Paying personal 'electric' miles

Hello all,

Quick query which I've searched for the answer but not sure I've found it!

My company are buying me the Outlander PHEV and they pay for all my business miles (I have a fuel card) but each month I submit my personal mileage.

Do I need to pay for purely 'electric' miles is the question? After all I've already paid for the electricity. I've had a good look on the UK GOV website and it seems to suggest that Electric miles are not chargeable (like normal petrol personal miles) because they don't recognise electricity as a fuel!?

So in my mind that would suggest I don't pay for them. Does anyone else have a similar setup? What do you do?

Thanks

Rob

My company had a similiar setup, apportioning the monthly fuel card total spend between them and me as per the numbers.

Obviously this gives no incentive to charge or be economical (apart from making your portion a little cheaper) as most our peoples miles are business many didn't even bother ever plugging in.

The company (and its a big one!) decided the better option was to do it the other way around exclusively for PHEV drivers, so we simply put fuel in ourselves and submit a business mileage. They pay back at the current HM Revenue approved rate - currently 13p a mile for a Petrol car upto 2.0L which is what a PHEV is. Using this rate ensured you get no tax liability from the payments.

With supermarket petrol at 99p a litre equates £4.41 a gallon. 441/13= 34, so you only need to achieve 34mpg to break even on this rate. That is not too hard to do in a PHEV even just running on petrol, so if you charge up which is cheaper than petrol per mile and get your mpg higher, you can actually make a small profit!

The company stay in the clear as they are paying the correct rate for a 2.0l petrol car and avoid the impossible minefield of trying to pay you for electricity which you can't easily prove went in the car and not the tumble dryer or how far you drove on it and how far on petrol.

I do the same as Bob, I had a choice of fuel card where every mile was paid back by me out of my salary or I just expense business miles at the 13p rate. With the phev it makes better sense to just expense the business miles otherwise you'll be paying the fuelcad rate for electric miles.

Thanks for your responses.

Asked the finance director and his view is that I keep a record my mileage and every journey that is under 30 miles will be pure EV, anything over would use Petrol.

It's a very balanced view because I'll be putting some of my electricity into the business miles and my business / personal mileage is about 800 personal to 1600 business per month so at no point will the business lose out.

The tax man should be happy that I have an audit trail so everyone is happy.

Nearly ALL my personal miles are very short journeys <15miles return so it's very unlikely that I will use the petrol much and even if I did that would balance out with the electric miles done on the over 30 mile personal trips which I will fully pay for at 12p a mile.

Don't reckon I will lose out much and it will save me paying out for a lot of fuel each month.

Weird. Under our system in Australia, we just get 76c per kilometer, whether we drive a monster truck, or a go-kart. (Well, there is some tiny allowance for different size engines, but close enough).

Company and tax man is actually paying off a fair bit of my car, since most my trips are done on electric. I wonder when the ATO will catch on, and make a separate category for electric/hybrid electric cars.

Sunder said:

Weird. Under our system in Australia, we just get 76c per kilometer, whether we drive a monster truck, or a go-kart. (Well, there is some tiny allowance for different size engines, but close enough).

Company and tax man is actually paying off a fair bit of my car, since most my trips are done on electric. I wonder when the ATO will catch on, and make a separate category for electric/hybrid electric cars.

Click to expand...

Is that the rate for the use of technically your own car? or just for fuel in a company owned car?

We have different rates 13p is if its the companies car and represents the fuel used for business purposes.

If the vehicle is in your name or you lease it then they can pay 45p per mile (first 10K, 25p thereafter) tax free, this is supposed to contribute to your fuel, car, wear and tear, insurance etc.

Just thinking about logging all my little trips... does anyone know if there's a way of pulling that out of the car somehow?

I'm sure I've seen, on this forum, a way of pulling journeys and fuel efficiency from the car...or was I just hoping?!

If it's possible that would really be easy.

I'm going to go digging...

ansellrk said:

Thanks for your responses.

Asked the finance director and his view is that I keep a record my mileage and every journey that is under 30 miles will be pure EV, anything over would use Petrol.

It's a very balanced view because I'll be putting some of my electricity into the business miles and my business / personal mileage is about 800 personal to 1600 business per month so at no point will the business lose out.

The tax man should be happy that I have an audit trail so everyone is happy.

Nearly ALL my personal miles are very short journeys <15miles return so it's very unlikely that I will use the petrol much and even if I did that would balance out with the electric miles done on the over 30 mile personal trips which I will fully pay for at 12p a mile.

Don't reckon I will lose out much and it will save me paying out for a lot of fuel each month.

Click to expand...

On the plus side I doubt the tax man has the resources to look at your situation too closely but if they decided to there could be issues. You won't achieve 30 miles EV so it could be seen as a rather generous in your favour. You will use fuel even in EV as the engine cuts in every time you need decent acceleration (unless you can only potter around outside peak traffic times). On cold days the engine will run at times unless you keep the heating off. As the engine is always available you can't actually prove you didn't use it, but as I say, if it works for you all well and good! and I doubt the revenue will be interested.

ansellrk said:

Just thinking about logging all my little trips... does anyone know if there's a way of pulling that out of the car somehow?

I'm sure I've seen, on this forum, a way of pulling journeys and fuel efficiency from the car...or was I just hoping?!

If it's possible that would really be easy.

I'm going to go digging...

Click to expand...

I don't think you can get a trip log.

We have an 'industrial' version of Tom Tom Sat Nav that also records all your journeys and transmits the data to a website we can get a report from, quite handy, but I am not suggesting you set that up.

Some in-car journey recording camera can do similar, they have GPS tracking and logging built in that automatically records your trip data, might be worth investing in something like that, its a good idea to have a camera onboard these days anyway (I do), it would be easily transferred to future cars you own.

--- Also there are many phone apps that can do similar ---

That sounds like a plan, the RAC do one which does everything including log journeys.

It would be good if the car did do it because you could prove EV was used, which would be handy.

I might do a little bit more digging and download the manual before I commit to any purchase.

BobEngineer said:

Sunder said:

Weird. Under our system in Australia, we just get 76c per kilometer, whether we drive a monster truck, or a go-kart. (Well, there is some tiny allowance for different size engines, but close enough).

Company and tax man is actually paying off a fair bit of my car, since most my trips are done on electric. I wonder when the ATO will catch on, and make a separate category for electric/hybrid electric cars.

Click to expand...

Is that the rate for the use of technically your own car? or just for fuel in a company owned car?

We have different rates 13p is if its the companies car and represents the fuel used for business purposes.

If the vehicle is in your name or you lease it then they can pay 45p per mile (first 10K, 25p thereafter) tax free, this is supposed to contribute to your fuel, car, wear and tear, insurance etc.

Click to expand...

Ah, that sounds more reasonable. Yes, thats for owned kr leased cars. If the company owns the car, we tend to get fuel cards and we either get included "reasonable personal use" as part of our package, or we reimburse the company for personal usage.

Actually thinking of doing it differently now. The idea of logging every little journey would drive me nuts. I might just pay for all fuel and claim back the business miles...simple!

I take fully paid fuel. as its a benefit in kind it uses the same rules from the Co2 rating so in fact the benefit in kind is much lower than a normal fuel card. I think it worked out at something like the equivalent cost of £20 per month, so if you would spend more than this amount per month on petrol then it would make sense to take fully repaid fuel. Of course you can also claim tax relief on the difference between refunded rate and HMRC limits of 45p up to a certain a mileage. I'll dig out my spreadsheet and post on here

ChicoryCoffee said:

I take fully paid fuel. as its a benefit in kind it uses the same rules from the Co2 rating so in fact the benefit in kind is much lower than a normal fuel card. I think it worked out at something like the equivalent cost of £20 per month, so if you would spend more than this amount per month on petrol then it would make sense to take fully repaid fuel. Of course you can also claim tax relief on the difference between refunded rate and HMRC limits of 45p up to a certain a mileage. I'll dig out my spreadsheet and post on here

Click to expand...

Interesting...

Benefit charge is £21700, x 5% CO2 value = £1085 PA. of extra benefit, @40% tax = £434 PA or £36 per month, not bad actually, less than a couple of fill-ups. I hadn't thought about the effect of the low CO2 on this benefit.

We are all more used to vehicles around the 20%+ charge area which costs more like £144 out of pocket a month.

My total annual tax liability (40%) for car plus fuel card (company and total private mileage paid) is £1150.
The PHEV saves an absolute fortune, both ways, over 'normal' BiK rate cars.

I can't claim back any charge costs, as, as has been said, electricity is not classed as a fuel by HMRC - so I don't bother to charge, which seems a bit perverse as all-round, I get about 30mpg.