What a Scooter Really Costs Per Mile

Scooter running costs get quoted as a cents-per-mile electricity figure, which is technically true and practically useless, because electricity is the cheapest thing about owning one. Here is the whole budget, in the order the lines actually matter.

Depreciation is the largest line

A 700 dollar scooter with a realistic four year life is costing you 175 dollars a year before you have moved. If you ride 1,500 miles a year, that alone is roughly 12 cents a mile. Ride 4,000 miles a year and it falls to about 4 cents. Nothing else in the budget swings that hard with usage, which is the single most important thing to understand: a scooter that sits in a hallway is expensive per mile no matter how efficient it is.

This is also why "expected life" is the input people get most wrong. A cheap scooter ridden hard on rough roads is a two or three year machine. A better one, maintained, is six or more. Our rent or buy calculator lets you set that number explicitly rather than hiding it.

The battery is the second largest, and it is deferred

On an electric scooter the pack is a consumable with a very long interval. Replacement typically costs a third to a half of the original purchase price, and on many budget models the pack simply stops being available, which converts "replace the battery" into "replace the scooter".

Budget for it honestly. If a pack costs 250 dollars and lasts 500 cycles at 15 real miles a cycle, that is 7,500 miles for 250 dollars, or about 3.3 cents a mile. Charging habits move that number more than anything else, which is what our battery care guide is about.

Tyres and brakes

Small wheels rotate a lot of times per mile and wear accordingly. Expect rear tyres on a regularly ridden scooter to need replacing far sooner than intuition suggests, and expect brake pads to follow. On a petrol scooter add the drive belt, which is a scheduled item that fails suddenly when ignored.

A working figure for tyres, brakes and consumables on a commuter scooter is somewhere in the region of 3 to 6 cents a mile, more if the roads are bad and you are heavy on the brakes.

Energy, finally

Here is the line everyone quotes. A scooter using 22 watt-hours per mile at 17 cents per kilowatt-hour costs 0.37 cents a mile. Not 37 cents. Under half a cent.

You can look up what you actually pay rather than guessing: the US Energy Information Administration publishes average residential electricity prices by state every month, and the spread between the cheapest and most expensive states is more than threefold. Even at the top of that range, the energy line rounds to nothing next to depreciation.

A 50cc petrol scooter is dearer but still small. At 90 miles per gallon and 3.30 dollars a gallon, that is under 4 cents a mile, plus oil.

The lines people forget

• Insurance and registration on anything titled as a motor vehicle. This is zero on a stand-up e-scooter and very much not zero on a moped.
• Gear. A helmet is a two or three year item. Gloves wear out.
• Locks. A good one costs real money and is not optional if the scooter ever waits outside.
• The fallback mode. The days you cannot ride still cost something, and a comparison that ignores them is not honest. Our commute cost calculator prices those miles back in.

Putting it together

For a typical commuter electric scooter ridden a few thousand miles a year, all-in cost lands somewhere around 15 to 25 cents a mile, of which energy is under half a penny. Ride it more and the number falls fast, because the fixed costs spread further.

The comparison that matters is not scooter against nothing, it is scooter against what you do instead. Even the full-ownership cost of a car, which the IRS standard mileage rate approximates for tax purposes, is several times a scooter's per-mile cost, and the joint EPA and Department of Energy fuel economy site will give you the fuel half of that for your specific car.

The number that actually decides it

Miles ridden. A scooter is cheap per mile if you ride it and expensive if you do not, and every other line on this page is downstream of that. Before buying, be honest about how many weeks a year you will actually ride, then run the arithmetic with that number rather than the optimistic one.