Here’s how you could spend less than £130 running your car for an entire YEAR

DRIVERS are having a terrible time at the pumps, paying on average more than £100 every time they fill up.

But there is a way to cut your fuel costs to the point that you’ll spend less than one tank of petrol over an entire year.

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The answer lies with electric cars, which despite recent electricity price hikes, are still the far cheaper option when it comes to running costs.

But to really drive down costs you’ll need a smart charger at home like the ones made by Ohme and an EV-specific energy tariff.

Currently these tariffs are on offer from energy firms such as EDF and Octopus.

Off-peak electricity tariffs mean drivers can charge their EVs for a certain amount of hours each day, often overnight, at a much lower cost than their standard rate of electricity.

These rates can be as low as 7.5 pence per kWh compared to the Ofgem energy price cap of 28 pence per kWh.

At 7.5 pence per kWh, it means that a typical UK driver’s annual mileage of 6800 miles in an average EV could cost just £127.50 – less than £11 per month.

And having a smart charger means that rather than having to manually set it to take advantage of the cheapest rate, it’ll work it all out for you.

Ohme CEO David Watson said: “Ohme’s smart chargers can connect with the national grid in real time and automatically adjust their charging for drivers to take advantage of all the times of low price charging with smart electricity tariffs.

“The result is that EV drivers can potentially run their car for less than £130 a year by smart charging their EV.

“For some petrol or diesel cars that could be what some drivers are paying for a single tank of fuel, but here it’s for a full year of EV driving.”

Electric cars are still more expensive on average to buy new than a petrol or diesel, but there’s a growing number of more affordable used options on offer.