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

Actually , it jsnt. Most ev batteries that have been tested at the 10 year mark still have over 93% capacity

Have you looked at the price different in buying a petrol car vs electric/hybrid?

When I was looking for a new car last year, a hybrid car was going to be a lot more expensive than a petrol car so it put me off - and I live in a new build so I already have a charging point and solar panels so would effectively be charging for free some days!

If you are buying a five year old electric car you need to think about how long is left on the battery warranty. I suspect that once this expires say after eight years these cars will have a little or no secondhand value. On the other hand our second car is 25 years old and going fine.

It's extremely rare that anyone would have to replace their battery

This

I've had an ev for a year now and have a home charger. My car will do 350 miles between charges. I do live rurally and like to travel around the country.
I can honestly say at I've never had a problem charging my car and I've never worried that I'm going to run out of charge

The range anxiety is only ever brought up by people who have never owned an EV. I've never been close to having an issue.

Only thing I'd say is don't get a car with a low capacity battery. My car's range is c300 miles in the summer, 240 in the winter. I'd not want the faff of less than that

Ooh yes, good point ! EV tariffs have cheap overnight costs so we run washing machine etc then too.

This, exactly. I live in the countryside and have never run out of charge anywhere, it’s easy to plan !
I wish people who don’t drive electric cars would stop making sweeping statements on something they have no experience of. I understand being a bit nervous or unsure, we were before our first long journey but we happily set of now without really thinking about it. As this poster has just said, you don’t set off without checking your petrol gauge, it’s no different for electric cars.

I have a plug-in hybrid which I think gives me the best of both worlds.

I charge the car at home and all my local journeys are done from the battery (we have solar panels, so filling the battery doesn’t cost much). However, I make reasonably frequent long journeys to a part of the country where public EV chargers are in very short supply, so am not ready to go fully electric.

We were early adopters of electric cars, dh is on his third one now and we have three at the moment. I’ve never one been in a situation where we couldn’t charge. Dh does surfing in wales and that’s the place with the fewest chargers that we have encountered but even then it’s fine. Even DD’s car (bought for £2500) tells you where the nearest charger is and whether it’s being used or not. And there’s countless apps.

Just be careful with an EV, the batteries cost thousands to replace. Everyone says "they have 8 year warranties", they DONT.

Any physical damage what so ever to the battery case will void the warranty. So a stone chip, a scratch, anything that can't be cleaned off WILL void your warranty. In practice this means that no EV on the road currently has a valid warranty.

I lost 6.5k to vauxhall because the Mokka EV that I drove had a two inch scratch on the battery casing. The issue was to do with the cooling gubbins, but they voided the warranty because of a scratch on the bottom of the battery.

Hybrid or petrol. Electric cars round the houses are probably OK but with longer journeys to do, I don’t want to be stopping to charge. I can do 500 miles on one tank of fuel which gets us to PILs with a very quick swap over driver stop.

The cars I was looking at at the time were the 5 series and e class and BMW and Mercedes were only offering 5 years or 100000km. The replacement on those is closer to the 15K mark and the battery wasn’t covered under the used car warranty. It’s something to bear in mind. A 2 year old car I’d have no problem but a 5 year old with no warranty on it not a chance.

Sure, some drivers are dumb. That's not the car's fault, no car is idiot-proof.

Running out of fuel happens with ICE cars too.
EV owners are far more likely to plan a route and breaks to prevent this happening than ICE drivers who think they can just about make the next service station.

We have only electric cars and drive across the UK. There are loads of points to charge nowadays.

We're looking at buying a second car for similar use later in the year, we'll be looking for electric, but have a decent size drive and can put a home charger in, we will also have the bigger petrol car for longer journeys, European holidays etc (we drive to France and the Netherlands)

‘Secondhand electric cars are fantastic bargains.’

Until you need a new battery….

Because you can charge at home I'd go electric.

We did go on holiday in Yorkshire last year and found charging a bit of a nightmare, we had to hang around in a supermarket carpark for an hour 3 times in the week we were there because there was nothing local to see or do near the charger and the NT place we'd just been to had the electric charger spaces taken up and the beaches we went to had no chargers nearby. If we went to that part of the world again we'd take a petrol car. Same when spending time in Cumbria where my parents live, chargers are difficult to come by at times.

Because some people are dumb and think they can just get another couple of miles out of it when it’s empty
or they get diverted and don’t account for the extra mileage
I have picked up electric cars before that have run out of electric 2 doors away from home because the owner decided to gamble on being able to make it
and once they stop they stop and are so much harder to push than normal cars

Another one echoing the "electric as long as you can charge at home" sentiment.
If you put environmental issues aside, the biggest advantage of EVs for the user I the cheap running costs and that only really applies if you do the bulk of your charging at home. We're saving about £100 per month on fuel since we swapped one of our cars to electric and when mine needs replacing I'll go electric too - we fitted a double charger at home in anticipation of that. But if you are reliant on public chargers for most of your charging it's expensive, and obviously a lot less convenient.
We've had an EV for 3 or 4 years now and we live in a rural area and do lots of long journeys. My DH does over 20 000 business miles per year for starters. We had a few minor niggles when we first got one because you do have to change your mindset a bit when it comes to refuelling but since then it's been absolutely fine. The last time we had to queue for a significant amount of time for fuel was to put diesel in my car at the weekend.
Most of the "horror strories" you read about charging issues are quite frankly, people being stupid. If they shared the same kind of stories with regard to an ICE vehicle people would say "So you ran out of fuel, you're an idiot, I have no sympathy" but failure to recharge your EV in a timely manner is somehow the car's fault. It's not like nobody ever runs out of petrol/diesel. A quick Google suggests that 800 000 people, or 1:7 drivers do so every year, but you don't see them in the press with their sad faces because everyone would recognise that for what it is - user error. And there are now about 76 000 public chargers with over 110 000 charging ports between them in the UK, so no, it really isn't that difficult to find somewhere in most of the country.
No doubt there are some very remote places where it's difficult, but you know what, they probably don't have petrol stations on every street corner either, or cashpoints, or shops. If you are going somewhere out of the way you do have to do a bit of planning around charging, but you do with other things too. Rural life is less convenient than urban living in a variety of ways.
I can't remember the last time we struggled to find anywhere to charge. We don't even look in advance on long journeys these days unless we are going somewhere very out of the way. Obviously there's still room for improvement, which equally obviously will only come if there is a demand, but most parts of the country are reasonably well served now.
But it sounds like the OP will be doing mainly short urban journeys anyway so recharging is unlikely to be a big issue. Provided she has private off road parking and can fit a charger I'd say an EV is likely to suit her very well. I wouldn't recommend one at this stage to anyone who can't reliably charge at home.

Currently the average life of batteries is around 10 years, the cost to buy new batteries between £5k and £15k. Also, if you drive it for 5 years your 10 year old car will have very little resale value because of this.

I was going to go electric for my next car until I saw the problems my father had with his. It wasn’t a year old and needed a new battery and it was quoted around £15k. Luckily for him it was a company car but I could never afford that, I think I’ll wait until the prices drop for batteries.