The Hyundai Kona is among the best subcompact SUVs you can buy.
It offers a little bit of everything. It provides a functional space in a small footprint, an engaging driving experience, and a suite of active safety features (like lane-keeping assist and emergency braking) as standard equipment.
The Kona carries a 10-year, 100,000-mile powertrain warranty that is longer than almost any of its competitors. Perhaps more impressively, buyers get three years or 36,000 miles of free maintenance.
It also comes with two completely different types of drivetrains at two radically different prices.
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So if you’re in the market, should you buy the gas-powered Kona or stretch for the more expensive Kona Electric? Or should you hold out for the Kona Hybrid that may be on the way before the end of 2021?
We’ll look at each option, weighing the Kelley Blue Book 5-Year Cost to Own for each drivetrain. For our comparison, we’ll examine the least-expensive version of each model.
The standard internal-combustion Kona comes in no fewer than six trim levels for 2021. Prices can differ dramatically. At the low end, $20,500 gets you a Kona SE with a 147-horsepower 4-cylinder engine and a 6-speed automatic transmission.
It is available in front- or all-wheel drive. The front-wheel-drive (FWD) model gets 30 mpg in combined highway and city driving. In all-wheel drive (AWD), the car earns 28 mpg.
At the other end of the spectrum, the top-of-the-line Kona Ultimate comes at an MSRP of $28,150. For that, you’ll get a more powerful 175 horsepower turbocharged 4-cylinder with a 7-speed dual-clutch transmission. In FWD layout, that will get you 30 mpg in combined city and highway driving. In AWD guise, 27 mpg.
All Konas have a destination fee of $1,185 in addition to the MSRP.
For our comparison, we’ll be using the cost of that least-expensive 2021 Kona SE, priced at $20,500.
The 2021 Kona is also available as a pure battery-electric vehicle.
Boasting an impressive 258-mile range from its 64 kilowatt-hours (kWh) battery pack, it’s one of the least-expensive purely electric cars available in America today.
Its single 150-kilowatt electric motor produces the equivalent of 201 horsepower, making it livelier from a stoplight than any gasoline-powered Kona.
The least-expensive model, the Kona Electric SEL, comes at an MRSP of $37,390. For this story’s purpose, the Kona Electric SEL qualifies for the federal tax incentive of $7,500. Factoring in the credit brings the total to $29,890.
Kona EV also qualifies for some state and local rebates. For example, state incentives in California come to an estimated $2,000. We do not add that in. Instead, we stick with federal incentives since the other programs vary so much from state to state.
One important caveat: The Kona Electric is sold only in California, Colorado, Connecticut, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, and Washington. There is no prohibition on crossing state lines to buy a car if desired.
Every system that attempts to estimate fuel costs is too simple. Each person drives differently, drives a different distance each year, and pays gas prices that fluctuate by the day and location. But, using averages, we can get a rough estimate.
The United States Federal Highway Administration estimates that Americans drive an average of 13,500 miles per year.
In an FWD Kona SE at 30 mpg, that would require 450 gallons of gas in a year.
At the time of this writing, AAA said the average gallon of gas costs $2.89. At that rate, a year of fuel for the Kona SE would cost around $1,301. In five years, you’d spend $6,503 on fuel costs, or about 48 cents per mile. The Kelley Blue Book 5-Year Cost to Own assumes 15,000 miles per year and is based on 55 percent city and 45 percent highway use.
That brings the total fuel bill over the period to $8,598, or 57 cents per mile.
Calculating the exact cost of fueling an electric Kona is an even more complicated matter. The U.S. Department of Energy’s Energy Information Administration estimates that residential customers pay an estimated average of 13 cents per kilowatt-hour of electricity.
At that rate, it would cost about $8.32 to charge the Kona’s battery pack to its full capacity. To drive that 13,500-mile average yearly distance, you’d need to do that 52 times per year. After five years, it would cost you just over $2,163. The KBB 5-Year Cost to Own estimate for electricity comes in at a slightly lower figure: $2,105.
The bottom line here is that the fuel savings cost favoring electric vehicles is substantial.
For its internal combustion engine cars, Hyundai recommends an oil change every 7,500 miles. In five years of driving at 15,000 per year, that comes to 10 service visits. Maintenance costs, which include those regularly scheduled service visits and replacement of wear items like tires, windshield wipers, and brakes, come to $3,124 on KBB’s 5-Year Cost to Own.
The Kona Electric requires drastically less maintenance than its gasoline-powered equivalent. There is no oil to change. Its electric motors are sealed and have few moving parts. That means dealers don’t conduct a multi-point inspection on them the way they would a gasoline engine.
Hyundai’s recommended maintenance schedule for the Kona Electric includes a tire rotation every 5,000 miles and almost nothing else. (Incidentally, we have no idea why they’d want to rotate the tires of the Kona Electric more often than those of a gasoline-powered Kona.)
Hyundai pays the cost of maintenance for the first three years or 36,000 miles with either model. While the overall maintenance costs are less, Kona EV owners can expect to pay $1,224 for wear items over the first five years of ownership.
It’s when you start to factor in depreciation, though, that the cost difference really starts to show. Electric cars depreciate faster than their gasoline counterparts.
The Kona SE, by Kelley Blue Book 5-Year Cost to Own estimates, loses $12,233 of its value to depreciation over five years.
The Kona Electric SEL, due to its higher purchase price and faster depreciation, would lose $27,669 in value over that same period.
Any discussion of electric cars’ depreciation should also caution that analysts are working with much less history in predicting future value.
We have more than 100 years of data with which to estimate the value a gasoline-powered car loses as it ages. We have much less than that with EVs.
It’s also possible that a dramatic improvement in battery technology will render current EVs much less valuable. Suppose Toyota gets serious about bringing out a solid-state battery with double the usual range in 2021. In that case, all bets are off as to what that does to the value of today’s EVs.
All told, in fuel, maintenance, and depreciation, the Kona SE costs an estimated $36,517 or 49 cents per mile to own for five years. The Kona Electric SEL, though much cheaper to drive on account of its less-expensive fuel, would run you approximately $41,068 or 55 cents per mile over that same period.
Today, it simply makes more financial sense to buy the gasoline-powered Kona. If your carbon footprint is a concern you can afford to pay for, the Kona Electric might be your ride. But it won’t be comparable in cost to the plain old Kona until depreciation of EVs starts to normalize in America.
For Americans who want an EV, the Kona Electric is undoubtedly an attractive option. There are likely to be a dozen or more EVs in a similar price range by the end of 2021.
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