Would you buy a electric car?

[ghtt]

So I need a car for my new job after only having one car that my husband uses, I can only drive a automatic, so debating a electric car, would you get one?

Yes, we've got two.

We've got a home charging point.

My daily commute is 25 miles and my car has a range of 180-240 miles (winter-summer).

DH works away. He drives 150 miles to work each week. His car has a range of 220-280 miles.

We've been to France and Belgium in the one with the smaller range. With the one with the larger range we've done plenty of U.K. longer distance trips. Never had an issue. France was easy.

Charging out and about is not as cheap as it was. But if you have a home charger, you'd probably rarely use public charging. I probably only use it 2 or 3 times a year. However, DH uses it every week.

My last charge at home cost me £1.50. That was for 2.5 hours of electric and added 70 miles to my car range.

I love driving both our EVs. We had a petrol courtesy car the other week. I hated it!!! So clunky, noisy and unresponsive. Driving EVs is a much nicer experience all round.

There's only one thing that would deter me. No driveway for overnight charging? No EV. But then, quite frankly, if you've no driveway or garage you're not really properly able to accommodate an ICE vehicle either - you're just freeloading of the neighbourhood and clogging up the street.

Have you seen the footage of the people who mone the lithium for the batteries? And yes, I know its also in mobiles phones and tablets before someone tells me Im not a good enough doo-gooder!

Unfortunately by 2030 everyone will have no choice but have an electric car

DD has a Zoe with 3 DC, charges at home with solar panels. Nearly cost-free motoring. I'm getting an EV6 next message month and can't wait. It will depend on how you use a car, what other vehicles you have, whether you can home charge etc.

I can't see it.
People living in terraced streets or in flats or on HMOs etc etc.

It's an idiotic pipedream dreamt up by a moron to think everyone can convert to electric vehicles.

I wish everybody drove them. I am SO sick of selfish assholes who drive around in cars with exhausts like giant canons. I don’t know how they get away with it. I’m right near a main road and all I hear night and day is the screeching and exploding from these stupid exhausts. How are they not illegal? They literally wake me up at night.

Sorry to hijack the thread, but god it pisses me off. As if this country is crowded and noisy enough.

Why not go hybrid that way you have benefir of electric for shorter journeys and for longer ones whilst your electric might do 40 miles if it didn't then the petrol would kick in. Also not beholden to needing to stop and charge as petrol kicks in.

I just changed my car due to ulez coming in, I stuck with petrol as even a hybrid is beyond my reach. however in 10yrs ill probably go hybrid first and then fully electric depending on how far long infrastructure has got to in terms of charging points and the price of an ev.

No. From 2030 no new pure ICE cars can be sold, but hybrids still can, and there will still be lots of second hand conventional cars around for years after that.
After 2035 hybrids are out too, but the legislation says that cars sold after this date must be "alternatively fuelled" so no more ICEs but that doesn't necessarily mean lithium ion batteries or even battery electric at all. The technology is coming on at a fair pace so by the time all the ICE powered cars are gone I would imagine there will be other options to the current types.

If you can charge at home, yes. Perfect for short commute.

We've had a long range Tesla for a couple of years and I was sceptical at first but now love it. But that's sole car and we need to be able to drive 300 km fairly often and 750 km occasionally (not UK) with 5 people, dog and kit.

If EV is second car, you could have a nippy little one.

I always find it interesting on these threads that there are two groups of people. Those that say that they have one and love it, and those that say their neighbour/mother/friend has one and hates it.

My neighbour has a Tesla and often drives to Switzerland in it. This used to cost him £750 in petrol and now it’s almost nothing.
I have a VW id3 and commute in London.

We may buy a small one as a second car for local journeys but we are buying a newer large diesel as a main car at the moment as we need it for towing a caravan. The infrastructure isn't good enough even if we bought a large EV suitable for towing as we would likely have to charge up on the way to our destination, not something I would want to do with a caravan on the back, also the weight would bring down the mileage making this more likely.

Maybe you should have bought a different house then, only a fool buys a house next to a main road and expects peace and quiet

Tesla does not source cobalt from the Congo where the dangerous hand-mining happens. I don’t know if other EV manufacturers also avoid buying cobalt from there.

Also meant to say - check out Robert Llewelyn’s fully charged programme - you’ll find lots of reviews of the options and the facts about some of the myths surrounding EVs

We have similar low mileage patterns and we have 1 car for the family, fully electric. Love it. Car cost more than a petrol model but we make it back so fast by not buying petrol. If you get a cheap overnight electricity tariff and only ever charge at night it costs less than £4 to 'fill up' which on our car gives you about 150 miles.

Yes definitely then

It's not nothing though. You still have to pay for the electric and charging stations in garages and service stations aren't that cheap. Not as expensive as fuel, but it's not free.

Id4 here. love it

The Range is great, costs us €6 v €80 to fill, so quiet, drives a dream. We live rural, icey cold winters and no issues at all with range.

These threads come up all the time. Everyone who has one loves it, everyone else has random stories about neighbour Bob who popped 2miles to tescos and ran out of charge so they would never buy one.

For me it's the decrease in tailpipe emissions so hoping to improve local air quality on the short journeys to the kids' activities or dropping them off on the way to school. The types of journeys that make dpfs unhappy...

With intelligent home charging it should save us money too - we'll be getting solar panels and I WFH more than I go in. There's also charging at the local station...

You need to work out if it's worth it to you.

Your mileage sounds right if you commute every day and do enough other trips.

However, like for like, electric cars are vastly more expensive to buy so unless that extra cost is offset by saving petrol then overall it can work out a lot more expensive than a small petrol car. This is what many electric car advocates fail to mention.

I bought a 2 YO small petrol car for £8k, the same car in the electric version was close to £20k and because I only drive about 6000 miles a year, it would take close to a decade for me to save any money with an electric car.

It will work out better if your annual mileage is a lot higher and especially if you can take advantages of tax breaks if its a company car or you're a limited company director but otherwise for many it's not money saving at all.

They are only cheap to charge at home if your smart meter works and you can access a cheaper overnight tariff, our useless piece of junk doesn't give readings to our supplier and energy companies don't change smart meters if you already have one.

Why is it that in these conversations people insist that electric cars are no cheaper to run than petrol ones, when loads of people who actually own electric cars provide evidence that they are much cheaper to run?! And the comments about resources being used to manufacture the cars obviously apply equally to petrol cars.