To ask if you'd buy an electric or petrol car in these circumstances?

Indeed.
I am generally not a conspiracy theorist but I am beginning to suspect that there is actually a coordinated disinformation campaign on this subject.
I mean there are genuine issues still to be resolved - I wouldn't currently opt for an EV if I didn't have off road parking and my own charger for instance - but some of the anti EV rhetoric is frankly so absurd that I find it hard to understand why anyone would believe it. Yet clearly many do.

Ours loses very little charge. We were away for a fortnight last summer in our other car, the EV was still pretty much fully charged when we got back. Even if it did, OP is planning to have a charger at home anyway so it doesn’t really matter, it’ll be easily topped up whenever it needs. Maybe if you were leaving it for months on end in a car park or something, but that’s not good for any type of car.

Apparently they do lose a very small amount of charge but we have driven 25 miles to an airport, left the car for 2 weeks (when it was moved offsite and brought back) and we lost about 30 miles of charge I think

My partner runs a paint shop/body repair yard. Neither of us have electric but not against the idea. He said that an electric car left at the workshop for a couple of weeks needed charging each time before they could move it (he was talking a top of the range Range Rover in particular) - would this apply if the OP only intends to use her car sporadically? Do they drain charge if left standing?

Thing is, EV owners don't CARE if you buy an ICE car, we really don't so there will be no gun involved
Conversely ICE owners and The media seem very very invested in trying to persuade people NOT to buy an EV

Electric car vs having your brains blown out I promise you they are really not that bad.

You won’t have a choice in the end.

The Chinese EVs are amazing right now. They all have them and it will soon be the case that all homes come fitted with chargers… din’t believe all the crappola in the Daily Heil and the Exprrss abiut them bursting into flames. It happens no more often than with diesel/petrol cars.

Good job its not compulsory then

I wouldn't ever buy an electric car under any circumstances, including having a gun pointed at my head.

Electric car if you can put solar panels and batteries on the house as well. We have slashed our transport costs. Our electricity bill is very low now.
Infrastructure is getting better all the time.

At the moment I think EVs make more economic sense if you make more journeys. Petrol probably still works out cheaper for those who don't have high mileage.

Yes, I know a few people who pre-covid did the sums for running a car based on purchase price and fuel/electric cost and found that EV was cheaper based on the average number of miles they did. Then come lockdown they were still paying a lot for their car whilst it sat doing no miles and the mileage they do now means the upfront costs of the car results in no real savings.

I think already though the premium for electric cars has come down from what it was

I think that was my point. At 250 miles a month you are doing on average less than 10 miles a day, so abour 1 hour per day on average using a granny charger.

At 250 miles a month it will probably take you at least a decade to recover the cost of the battery, even if you were charging it for free. You might be saving £500 a year in petrol tops unless your alternative car would be a huge gas guzzler.

Of course you have the tax, lower maintenance and BIK as well to factor in (maintenance although probably cheaper is a bit of an unknown).

There are some bargains to be found if you are prepared to look around. I got my Zoe last September from a main dealer. We found mine, top spec with only 36 miles on the clock and it was 18 months old. A pre-reg which had sat in storage and the cost was £13k which is not much different to a petrol car with same level of trim/mileage etc.

Yes, we have an outside socket. It was installed with the aim of getting a proper charger installed so the electrics have been uprated but like you didn't want to spend the grand on getting a charging box. The outside socket works just fine.

@GasPanic mine is a full EV and yes, it can take some time to charge but I never let it get so low that I need to charge for 24 hours. I wait until I am around 50% ish and then stick it on charge overnight. It's full in the morning. I can get 250 miles in the summer and 150 in the winter so plenty for my needs.

One of our neighbours also charges his from an outside socket which hasn't been uprated and has no problems at all.

I probably average around 250 miles a month so not a huge amount.

It's a state of mind. If you want an EV and believe in them you won't mind the charging, just like if you want a petrol car you don't moan about having to go to the petrol station.

At the moment I think EVs make more economic sense if you make more journeys. Petrol probably still works out cheaper for those who don't have high mileage. It depends how much of your decision is about cost. Our EV is lovely to drive and SO much safer with all the tech. But it's only cheaper because we do enough miles to outweigh the higher upfront cost.

When we first got our EV we leased for 6 months to see if it worked for us so it wasn't worth getting a charger fitted so we charged with a plug from the garage.
I don't know the details as DH set it up but he did buy an exterior extension cable.
It wasn't as fast as a charger but we just kept the car topped up and it worked fine and it was set to charge overnight for cheaper electricity (Octopus).
The charger cost around £1000 but I am saving around £150pm vs petrol so it paid for itself in 10 months

And yes to what PP said about the wiring too. Get a proper granny charger like a Masterplug and set it to 10amp for safety instead of 13. Constant high use on a standard plug socket can be risky, especially if you’ve got older wiring.

We used a granny charger (3-pin) for about six months with our full EV. It’s doable but annoying, I wouldn’t view it as a permanent solution unless you are very low mileage. It takes almost 24 hours to charge the car from empty and makes it harder to take advantage of the cheap EV tariffs, which tend to be about 6/7 hour slots overnight. If you’re very low mileage it might work, if you’re doing only 20-30 miles a day or something and plug in every night overnight, but a proper EV charger is worth it for most people.

We had to rely on the ICE car more when we used the 3-pin as sometimes we couldn’t get the EV charged in time for what we needed so would have to take the petrol car. Now we use the EV for probably 90% of our day to day driving and the petrol car is used for second car duties and holidays, as it’s a v big car with giant boot.

I don't think you can get away with a standard plug on a full electric. Unless you hardly use it. My plug in hybrid takes about 1 hour for 10 miles, so if you have a full electric you are talking about almost a day for a full charge off the standard mains. If you don't use it much then you could get away with it, but then why would you want to spend all that money on battery capacity if it was hardly ever used.

You also have to make sure your electrics are in good shape, because although they can charge off standard plugs, the current draw is a lot more than most appliances and occurs for a very long time and if your wiring is shoddy then it could be risky.

I've been charging a PHEV off a standard plug for a year and it works fine. But the wiring/socket is in good shape. And I never charge at night or when I am out.

Do you have an outside socket @BestDIL? I'm considering an EV but could do without the grand to pay for the charging box, and we don't have a garage.

I've been critical of EVs above, but I am currently driving one. It's on a 3 year lease and I'm switching back to owning a car at the end of the lease, can't afford a new one, so it will be an ICE. DH has bought a hybrid twice, both under 4 years old. The first one's battery burnt out within 10 days of purchase, the second wouldn't run on its battery and if we'd had to pay for a repair would have been over £1k. Both from main dealers. So he's back to ICE as the technology just doesn't seem robust yet.

Telegraph the same. Clear anti EV propaganda from the right wing press, gets lapped up by the climate change deniers and other dinosaurs unwilling to accept newer technology.

Agree the vitriol some ICE drivers have against EVs is really weird. It’s pretty much all one way.

i would be too polite to say in real life but would like to ask whether ICE drivers feel bad about the air quality? I live in a beautiful city but in a dip and you used to be able to see the fug of fumes hanging over the city. I felt guilty sitting in a traffic jam pumping out fumes as little kids walk by. It’s not right.

Fair enough. Few more miles than the outlander with its 31 mile range

Wasn't there a massive to- do when compulsory seat belts were introduced?

(mind you, it's true that that has had a downside- far less young, healthy organs available for donation nowadays 😬)