To not get an electric car?

[Jamesblema]

I was keen to get one as our second car (small-ish run around mainly for DH to do his 25 min commute every week day - we have a larger family car).

My main reasons were the savings on running costs and the benefit to the environment. I figured we could spend 6-8k on the car and then we would save massively on petrol costs. However, taking to the men at our local garage has put me off- they said that electricity costs are almost as much as petrol and repairs on electric cars require specialist mechanics and can be massively more expensive especially when something goes wrong with the battery. They also said that the estimated remaining mileage is often more than you actually have left and you can easily run out of charge and need to stop for over an hour to charge up. The cost of buying a hybrid is putting me off that option too.

So aibu to keep my petrol car at the cost of the environment? Any positive electric car experiences?

If they are available. A full charge still takes approx an hour for most vehicles as I understand it.

Fine if you're tootling about, useless if you have deadlines / travel times to adhere to / kids to get him to bed or what ever where time is of the essence.

That's off
The NEC has the UK's largest ultra rapid charging hub that can charge 30 cars at the same time

www.bppulse.co.uk/going-electric/the-uks-largest-public-ev-charging-hub-nec-birmingham

I've been driving electric for around 6 yrs now, average around 10'000 miles a year, would never go back

We have had an EV since June last year.

Everyone in house prefers it to the ICE car which can go days between uses (but is still needed for those uses) as it is just so easy to drive.

Plug it in overnight and it charges at 7.5p per kwh and we get on average around 3-3.5 miles per kwh depending on time of year and driving style (ds get much less mileage than I do and in the summer it is more).

A £3 overnight charge will give us 120 - 140 miles (we keep charge between 20%-80% so we have a bit more range in there available for longer journeys if we need it). We charge twice a week.

I think your driving needs are important to your decision. We don't do many long journeys, my work is only 20 miles away. Occasionally I go to the office in Edinburgh, 70 miles each way, and that is fine on one 100% charge - with the advantage being if you get stuck in traffic it consumes less power crawling than it does at speed. We would use the ICE car for any rare longer journeys we do as we are not confident with charging away from home at unknown chargers.

Servicing is cheaper £88 for last service. Insurance is higher £275 -> £440 (but insurance prices have also jumped so not sure how much of that is because EV)

Added bonus is we run the dishwasher, washing machine, and ds gaming until 3am(!) overnight too at 7.5p electricity rate.

I love my Nissan leaf. It's a 16 plate, 25,000 miles, I bought it in September.
Due to its age fully charged it shows 70 mile range which is more than enough for me.
If I was to primarily charge at a commercial charging point it would cost around the same as a diesel but I plug into a 3 pin socket in the garage once I'm down to 20% and the car charges overnight.
I'm averaging 500 miles per month, comparing bills for the same months 22/23 it's costing on average £25/£30 per 500 miles. It was costing that near enough weekly with my old car.
I pay no road tax.
My insurance is £100 cheaper than the equivalent for my previous diesel car.

As far as repair costs go, there's not a huge amount of things to go wrong bar brakes, suspension etc.
I got the car from an independent specialist who can replace individual cells in the battery if/when they fail rather than the whole battery.
It's an absolute no brainer as our second car and it doesn't mind the short stop/start journeys that caused problems with my diesel.
The key as with any used car is finding a seller that you trust.
If you're in the northeast of England I know just the guy.

I'm changing my car and absolutely won't get an electric car for environmental reasons. The lifecycle impact of an electric car and battery is awful for pollution. Plus extra road damage as they're heavier. Plus they're lethal in car parks being so quiet, I've nearly been run over several times by an electric car I couldn't hear.

The impact of all the current electric car batteries needing to be disposed of in a few years will be shocking on the environment. The mining for the components is also terrible, but fine as long as it isn't anywhere geographically near us, right? 🙄

We had one as a company car and I found it stressful as it can say you have 30 miles left but you don’t really and it will suddenly change and I never really trusted it. Also stopping to charge it can take ages, more so as electric cars get more popular as the chargers are often taken so you have to wait or they’re broken so you’re looking for somewhere. It’s really not good when you have unexpected trips. I also wouldn’t buy one second hand for the reasons you said.

I would not have anything other than electric now but it depends on what you're using it for.

I am using mine for school runs and very short distances to and from work.

The range I get is less than the advertised range but the accuracy of the miles left on the guage is very accurate. I've never run out of charge and have run it down to 1 mile left!

You cannot rely on there being chargers whilst out and about. They are very commonly out of order or in use (or a petrol car is parked in the charging spots as they are commonly nearer the entrances for places)

If you keep it charged up at home it's fine. I tend to just plug it in whenever I'm at home. I would never drive anywhere assuming I can charge it there because that could be disastrous.

The costs are cheaper than petrol but maybe not by as much as you would think.

I have never had it in the garage in all the years I've had it. There's no real engine so nothing to go wrong. The only thing I top up is the wiper wash.

The main advantage for me is the car is SO pleasurable to drive. It's no harder than driving a dodgem. Foot down to go, foot off to stop. No clutch, no gears, no revs. It's like driving for dummies. So easy. And the drive is so smooth. I get nausea now when I go anywhere in a petrol car.

If I had to rely on it for driving on holidays, long commutes etc I would NOT get one. For short city drives or school runs they're a winner.

We've got one and we love it. It costs only a few quid to "fill up". We drove it to the north east and back yesterday. Had to stop once to top up the electric but it literally
Took 5 minutes as we only needed a bit of charge to get us home. Even a full tank of charge would have taken 30 minutes to fill.

Having said that I may not buy one unless it was a good price (ours is lease) as I've heard the batteries have a relatively short shelf life.

We do love it though.

If the deterioration in the battery life in my mobile phone is anything to go by, there's no way I'd buy a battery car and expensive battery replacements down the line.

Something else to look out for - parking charges while charging the car!

We just got an electric car 3 wks ago and have just been on holiday. We got home to a parking fine as it seems we went in a private car park to charge the car and should have bought a parking ticket too! I’ve checked reviews for the location and loads of people have been caught out with this 😡. It never occurred to us to check parking charges!
The other trouble we had was that at 2 places the charging points had been vandalised and the cables stolen.

However, we have changed our tariff at home with Octopus and now get electricity overnight at 7p / kwh so it’s really cheap to charge the car at home.

I'd go hybrid after reading this.

www.consumerreports.org/cars/car-reliability-owner-satisfaction/electric-vehicles-are-less-reliable-than-conventional-cars-a1047214174/

Mechanics aren't massively keen on EVs - they're not very keen on changing their business models and retraining! Also local garages won't have had that much experience of EVs. I wouldn't trust much of what they say and I'd ask people who actually own EVs.

We have two - there's not a chance that we would ever go back to ICE cars.

I often drive the length of the UK or across France. My rest stops are generally less than 10 mins…….

Did he not find the massive BP super fast charger bank at the NEC? Where 180 cars can be charged simultaneously?

Or any one of the loads of chargers in and around Birmingham?

We're an entirely EV household and do long drives frequently, and have never had an issue. Even in the far flung areas of Cumbria/the north York moores.

I don't think this matches what other reports have found.

It's about as much rubbish as them bursting into flames - which as it happens is far more likely to happen to ICE cars. It's just that EVs are more 'newsworthy'.

Replaced the sensible diesel family wagon with a petrol
in December because there wasn’t a single electric alternative that worked for us.

They really aren’t expensive now, because the bottom has dropped out of the second hand market for electric cars, so dealers are keen to sell them. Next year, electric car owners will have to pay the equivalent of road fund licence, which they don’t currently.

Yes particulates from tyres. Very heavy, ruining the roads. Huge amount of minerals and metals to make. The electricity mostly requires fossil fuel to make. Have a friend with a nissan leaf. He also has a Citroen sitting in the garden where, the batteries went on it. That one used to cost a fortune to charge. He now has solar panels. Hates it for long journeys,chargers broken,big queues. Of course the garages will bring them into line,to make money. DH was a motor vehicle technician. 4 years ago, they had one tech who was trained on the electric vehicles. He said he would never have one. If we could afford it,he said he would go self charging hybrid.

Nope, because that only went live in September 23, so wasn't a thing when we went! There were a handful of chargers around the site, all the speedy ones were either broken or in use.

He had tried NINE places on the journey down from Leeds and had an event to get to. He later found a McDonald's with a charger, but again it wasn't that fast and he eventually made it home very late that night.

As per the PP, that only went live in Sept 23 so is after this trip.

I love my Ioniq 5. Have had it for two years and no issues with charging. Just check on the charging site app when I’m going long distances to know where I can charge quickly. I had a diesel car before and I will never go back to a fossil fuel car unless I absolutely had no other choice.

Well of course the mechanics don't want you buying one!

We got an EV as our second car and I absolutely love it. So zippy and smooth to drive. Our SUV now feels like a tank by comparison.

I also just leave it plugged in at home on a regular slow charge, and this mostly does the trick for our purposes.

EV enthusiast here. Currently on my third Musk Mobile.

First thing? Please forget the absolute bollocks that an EV is "better for the environment", it isn't. The Carbon footprint of an EV is fucking enormous and none of them will last more than 10 years because nobody is going to pay 10k to replace the battery on an eight year old car. So all the current ones will last half as long as an ICE car. They are apparently designing ones with different batteries, supposedly cheaper, but those new batteries can't be retrofitted to existing EV's. If you like the idea of an EV, go for it, but don't kid yourself that you're saving the Polar Bears by driving one.

I am a tech head so that's why I drive one.

If you don't have a home charger then you won't save any money in "fuel" costs over a regular car, so there's that to think about.

Stated range is just a suggestion, in reality you will reliably get half the range, and maybe a bit more if you're light on the throttle and never carry passengers, luggage, use the heating, Air-Con, or drive against the wind.

Look up Zap Map or similar and map out the chargers in your area, it will help you to decide if an EV is viable without home charging. Most are free late at night so you could just time your charging then if that applies to you.

They are a different league to an ICE car to drive, torque is instant and can catch you out if you're not used to it, especially on wet roads. Braking is mostly just foot off and let the regeneration take over, so you don't really have to use your brake pedal often, almost never in town.

Tyres are EV specific and 30% more expensive than "ordinary" ones.

You will use the heated seats to warm you up, not the cabin heater, even the Tesla heater is a bit pants and the drain on the battery just isn't worth it.

I think they are so much fun to drive though, like being in your own Sci-Fi movie! My car feels like a space ship!

Insurance will be a killer though, MAHUSIVE premiums, so factor that in as well.

We got a second-hand e-Golf a couple of years ago as our running around car (and in practice the one we both drive most). It’s brilliant. Very easy to drive; cheap to charge at home on the overnight tariff; range is fine (max 144 miles - down to 90ish if it’s well below freezing - but that’s more than enough for school and office commuting). We’ve got a diesel family car for long distance stuff. The only maintenance issue so far was an intermittent fault on the charging socket, but the local VW garage got that sorted quickly and it wasn’t too expensive.

Big question I guess is when we’ll take the plunge and make our second car electric … feels like the national charging infrastructure probably isn’t quite there yet, but it might be in the next few years when we sell our current diesel.

If an EV suits your lifestyle then they are great.

If you can charge at home on a smart meter they are massively cheaper to run than petrol.

Servicing generally cheaper as there are less bits to service.

Range on them is getting better all the time, and if you are planning to use it as second car runaround it'll be absolutely fine.

And, despite what petrolheads will claim, over the course of the lifecycle of a car EVS are undeniably greener than ICE equivalents.