Tools
The numbers behind owning an EV in Canada
9 tools, each built on a named source rather than an estimate. Where a figure could not be attributed it is left out and said so, which is why some of these tables are shorter than they could be.
Owning one
Public charging
How many EVs share each fast charger province by province, how far you can get from one on the Trans-Canada, and who runs them.
NREL/NRCan station data, StatCan 23-10-0308, OpenStreetMap
Charging cost by province
What it costs to charge an EV against filling up with gas, across every Canadian province.
Provincial electricity and fuel prices
Maintenance schedules
Toyota and Lexus want the car every 8,000 km. Polestar asks every 30,000. Tesla schedules nothing. What each manufacturer actually requires, and how findable they make it.
Manufacturer schedules and owner's manuals, Canadian where they exist
Warranty coverage
Almost everyone covers the battery for 8 years. The number nobody quotes is how much capacity they guarantee — GM says 60%, most say 70%. Plus what the booklets say about skipping a service.
Canadian warranty booklets, CAMVAP
Insurance costs
Canadians pay about 36.8% more to insure an EV than a comparable gas car — $3,131 against $2,289 a year, more than twice the gap in the UK.
Broker book of business, international comparisons
Buying one
The market
Registrations by province
How many zero-emission vehicles Canadians actually registered, by province and quarter. BC and Quebec lead; Newfoundland and Alberta report nothing.
StatCan 20-10-0025-01
Chinese EV imports
Canadian passenger-vehicle imports from China by month and value. The Shanghai-built Tesla Model Y is the dominant contributor.
StatCan 12-10-0178-01 (NAPCS 81)
Why every card names a source
Most of what gets written about EVs in Canada is either a manufacturer’s number or a guess, and the two are hard to tell apart once they have been repeated a few times. Every figure on these pages carries where it came from, so you can disagree with it from the same starting point we did.
It also means the gaps are visible. Ford’s maintenance interval is marked unresolved because ford.ca will not show a Canadian schedule without a VIN. Nunavut is named on the charging page rather than dropped, because three plug-in vehicles and no public station is a finding. A blank is more useful than a plausible number.