Please tell me about your electric car

[Partey]

I’m beginning to seriously consider an electric car.

my commute will soon increase to a 30 mile round trip, 4 times per week. Occasional trip to sports clubs and stuff after school and weekend spent doing maybe 30/40 miles per day Sat&Sun.

it’s just cost me 73.00 to fill up my 1.0 litre VW, and at the minute I’m spending around 210/260 per month on fuel.

my budget would only allow for a Zoe or Leaf, and by my calculations I would at least half that even doing each gill charge at home(although my new employer will install charge point too which would be free). It feels like a no brainer has anyone made the switch with similar commute/current costs who can actually tell me they’re better off?

We've got two electric cars. DH is on his second one as he has a long commute. I've got a Zoe as I didn't want a big car and most of them are big.

The range is 240 miles, we have a charger at home but neither of us need to charge every day so we work it out between us. It is of course much cheaper to travel. We just went away with my sister and our families. From the same place, to the same place. It cost us £30 there and back and her family £180.

Something doesn’t add up there. That quantity of fuel will probably take you 1100-1200 miles in your small VW. From your description of your usage you don’t do anywhere near that?

@Shade17 my current commute is around 20 miles but can travel in the community for my work so it does vary hence the vague nature of numbers. I used my banking app to pin point petrol spends over the last 3 months and monthly spends fall between £210&£250

I’ve had this car since last April and have done 13.5k so definitely at least 1k per month. Sometimes more sometimes less.

@ScootsMcHoy can I ask about your Zoe battery pls? Is it leased? I worry that my budget of 10k will only allow for older model with battery lease, with my mileage that would be too much per month

That’s OK then, I was going to suggest maybe a problem with the car! It’s worth calculating the actual MPG you’re getting brim to brim along with the cost per mile. This is useful to calculate the potential savings of an EV.

Hi! My commute is the same as yours: 15 miles each way. I usually do it x5 a week. My car is a Mercedes EQA 250. When it's fully charged its range is 230 miles. I love that I never have to fill up at a petrol station. Time is money! If you can charge your car at work for free, that's a win win win, I can't see why on earth you wouldn't go electric.

No I didn't lease the battery. I haven't had the car long and it's new because there were absolutely no used cars at all when I was looking. The car market is mad at the moment.

@Shade17 thank you, I do fill to brim each time and always get a telling off from my dad for not manually calculating the MPG. A lot of my driving on weekends is motorway driving, but during week it’s shorter journeys.
my employer having a charge point fitted will probably clinch it for me

@ScootsMcHoy this is part of my thinking too, I’ve had my used VW just over a year and even though I’ve added 13k miles I’ll get my money back if I sell now. It’s barmy!

@cheapskatemum ah I wish I could stretch to that budget! I was looking at the electric minis today online too but I want to avoid any borrowing hence the low budget. I think I’ve got some research to do

DD has a Corsa, she charges it free at work. No complaints about the car itself. It was around £25K

Oh sorry I just saw your buying a second hand, ignore me, maybe next time though because the second hand market will be flooded with EVs in 3/4 years

I do around 500 miles a month (lots of short journeys rather than a few long ones) and charge the Zoe about once every 8 days.

I was very fortunate in that I had a limited edition Smart 4+4 car to part exchange. The dealership gave me a brilliant price for it, so my monthly payments on the EQA aren't too bad. It took me a while to get used to driving a big car again though! Hope your research throws up something that's right for you.

Also, I hire the Zoe through a car subscription service (Onto). Charging, insurance etc. are included in the price.

I have a leaf on a lease deal and it’s fabulous for lots of small journeys. Overall range is less than listed but if you can charge at work then less of an issue for you. I have an overnight tariff and solar panels so it only costs a few quid to charge.

I'd still question your petrol usage and cost. Which car do you have? I have a Skoda citigo, which is the same as a VW Up! and it costs me just under £60 to fill up and I get 400 miles for that so 15 p a mile.

You're spending £230 on around 1100 miles, so about 21p a mile, so substantially more fuel use in a similar car.

It does sound like you might benefit from an electric car but how quickly you benefit depends on how much it costs to change your car.

I have a Kona, it's got a range of 300 miles and does that even with a heavy load. I am not a car person but I love this car!

I've got an i3. Second hand but only about 5k on the clock when I got it. On PCP.
I commute about 39mile round trip 5 days a week. Have a 150ish mile range. Charge daily in winter to keep the battery topped up and every other day in summer.
DH has a plug in hybrid VW. Together we spend about £100 a month on electricity for the house and the cars.
I'll never go back to a petrol/diesel car. I absolutely love my i3!

You're going to buy a whole new car to offset fuel costs?

I mean, sure, if I bought a brand new Tesla (ugh), I'd save money on petrol... and lose a shedload on being dumb enough to buy a new car at RRP.

I think look at driving habits first. I have a Fiesta 1.4L from 2011, and I get over 60 MPG driving in it most days. Though my commute is also about 15 minutes.

Also, love that EVs are kicking off as we move into an era of rolling blackouts being a common thing in the West. The Californians are having fun dealing with an influx of rich people buying (mostly) Teslas and then having to deal with power going down in summer.

Our grid isn't capable of dealing with EVs. Look to getting a hybrid and, well, not driving as much if you don't need to.

I'm not in the U.K., but have a 2016 Zoe with a battery lease (which means the car is cheaper to buy). It has a range of around 100km in summer and 90 in winter (colder winters here than UK). Its previous owner did a 70km round trip commute and charged it every night. I don't use it to commute but do a shorter trip (25km round trip) 3 times a week, plus shopping, the odd visit to friends, etc. We use it for as many local trips as possible - DH still has a petrol car.

I had to replace my 17-year-old car and the Zoe cost €6,000 in a private sale last summer - about the same as a similar petrol car would have cost. They are going for a bit more now though! It had approximately 60,000km on the clock. I could have bought the battery for an extra €3,800 but we didn't have that much spare cash, so I pay €59 a month for the battery lease, which is about the same as I paid for fuel in the old car. At the time of purchase the cost for a full charge on overnight electricity was around €2, although I usually charge it from a third to half full so it's done in the 8 hours of cheaper rate. I haven't checked what it costs now. When I first got it I didn't even notice a change in my electricity bill, because the charge was just part of normal fluctuations such as using the tumble dryer or oven. In recent months my electricity bill has increased by about €20 a month, but that's got more to do with the increase in electricity costs than charging the car. In my opinion it was a good time for me to get an electric car - petrol would definitely be costing more now!

@BarbaraofSeville I drive a Polo. It’s looked after, serviced etc. next time I fill up I’m going to manually calculate the MPG. I drive sensibly and my think blue thingy tells me so 😆

@Liebig my new job is further away, mostly dual carriageway and my current car is paid for. I will get back what I paid for it just over a year ago, maybe even slightly more hence the serious consideration of electric. I’ll also be driving at times for my new job and they plan to add charge points when we move into a new building which is being built at the moment. I can’t reduce use any further, my wfh is being offset by using my car during business hours when I’m required to.

That’s fair then. If you can basically swap your car for the EV with minimal extra cost, makes more sense. Have you factored in the home charge station cost or is that part of the deal?

@Liebig the CEO of Octopus believes that is completely wrong and that EV charging could actually be a way of bringing costs down for the general population. He did an interview for Fully Charged recently where he explains it in depth and it's very interesting.

As it stands now, there is simply no way the UK grid can support even a fraction of the British car fleet moving to electric along with the move to heat pump based central heating. The amount of power being supplied by gas as I type this right now is 48% of total power usage (17 GW).

The old coal plants still around or using "renewable biomass" fuel (wood chips from American forests) like Drax have been given a stay of execution for now because of the Ukraine situation. But once they are mothballed, we'll need to replace them somehow. Probably with more gas, since it is by far the most prevalent fuel in our grid mix. Any off-set with wind turbines (I'm ignoring solar which is more or less negligible at this latitude) ignores that 1) the wind doesn't always blow, 2) we have no form of storing that wind energy for any reasonable amount of time.

The North Sea is declining in output, which is why we went from stopping exporting oil and gas in 1999 to importing more to deal with our shortfall in 2005. That means more oil and gas will be needed to offset those decline rates, even as we move to EVs. Cars, however, make a very small use case for hydrocarbons. It's HGVs that we need to worry about, and they're not going electric any time soon.

This is all a tad academic since to even replace the vehicles on the road with EVs, we'd be using twice the global annual output of cobalt, nearly all of the global production of neodymium, and 3/4 of all lithium production globally. This at a time when every other major economy will be trying to do the same. There simply aren't enough resources at cheap prices to enable this transition for Octopus' CEO to even worry about more EV tariffs.

I guess if one can afford it, go for an EV, provided you aren't blowing more money on the purchase than you would on petrol. But not everyone is going to manage that, and not with the price of lithium going up triple digit percentage points (up five fold) since January. Most people are just going to not be able to drive, and the fuel costs for those that don't will still be bad news for them since diesel powers our world. It was £1.86 when I drove past my local forecourt tonight.