Electric vehicle

[SallyAny]

Hi, need to make a decision this week on buying a new car…. Probably ford puma but can’t decide whether to go electric or not! Don’t do many long journeys, 3/4 times a year - is it worth it financially after charger installation? Mileage usually 11/12,000 a year. Thank you 🙏

No idea I’m afraid, but my neighbours have electric cars and the one thing I hate is the ugly charging station on the front of their houses. One runs a wire out from inside their garage, so that’s what I’d look at doing if I HAD to have one.

Ford were giving free chargers (and 10k miles of electric) with their EVs, might be worth checking out?

Go electric, I’ve just swapped to an EV, I was spending £50 a week on petrol, now I get 7p a KWh, and 4 miles per kWh, and they’re so nice to drive. I have a charger, cost £1k, means I can charge on cheap night rates, I plug the car in, tell the app how much I want to charge and it gets me the cheapest overnight rate. I can’t see me ever going back to petrol.

Yes, I’ve seen others where cable goes right in front of the house, I have an electrician friend who will channel it in… costs a bit more but need it to look neat!

I spend about £50 too … how much do you think you spend a week now? Thanks

Thanks, had a look but think they’ve replaced that with the EV grant

Brilliant- I wouldn’t ever go back. Charge for about £20 once a week. Use a supercharger for a longer journey. You just feel so….. clean ✨

We went electric this time last year. We’ve done just 8000 miles which has cost us around £150 in home charging plus about £57.47 at Tesla, when we’ve been at DS2’s and needed to charge to get home. I love my EV, we won’t be going back.

Ford's have wet belts. Don't touch them!

It's definitely worth it if you have a home charger. We're still waiting to have one fitted and so far we've spent £48 on charging in 10 days on public chargers. But it's all about the infrastructure. We have 6 chargers within 4 minutes of our house. The nearest and cheapest 2 don't work (something to do with the internet signal strength). Then there are 2 22kW chargers and 2 50kW chargers in the public car park. You have to be careful because the conditions say that you must pay for parking, and the fast chargers have a maximum stay of 1 hour, but the slower chargers allow 3 hours. So you have to make sure you've read all the conditions before you charge to avoid a FPN.

The £48 I have spent would have been £5.46 if we had a home charger.

Charging on public chargers seems to be about the same price (there or there about) as buying petrol/diesel.

Charging at home on a standard tariff is about half that.

Charging at home overnight with a smart meter and on an ev special tariff is just over a tenth of the price of petrol.

So from that angle, theyre much cheaper to run.

Go through tyres a bit faster. Insurance can be a lot more. So worth checking out. Servicing costs lower. Need plugging in pretty regularly. Never have to stand at a petrol station filling a tank in the pissing rain.

We have a home charger and it saves us a fortune, plus we now get cheap electricity over night to use it to do the dishwasher and heated airer etc. I also didn’t realise how much extra I was spending at petrol stations when I filled up. A chocolate bar/coffee/can etc. plus extra if the kids are in the car soon adds up. We rarely charge on public chargers unless on a long journey and in that case, we’d have stopped anyway.

About £5 on charging in a week, I have switched to an EV tariff which has increased my day time charges for electricity a little, but I’ve also got solar and a battery so in the summer I’m only paying the standing charges.

We’ve saved a fortune with ours, I do about 350 miles a week, previously around the £60 mark to fuel up.
we charge most nights , as it’s heavily reduced on a British Gas EV tariff, between 12-5am.
We only charge up to 80% as recommended by the manufacturer, we’ve an VW ID4, technically on paper we should get around 300 miles from it, I get about 230 on 80% charge. We’ve had it since May, only used an out of home charger once just as a test to see what it was like.
It’s drastically more expensive than charging at home.
We spend about £8/9 on charging a week (350 ish miles) it’s about the same as petrol to charge in an out and about point (unless you subscribed and get it discounted).

With my home charger and octopus go I would say uts £1 or less to do 40 miles. You need to have a smart meter installed to get any of the cheap night ti.e tariffs.

I went electric, I wasn't sure so I leased one for 6 months and now would never go back to petrol or diesel. I love driving it and charging at home.
My range is over 300 miles if full and I have never struggled to find or use a charger on the few times I have needed to charge away from home.
According to my app I have spent £998 charging this year which would have been £1700 in petrol

Don’t think the EV has a wet belt?

The OP said was "thinking about going electric."

ICE versions of the puma have a wet oil pump belt . . .

Our tariff is intelligent octopus which is a fixed price of £30 per month for all electric car charging regardless of how often it's plugged in. Given we do about 1500 miles a month, this is considerably cheaper than fuel.

We went electric about 18 months ago. I would never go back to ICE.

We plug in overnight and a full charge costs £3.50. When you are out and about public charging does cost about the same as petrol but then we only go on journeys long enough to need that a couple of times a year.

Insurance is not that much more on my brand new Volvo than it was on my 7 year old Nissan. We pay £350 for the year.

We save a fortune and have no regrets.

The only time it has been a pain is when we went to Scotland and the chargers weren’t working at the place we stopped to charge which resulted in a detour and having to hang around. And in the summer when we went to the Lake District and had to wait for a charger because they were all in use. But new chargers are being put in everywhere all the time. We nearly always just charge at home which is cheap and convenient

We got ours in the summer and are planning a deliberate trip to test out how public chargers work as we have not needed one yet

at 12000 miles a year, assuming say 4miles per kWh and 7p per kWh ( octopus energy nighttime rate) would be £210

at petrol engine at 50 miles per gallon and 1.35 per litre is £1458 in costs for the same mileage meaning that including the install cost of the charger you would be in profit at the end of the first year

your long trips might mean that you just break even in year 1

I was in the same boat and ended up testing how an EV would fit my routine by planning a couple of pretend trips through www.smartevroute.com/ . It helped me see that short, local driving hardly made a dent in the battery, and the odd longer run was easy to map out. If you’ve got home charging, the day‑to‑day side feels pretty simple, and the stop‑start stuff is way smoother than in a petrol car.