How Much Does It Really Cost to Charge Your Electric Scooter? We Tested It in Chennai

You’ve seen them everywhere: the silent, swift electric scooters gliding past crowded petrol bunks. The dream is powerful—no more queues, no more engine noise, and best of all, no more watching your money disappear into a fuel tank.

But once the initial excitement settles, a practical question creeps in: How much does it actually cost to charge and run one of these things every day? Is it really that cheap?

Marketing brochures throw around confusing numbers, and your friends give you vague answers. To cut through the noise, we decided to find out for ourselves. We took one of India’s most popular electric scooters and did the math using real, current electricity rates in Chennai.

The results are not just interesting—they’re game-changing.

The Simple Answer: The Cost per Kilometre

If you’re in a hurry, here’s the bottom line:

To fully charge a popular electric scooter like an Ola S1 Pro at home in Chennai, it costs approximately ₹18. With a real-world range of about 130 km, that works out to an incredible 14 paise per kilometre.

For the full breakdown of how we got that number, and to see how it compares to a petrol scooter, read on.

Let’s Do the Math: The 3 Simple Steps to Your Answer

To figure out the real cost, we only need three pieces of information: the scooter’s battery size, the cost of electricity, and the scooter’s real-world range.

Step 1: Know Your Battery (Your Scooter’s “Tank Size”)

First, we need to know how much electricity your scooter’s “tank” can hold. For our test, we’re using the Ola S1 Pro, which has a 4 kWh battery.

What does kWh mean? “kWh” stands for kilowatt-hour. It’s simply a unit of energy. Think of it this way: if a petrol scooter has a 5-litre tank, this Ola has a 4-unit “electricity tank.”

Step 2: Know Your Electricity Rate (What You Pay TANGEDCO)

This is the most crucial part. In Chennai, your home electricity is supplied by TANGEDCO, and the price per unit (per kWh) depends on how much electricity your household consumes in total. It’s a “slab” system—the more you use, the more you pay per unit.

Here are the common domestic tariff slabs (as of mid-2024):

Most households with standard appliances plus an EV scooter will likely fall into the ₹4.50 per unit slab for the additional electricity used for charging. We will use this rate for our main calculation as it’s the most realistic for a typical family home.

Step 3: Calculating the Cost of One Full Charge

Now, we just multiply the battery size by the electricity rate.

• Formula: Battery Size (in kWh) x Cost per Unit (₹/kWh) = Cost of a Full Charge
• Calculation: 4 kWh x ₹4.50 = ₹18

That’s it. To fill your scooter’s “tank” from empty to full at home, it costs you just eighteen rupees.

The Magic Number: Cost per Kilometre

A full charge is great, but what you really care about is how much it costs to go somewhere. To find this, we divide the cost of a full charge by the scooter’s realistic range.

While the Ola S1 Pro claims a higher range, a realistic, real-world range in city traffic is about 130 kilometres.

• Formula: Cost of a Full Charge / Real-World Range = Cost per Kilometre
• Calculation: ₹18 / 130 km = ₹0.138 per kilometre

Rounded up, that’s just 14 paise for every single kilometre you travel.

The Ultimate Showdown: Electric vs. Petrol in Chennai

So, how good is 14 paise per kilometre? Let’s compare it directly to a popular petrol scooter like a Honda Activa or TVS Jupiter.

The Verdict is Staggering: The petrol scooter is more than 16 times more expensive to run for every single kilometre you travel.

Every time you ride 100 km on your electric scooter, you are spending about ₹14. To travel that same 100 km on a petrol scooter, you would be spending around ₹226. The savings aren’t just small change; they are massive and add up incredibly quickly.