The electric airport transfer isn't just the greener one anymore. It's quietly the cheaper one.

You used to drive an electric car because it was the right thing to do, and you paid a little more for the privilege. Not anymore.

Charged at depot rates, an electric car costs somewhere around 2 to 4 pence a mile to run. A petrol car over the same road costs roughly 13 to 17. On a short hop the gap is pocket change. On the journeys we actually do — your door to Southampton, London to Manchester, the 40 miles out to a cruise port and back — it's the difference between a fleet that's expensive to run and one that isn't.

And a fleet that's cheaper to run is a fleet that can hold a fixed fare through a fuel-price spike without blinking. That matters more than it sounds, because the 45 minutes from the terminal to your front door is a bigger slice of your trip's footprint than most people would ever guess — and one of the easiest to cut to near zero, increasingly without paying a premium to do it.

How the economics land on a real journey

• The fuel line collapses. The biggest running cost of a long transfer is the fuel to move two tonnes of car a hundred miles. Electrify that and it largely disappears.
• The fixed fare gets safer, not riskier. We quote one price and hold it. A cheaper, steadier energy cost is exactly what lets us keep doing that when the forecourts are having a bad week.
• The maintenance bill shrinks. Fewer moving parts, less brake wear from regenerative braking. Boring — but real money over a fleet's life.

The old framing — "green" on one side of the ledger, "cost" on the other — is gone.

None of this means every car on every road should have been electric yesterday. Range, charging time and the right vehicle for a nine-suitcase family group are real considerations, and honest operators say so. But on the journeys that make up most of what we do, the clean option and the cheap option are becoming the same option. It's the same logic behind our whole model — a firm that's careful with your money tends to be careful with everything else.

So the question we'd put back to anyone still treating low-emission travel as a premium extra: what exactly are you paying more for?