EV for the main family car

[Ticketybloop]

If you have made the transition to electric for your main family car, how has it been? Do you regret it or are you glad you made the switch?

We have been sorely in need of a new family car as our old diesel is on its last legs. Really wanted to go electric with this one, but with 3 kids and periodic live-in grandparents, we also needed something large and practical. When the Volvo EX90 (aka electric XC90) came out, we took the plunge and ordered one for 2024 delivery.

I am now second guessing our decision and am worried about how we will fare as a family on pure electric. 600km
on a charge seems okay to me, but now we have family members now telling us we will regret it. For day to day use I think it will be great as we can charge in our driveway or garage. We chose electric over hybrid for a number of reasons, and maybe by the time it’s delivered in 2024, the charging infrastructure will be better, but now I am worried we have made the transition too soon.

Would love to hear personal experiences of making the move to EV for your family car if you have done so!

What are you worried about? You will be charging at home and have a massive 600km range.

I just don't see what you are worried about?

@Swimmingpoolsally - do you own an Ev? As frankly that’s all a load of rubbish.

Our large suv costs around €6 to charge 0-100% at home, which is where we charge 99% of the time. It’s -12 here atm, has been for months. Our battery doesn’t run at 30% capacity.

I just am looking for experiences from real families using them; 600km sounds good in theory, but people clearly get less than that in the real world, so I am wondering how much of a lifestyle adjustment it really is if that’s their main mode of transport. 🤷‍♀️

I wonder if some of the horror stories are from older cars with smaller batteries?

@Ticketybloop - the development in range is huge over the years. As an example, the Nissan Leaf is a small ‘city car’.
wiki says:
The Leaf's range on a full charge has been increased gradually from 117 km (73 miles) to 364 km (226 miles)

So 10 years ago, it was found about 1/3 less mileage, as couldn’t really go far.

Our IPace does have a drop in efficiency in cold weather (not horrendous) and it takes slightly longer to charge overnight but it's no where near the problem that many people state. We are in the NE so the temperatures are regularly below freezing in winter. It's not been problematic for us.
Fuel efficiency on ICE cars is similarly affected (12-24% drop) but it's not as obvious as it it with an EV.

Tesla model S range used to be max 265miles (425km) , now less than 10 years later it’s 405miles (650km) - so over 200km increase in a few years

Get a self-charging hybrid. Uses virtually no fuel, cheap as chips. No annoying plug-in.

This weekend I drove from Norwich to London and back again for £30. If that, to be honest.

We've had a Volvo XC40 recharge for a year as the main car and most of the time it's fab but when you need to do a journey longer than its range it's a bloody nightmare. The public charging infrastructure just isn't there at the mo.

We've done two long trips in it which used to take about 4 hours but now take 6 as it usually takes several attempts at various motorway services to find a charger that is available/working. Our problem is compounded by not being able to charge overnight at our destination which means you start the next day needing to charge and whilst fast chargers get you to 80% quickly, 80-100% is at trickle speed so in reality it's not worth charging beyond 80% on a fast charger as you'd be there hours.

Last time we left the motorway to find chargers as that worked out more efficient. McDonald's are usually good for this. Most motorway services have 1 or 2 chargers and even though they now appear to have switched on dual charging (2 cars being able to charge per machine), I've found the speed of the charge greatly reduced e.g., a 50kwh charger only reaching 30kwh.

I love driving it though and am considering changing my petrol car for another EV but just struggling to reconcile myself to the annoyance of a rare longer journey.

That’s a helpful overview, thanks! My neighbours have a Tesla and an XC40 Recharge, and the wife said she vastly prefers the Volvo to the Tesla for everyday driving. They are the ones who helped us make our initial decision to go electric.

I really hope that by the time we take delivery in 2024, infrastructure will be improved enough that we don’t have so many issues like the ones you are describing on longer trips.

I’m really glad to hear the efficiency drops aren’t as bad as some make them out to be. I wonder how many reporting these things don’t actually own EVs themselves and are just repeating what they’ve heard about some of the older tech.

I really like that OTA updates can keep improving the car over time, as hopefully that offsets some battery efficiency losses. The dealer said there was a rumor they might be able to get the range up by a few hundred extra km on a charge in the future.

The drop in range in cold weather is a pretty poor feature of EV cars. My work commute usually takes 25% of battery each way but in the colder weather it's been around 30%. During the big freeze we had before Xmas I decided not to make the trip as the satnav was saying it was going to take 40% each way.

We recently drove back from airport parking and the satnav said we'd be on 3% by the time we got home. By driving sedately on the motorway we ended up on 10% so it is possible to eek it out a bit when needed.

Yes, the cold weather efficiency losses are something I am curious about. What car do you have and how long have you had it?

No way for me. The majority of my driving is at 60 in cold and remote places. In snow drifts the other month there were a lot of abandoned EVs. But if you live in town and only do supermarkets/schools maybe )but probably not).

We have a long range iX so similar size and battery as the main family car.

Once you get used to sticking it on the charger overnight then you don’t think about the battery in day to day driving. I do a lot of motorway driving due to where we live.

Charging for long trips needs to be planned fairly carefully but it’s not insurmountable. If you’re planning to drive London to Newcastle every week then I could see it doing your head in.

We only charge to 80% day to day which is theoretically 260 miles. In normal mild weather we actually get around 220, in very cold weather it’s about 190 ish.

We had been looking at switching to an EV from a PHEV. Maybe the Volvo. But a drive back to Essex from Nottingham, with the sight of 12 cars queuing for the three available chargers (three were out of service) at the services put me off. The infrastructure just isn’t here in the UK yet.

We use our PHEV for either very short (station/ school/ dog outings run) or very long (mostly across France) journeys. Neither of which would particularly improve with an EV. We use a mid-sized petrol car for my work and other trips. Given where we drive to, an electric Volvo sure as hell isn’t going to be doing 600km a charge on stop-start short runs, through the Alps in the snow, or down the autoroute with the air con at full pelt.

DHs car (and main family car) is an EV.

Never had an issue. It's just about journey planning, which as I pointed out, its no bad thing being forced to stop for 30 minutes every 300 miles.

The cold weather thing, certainly in our BMW EV, makes your range drop immediately. Because it has to get the batteries to temperature. As soon as they're at temperature, the range increases again

Even with 4 of us in the car, in freezing temperatures and a fully loaded boot....we still got 300 miles range.

Also, you change how you heat the car, so instead (for example) of heating the car when you're in it, you heat yourself ..so you turn on the heated seat and steering wheel heater, instead of trying to keep the car at 21degrees, you keep your area at that.

DH drives hundreds of miles for work, and now just plans a 30 minute coffee break into his journey, which as I've said previously we should be doing anyway, and makes sure he books hotels with car charging.

That’s interesting, I didn’t know that about the cold and battery! Good tip about using the seat and steering wheel heaters. Do you just have it set up so you can turn those on remotely a few minutes before you get in?

Yes, via an app on his phone. You can pre condition the batteries (I have no idea what this means) and also set it up so it's warm/cool (which is actually amazing when we have that baking heat) so when you get in, it's perfect.
You can set it on timers, so if you know you need to leave at 7am, you just put your departure time and it does everything else.

To be fair, the tech in his car, is amazing. It's all about setting things up to maximize it.

Would I personally move to an EV? Not at the moment, purely because I can't afford to. Not to get the level of car I'd want.

But when I get my payrise and promotion, it's definitely a serious consideration.

For reference, I drive about 30k miles a year, he does easily 40-50k, last week I did 650 and this week he'll be doing 800. So it's not like we just tootle around town

We looked into the pros and cons of pure EV. Our conclusion is that it's not yet a mature enough technology, and the available vehicles wouldn't suit our needs.

We've recently got a second Toyota Corolla hybrid - reasonable priced, decent load capacity, excellent fuel economy, ten year warranty. This is to replace my diesel golf estate.

SUVs seem like they're nearly always going to be dragging round more car than is actually needed to transport people and stuff. Maybe the OP really does need something big but most people don't.

Someone mentioned about batteries losing range in the cold until they were up to temp

Is it possible to get them up to temp
On your driveway whilst plugged in ? - I know our engineers are advised to warm the seats before setting off to save range

This is really good info, thanks. My DH is a tech guy and is super excited about all of the new features these cars can offer. We had been waiting to switch until a good size family car with at least 300 miles of EPA range came on the market, as that’s where we felt we could make do without too much range anxiety. Apparently with this one, the LIDAR ‘invisible shield’ is a safety game changer, both for people inside the car and also outside of it. And you can even power your house using the car in the event of a blackout!

We haul around 7 people (3 kids + grandparents) for between 3-6 months of the year, including on 8 hour road trips, so yes, we do need the space. We also regularly use the car for ski trips, camping, etc. It’s either one big car or two smaller cars for us. DH is happy to cycle to work, so we figured one car to do everything was the better option, both financially and environmentally.

I would have thought with that range you'd be absolutely fine! We have 2 EVs - a Leaf with a 150mile range and a Kia E-Niro with a 250mile range. I do find the Leaf a bit annoying sometimes for longer trips because you have to charge and as others have said, occasionally there's an issue with that (I'm also an over-thinker and I don't like the slightly out of control feeling!). The E-Niro on the other hand is great, rarely needs charging out and about for the kind of trips we do, and when we did a long drive down through France in the summer, 9 times out of 10 charging wasn't a problem (and as others have said, it's actually really nice to stop every few hours to stretch your legs). It's definitely way cheaper than our diesel cars were, and even if the electricity is made in the most polluting way possible (unlikely 100% of the time), you know you're not contributing to urban particulate pollution every time you drive.