Electric car with no charger at home?

[Leafywool]

The lease on our current petrol car is up soon and we need to be looking at a new one. There's some very good deals on EV at the moment and DH is really keen, but me not so.

We live in a terraced house with no drive. We do have access to parking around the back of our house as there's a wide alleyway and houses on our side are allowed to park there. But we live in a Grade 2 listed house in a World Heritage Site so I don't think we could even get a charger installed even if we wanted to as there's lots of restrictions on what we can and can't do. I've never noticed any other houses in this area with one installed so I assume not.

I don't drive the car much at all, only to the supermarket or if I take dd somewhere. DH commutes 12 miles each way Mon & Tues and his office has free charging points in the car park. Outside of this he doesn't use the car much either, usually only to go to suppliers for our business or if we go on a day out (quite rare as DH works weekends too).

Would it be a royal pain in the arse to have an EV with no means to charge at home? There's a Shell station at the top of our street that has just installed loads of charging points and there's loads of other places close by which have charging points (we are on the edge of a city.) DH thinks he could charge at work and it would do us all week. I have no idea!

Would love some opinions

I would stick to petrol if I regularly did long journeys, but if an EV suits your needs, you only do shorter journeys, and you have a home charger it is less faff.

We have a charger next to the driveway and plug it in overnight around twice a week and it costs around £3.50 to charge from 20% to 80% for another 170 miles till I hit 20% again.

Everyone (dh, ds or I) takes the EV when it is free as it is just so comfortable and easy to drive.

Op i have this set up. I'm in a ground floor flat with my car parked right outside my window. The property management company refused to allow me to get a charge point installed inside or outside. I got the car anyway as it was a no brainer cost wise through my work salary sacrifice .
I don't do many miles at all as I work from home so using public chargers isn't a problem. HOWEVER. what I have realised is that with my previous petrol car if i put £40 worth of petrol in I would be able to use £40 worth of petrol.
If i charge my car at a public point and spend £40 I won't get £40 worth of mileage from it. The charge diminishes every day even if im not using the car. I think it's worse in hot weather but I had no idea how much money i would lose this way.

DH has an electric car and he only charges it at work. We can plug it into a normal socket at home if we want but we've only done that once, and frankly it took so long, it wasn't worth the hassle of finding the extension cable.

I wouldn't rely on public chargers only but if he can do it at work I think it'll be fine..

We have an EV as one of our cars which we got in Jan, we haven’t got our home charger installed yet but DH charges for free at work, we use it a lot more than you would distance wise and a full charge lasts us a full week

"There's some very good deals on EV at the moment"

There might be a reason for that.

We are in a terraced house, considered and EV and instead going for hybrid. Charing would be impossible. I can charge at work but again it’s becoming more popular so the charge points are always in use and any long break from work makes this useless. Friend of DPs at work had an ev and said u less you can charge at home don’t bother. 9p per kWh at her home vs up to 60p per kWh elsewhere. Makes it very very expensive

@Leafywool

It depends on where you plan to drive it and how far the battery will take you! Just pottering about with charging nearby or in the office is ok. Going on a 300 mile trip won't be if there's no charging on the way or when you get there. We've had two hybrid cars for this precise reason. Got a petrol safety net! Pottering about - we use the battery. Charging up the road is fine as long as you can get a charging point when you want one. Is cost reasonable? They vary a lot.

We got an electric car a few months ago. We're planning to get a home charger at some point, but I've just been charging at work and that's been totally fine, so we're not rushing to pay for the home charger! We do way more mileage than you, and I still find that one charge a week is fine. Will depend on the range of the car you go for though. Can't imagine us going back to petrol now.

What sort of range does the EV you're planning to get have? My partner's has a range of c.250 miles so only needs charging once or twice a week anyway.

We have an EV (our main car which is used for all long journeys) which we "granny charge" literally on a 3 pin plug and extension cable. We don't have a driveway but can fairly reliably park on the road outside the house. We cover the charge cable so that it isn't a trip hazard. This is completely doable. However if charging at all at home would be impossible I wouldn't do it.

Yes but the point is, fire brigades can’t put an ev fire out like they can an ice fire. If you’re trapped in there, there is nothing they can do. That’s the point. And as these cars become more popular then fires will increase, and as the batteries get older and degrade. It is a real issue. If it wasn’t the manufacturers wouldn’t be trying to solve the problem before it becomes widespread

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-66866327#:~:text=EV%20fires%20also%20create%20a,out%2C%22%20says%20Mr%20Maher.

You’re missing the point. A lot of people don’t understand lithium battery fires are hugely dangerous and will increase as the age of batteries in the roads increases.

an ice fire the fire brigade can control it and get you out. If you’re trapped in a ev where the battery is damaged. It is hugely likely to combust, and if that’s the case, it is also hugely likely the fire brigade will need to sit back and let it burn, they won’t be able to help.

just as the car park right now has young batteries. And hasn’t had so many cars, doesn’t mean we won’t see more and more ev on the roads, with batteries that are starting to age and degrade. And then more and more fires. Even brand new ones are a risk.

https://www.autocar.co.uk/car-news/electric-cars/how-much-fire-risk-are-electric-vehicles#:~:text=A%2520toxic%2520vapour%2520cloud%2520develops,be%2520extinguished%252C%E2%80%9D%2520says%2520Christensen.

I've just bought a new hybrid, and in the salesroom were a couple who were trading in their EV for a hybrid. They lived in a terrace with no off road parking and were finding charging it up very inconvenient because they had to go off and find a local charger . It was a particularly inconvenience in the winter months when the battery use was so much higher. And they commented how expensive charging had become.

My husbands just got a BMW i4
couldn’t fit a charger at our house because of the layout of our driveway

so he got the charger installed at our sons house which is a 5 mins drive away charger and installation was free from BMW

he drives there once a week and charges the car
he times it so when he goes up my son is on his way to work so he drops him back home and then he picks him up in the morning to collect the car

i have a my own car so I could also drop / collect him and he’s got a bus pass and the bus takes 5 mins door to door

it’s a bit of a pain but he’s saving loads in money so he doesn't mind

but we also have loads of charging points including fast chargers with a few mins drive so not a real problem if we had to charge somewhere else

Honestly, I don't see a lot of the real supposed savings in EVs unless you go with a relatively well depreciated car like all those people that got the Audi E-Tron when it first came out and dropped 80% in value in three years.

I get between 60 and 80 MPG in my Fiesta MHEV that cost me all of £12k. To have fuel prices even factor into making a saving any time soon, to say nothing of the insurance and other factors, I'd have to be driving a lot and with the priciest fuel we've seen to make it worth it at all.

The engineers I work with, one who had a BMW i4 and another with a VW ID.3 have interesting takes. The former loves the speed he can get, though laments the BMW gouging (not sure what he expected). The latter could only tell me about how much he wished he could have his old Ioniq back due to the range, weird design choices, and the stupid tyre situation for his company car.

Is it £3 on an EV charger or just essentially on a normal 3 pin plug? I can't see the point in having one for the savings if it's £25 for 150 miles on a rapid charger, that's equivalent to diesel costs.

OP if he can charge it at work for free it might work for you. That's what my EV driving colleagues do (and how they save money by having an EV, they rarely charge at home). The only thing to be wary of is everyone else fighting to use the free chargers. We got to the point at work that it was threatened that there would be a blanket ban on all but the company vehicles using the free chargers because of complaints of people unplugging others' vehicles, who were monopolising the charging points, to use them themselves. It hasn't come to it...yet.

Round me, the companies that have EV chargers are restricting them to fleet vehicles or you have to use a prepaid card you ask for like a fuel stipend. They're not subsidising anyone else's driving habits it seems.

Also, the new Sainsbury's EV chargers that have been in a month have two of the six units out of use already. Don't even think it was vandalism, they just gave up. The car park can easily hold 400 vehicles, so this is a pretty meagre setup.

@ShambalaAnna

The huge price drop is alarming. It appears to be down to battery life worries and lack of power as battery ages.

New electric cars can be very expensive and I'm not going to buy Chinese cars. Running costs should be cheaper and the smug feeling you get from owning one or driving a company one is, of course, priceless!

The biggest problem is charging time and waiting for chargers to be available. Where we are in Cornwall, there are no public chargers within 15 miles. Obviously it's charge at home or bust. The new village car park doesn't have a single charge point. Wrong electricity phase apparently! There are still lots of barriers and DHs new car is petrol.

It's on an EV charger and overnight tariff, we have one fitted at home.
Yes, the raid charging is very expensive, we only use them when we go on a long journey and it's unavoidable.

Do you live in Saltaire by any chance? If so hello, I do too. Either way we don't have a way of charging either by DH just charges it at work every day and it's never been an issue.

Look accidents happen. The truth is you’re safer in a ice vehicle than ev if it comes to a crash, and it is very clear as batteries degrade, and they degrade every single day of ownership, and as more ev are on the roads, that the fires will increase. I understand yoh don’t like the message, I understand it’s uncomfortable, but it is factual. Saying I’m going to increase the risk to my life and take it, to save money is something I cannot fathom.

ev is now primarily driven by fleet sales, private ownership has flat lined, and dealerships are struggling to get them off the forecourt and offering huge discounts to get rid,

Sales have slowed because of shortage of parts from China, which also has been effecting, though not to the same extent, other things like mobile phones.

It took 13 months from ordering to getting our car (work scheme) because of that.

You’re assuming that other people in the office don’t have EVs that need charging!

Rather than get too worried about scare tactics sponsored by the oil industry, this website is very useful https://fullycharged.show/blog/stop-burning-stuff-myth-busting/

Ev owner here. Most evs have a range of 200,+ miles and would pretty much fully charge on a slow charger during the 7 hours your husband is at work so I'd say it's very do-able. Would he have to pay for the charge at work? I think if you always charge on commercial chargers then the cost per mile becomes more equal to petrol.