly generous three-year/36,000-mile complimentary maintenance program — the covered services are basic and will save you a few hundred dollars at most. As we can see, free charging is a serious benefit that can save you thousands if you're diligent about where and for how long you charge.
As the EV market begins to mature, manufacturers are beginning to cut back on free charging benefits as a perk of buying a new EV. Many OEMs have nixed charging benefits altogether, and those still offering this perk are increasingly replacing session benefits with a cash or kWh credit, limiting the value. However, there are still quite a few vehicles that offer free charging for the first 30 minutes, and a small handful offer unlimited free charging regardless of the session length. Make sure to visit our list of EVs with free charging for an up-to-date account of every electric vehicle with some kind of free charging benefit.