Electric cars officially give cheaper mileage than petrol or diesel ones, but Britain is still the 13th-most expensive place to run the green vehicles.
Research from comparison website Uswitch found an electric Nissan Leaf E+ would travel £2,380 on £50, compared to £443 for a similarly-sized petrol Volkswagen Golf.
That is a difference of 1,936 miles, which puts the UK at 21st place out of the 33 major countries Uswitch examined.
The cheapest place to run an electric car is Lithuania, where the Nissan would cover 4,434 miles on £50 and the Volkswagen 529.
The next-cheapest country is Norway, where an electric vehicle would be able to travel 4,171 miles and a petrol one 391, then Sweden (4,050 and 419).
The reason is that electricity is cheap in these countries, making it more cost-efficient per mile to run an electric car than fill up a petrol one.
But the most expensive place to run an electric car is Slovenia, where a Nissan Leaf will be able to travel just 1,584 miles and a Volkswagen 561 miles.
The Nissan Leaf has an advertised range of 239 miles on a single charge and the Golf will do about 575.2 miles on one tank of fuel.
A Uswitch statement said: "Despite the fact that batteries in most electric vehicles (EVs) will still not take you as far on one charge as a tank of petrol, they do have the advantage of being much cheaper to recharge than the cost of filling up a tank of fuel.
"Therefore in every major country in the world, you are able to travel much further for your money in an EV than a petrol equivalent."
Unsurprisingly, the country where it is cheapest to run a petrol car is the US.
A £50 budget would take a Golf 895 miles, compared to 2,584 for the Leaf.
This is due to incredibly low fuel costs in the country, where the average petrol price is 64p a litre.
Two weeks ago we reported that Nissan is about to create thousands of extra jobs in Sunderland as it expands its battery production in the region.
The Japanese car maker already manufactures the Leaf electric car in Sunderland factories.
The government is contributing to the overall cost of the giga-factory, which is expected to cost hundreds of millions as part of its shift to ban sales of new petrol and diesel cars from 2030.
It is understood that the factory would produce 200,000 battery cars a year as well open up thousands of jobs.
It is hoped the new plant will be producing batteries in time for 2024.
That is when the level of UK-made components in UK-made cars is required to start increasing in line with the terms of the UK's trade deal with the European Union - where most of Nissan's Sunderland-assembled cars are sold.
