Market & Europe
Expensive electricity, more electric cars — and Switzerland pays more than Europe
Cheap electricity ought to sell electric cars. Across 37 European countries that does not hold: where household electricity is expensive, more new cars carry a plug. In the top price third it is 27,8 per cent, in the bottom third 9,6. And Switzerland, whose electricity is held to be cheap, pays 29,00 centimes/kWh and comes in at rank 4 of 38.
Switzerland sits above the EU average
The prices are comparable only without value added tax. ElCom states Swiss tariffs net, while Eurostat’s standard figure includes every levy — placing the two side by side makes Switzerland 8,1 per cent cheaper than it is. The table therefore takes, for every country, the figure without value added tax, with grid use and the remaining levies included.
| Country | centimes/kWh | fully electric |
|---|---|---|
| Ireland | 34,60 | 18,6 % |
| Belgium | 30,80 | 34,1 % |
| Germany | 30,34 | 19,1 % |
| Switzerland | 29,00 | 22,3 % |
| EU average | 22,91 | 17,3 % |
| Türkiye | 5,39 | 16,7 % |
The Swiss figure is ElCom’s official value for tariff year 2025, profile H4 at 4’500 kWh a year. That is the profile falling inside Eurostat’s consumption band of 2’500 to 4’999 kWh. It was converted at 0,9329 CHF to the euro, the mean of the same six months the prices are averaged over. Switzerland reports no electricity price of its own to Eurostat and therefore appears in none of the calculations below.
Expensive electricity stands next to more plugs
Across the 37 countries with both figures the relationship runs the other way than expected: 0,38 between electricity price and plug-in share, so weakly positive rather than negative. The thirds are more telling. The twelve most expensive electricity markets average 27,8 per cent of new cars with a plug, the twelve cheapest 9,6 — a gap of 18,1 percentage points, in favour of the expensive ones.
In the top price third, better than one new car in four carries a plug. In the bottom third, not even one in ten.
What it comes down to instead
The electricity price stands next to the electric share without explaining it. Prosperity is the closer candidate: between gross domestic product per head and the plug-in share, across the same 31 countries, the relationship is 0,64, while electricity price against plug-in share is only 0,28. Wealthy countries also have expensive electricity, 0,51 between those two. The electricity price therefore moves with prosperity, and that is where its link to the share comes from.
None of this says what a single household should calculate before buying. For that, what counts is the gap between electricity and petrol costs over the years of ownership, and that is decided by your own tariff, not by a national average. Europe-wide comparable petrol prices are not available to us, so that gap appears here for no country.
On fully electric cars, Switzerland is ahead
In the 2025 registration statistics, 22,3 per cent of new Swiss cars were fully electric. The EU average stood at 17,3, Germany at 19,1. The lag Switzerland is said to have is not in this figure: it sits 5,0 points above the EU and 3,2 above Germany.
One figure we cannot compare
On the plug-in share — fully electric plus plug-in hybrids — comparability ends. Eurostat lists 3,0 per cent plug-in hybrids for Switzerland; auto-schweiz measures 10,7 for the same period. The gap is more than threefold, and it is not Eurostat’s: for Germany the same series matches the official German statistics. In the Swiss return the plug-ins evidently land in the collective item for hybrids without a plug, which comes to 37,9 per cent here against 22,7 in Germany.
As long as that holds, this site states no europe-comparable plug-in share for Switzerland. The 25,3 per cent that would follow from the Eurostat figures would stand next to 30,0 for Germany and look like a lag — a lag that is in greater part a reporting gap. The case is listed as lg34 in the register of data gaps.
What we do not know
- Why the Swiss plug-in return deviates. That it deviates is measured. Where along the path from the road traffic offices to Eurostat it happens, we have not asked.
- Whether the fuel price explains the difference. It would be the next candidate, because an electric car pays off on the gap to the petrol price. We have not gathered Europe-wide comparable fuel prices.
- What prosperity does in detail. A relationship of 0,64 is not a cause. Purchase incentives, company car rules and charging infrastructure all hang on the same prosperity and are not separated here.
- What 2026 looks like. Eurostat supplies annual figures; the complete 2026 year will not be available before 2027. Monthly shares do not exist officially across Europe.
What this means for a purchase
- Anyone counting on cheap Swiss electricity is counting too low. 29,00 centimes/kWh net is the European top field, 26,6 per cent above the EU average and only 1,34 centimes below Germany.
- It changes nothing about the charging costs on this site. They calculate with the official Swiss value anyway, not with a European mean.
- A country’s electricity price says nothing about your own calculation. What counts is your own municipality’s tariff against your own fuel consumption — both are in the «Charging» and «Total cost» tabs.
- Looking at the share alone is misleading. Depending on whether you count fully electric or with a plug, Switzerland sits ahead of or behind Germany. Anyone quoting such a figure should say which one it is.
Sources: Eurostat, «Electricity prices for household consumers» (nrg_pc_204), second half of 2025, consumption band 2’500–4’999 kWh, excluding value added tax; «New passenger cars by type of motor energy» (road_eqr_carpda), year 2025; «Main GDP aggregates per capita» (nama_10_pc), year 2025; exchange rate via «Euro/ECU exchange rates» (ert_bil_eur_m). Swiss tariff: ElCom, official value for tariff year 2025, profile H4, via static/energiepreise.json. Swiss motor energies for the comparison: auto-schweiz, plug-in statistics January to August 2025.
Transparency: the correlations are Pearson values across all countries reporting both quantities — no editorial selection, because a correlation over hand-picked countries measures the hand. EU and euro area aggregates are excluded; they would be their own members a second time. Switzerland is missing from the price series and appears in no correlation. The thirds split the 37 countries by price into three groups of twelve; the middle third goes unmentioned because it separates nothing. Every figure in this article is recalculated from static/strompreise_eu.json at every npm test and searched for in the text, in all four languages.
