DIESEL PRICES IN Ireland are now at a record level.

Even the last time we had price increases, at the height of the war in Ukraine, petrol was the fuel that saw the largest jump, but diesel had, thankfully at the time, still lagged behind.

Back in 2008 when the then-government changed the taxation laws on cars from one based on the engine size (the cubic capacity, or cc) to one based on CO2 when they, like everyone else, believed that purely lower CO2 meant cleaner (we know better since), we all moved in droves from a petrol-biased car parc to a diesel one.

So the €2.20 in some forecourts at the time of writing is certainly stinging a huge amount of buyers. If you are driving a very average family car now over the CSO average of 17,000km per year, it is costing you about €2,000, give-or-take, per year to fuel it.

So a bang-average Hyundai Tucson diesel, which was a top-seller for a number of years with a 54-litre fuel tank is costing you just shy of €119 for a fill. Something like a Volkswagen Passat with a larger tank is now an eye-watering €154 to fill from empty.

The Irish government is taking about €1.40 per litre in tax, or roughly €93 of that €154 fill. We are likely to see measures in the coming week to give drivers some respite, probably in the form of excise duty cuts, but what is clear is that more and more people are now starting to take moving to an EV more seriously.

On DoneDeal cars, we have seen a 33% increase in searches specifically for EVs. There has been a 36% increase in sales of new EVs so far in 2026. But there are people who are understandably still nervous of making the move to an EV, especially a used one, but let’s take a cold look at this to see if it makes sense for you to switch to an EV, be it new or used.

I have an EV as my own, personal car. It is a Volkswagen eUp, which is a small car with a 32.6 kWh battery. It has a range of about 220km from a full charge. I can get more if I drive it carefully and in the summer months.

I have had it from new and it has 36,000km on the clock........

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