What type of car would you buy? Petrol or electric?

[EverydayImPuzzling]

If you needed to replace your car now, would you go for petrol, hybrid or electric? I only need a runaround hatchback, not interested in expensive badge cars. My main priority is reliability. Electric would work for me practically but I’m worried that with my low annual mileage (c. 3k a year) the saving in petrol cost wouldn’t make up for the extra few £££s I’d have to spend to buy it in the first place.

Plan to buy in cash, second hand, and run it into the ground.

@Oblomov22 yes I would potentially go for hybrid and that Hyundai does sound fun! I don’t really have a budget yet, as I don’t have to hand my company car back until January 2023 so I’m just starting to look at options, consider budget, establish what’s good value etc.

If I had to put a figure on it I don’t really want to be spending more than £15k and ideally no more than £12k, however there is room to stretch the budget beyond both those figures if it made sense. I haven’t bought a car since 2016 when I spent £5k on my first car, a Seat Ibiza which was great fun, but then I sold it when I got a new job a couple of years later and haven’t needed to buy a car since (DH has company car too).

Petrol

Definitely petrol. We do low mileage and tend to buy a new small car and keep for 10+ years. I've done the number crunching and petrol would have to massively increase in price for it to work out cheaper for us to buy electric.

I'm also concerned about buying a keyless vehicle as they tend to get nicked round here

Well for that healthy budget you would get a fabulous 2nd hand low mileage hybrid.

I'm not ready for an electric car , the infrastructure here isn't good enough and I'm hearing mixed reviews . I know three people who've recently bought electric and all of them now say if it wasn't for the fact their partners had petrol they wouldn't have bought them . Less mileage between charges was one reason and nervousness of arranging journeys around charging units another , in fact one charging unit was broken .

@Wykid

I bought an electric corsa

Best thing I did. It’s cheaper to run and much better for the environment

With a price difference of between £6 & £10 k