To ask if you'd buy an electric or petrol car in these circumstances?

[minniecoop]

I'm looking to buy a 2 to 5-year-old old car. I work from home, and the car will mainly be used for short local journeys on the weekend. Maybe once or twice a year I will travel 100 miles to see family, but I'm more than happy to stop off to charge the car and have some lunch, etc. I have a driveway and so I can charge the car at home.

I'm really not sure whether to go for electric or petrol. Petrol is obviously more familiar as it's all I've known, and as I drive so little I've never really noticed or been bothered by fuel costs. I would fill my car up with a tank of petrol and it would last me weeks. I'm looking at MINI Coopers specifically.

Would you go with an electric car or buy a petrol car for (probably) the last time before they're no longer made?

My DS and his wife bought an electric car with the plan to have the second car petrol driven.

Two years down the line they have changed the second car to electric too as it is so much cheaper and have found no inconvenience in charging.

They do have solar panels and a charging point.

Electric definitely. Yet again there is some nonsense being spouted on here about the UK not being ready.
You won’t run out of charge down a country lane any more than you wouldn’t run out of petrol. Absolutely absurd!
The range of our car is over 300 miles and we don’t have a home charger, depending where you live they might not be necessary. Our council working with a firm have installed loads of on street lamp charging points. We live in a terraced house and it’s not an issue. It’s so easy where I live.
OP you will find most posters who have an EV will say it’s fine, people who don’t own one post all the negative crap.
You will defo have a bit of range anxiety at first but you get over it pretty quickly.

Why on earth do you think you would end “stuck down some country road with no charger for miles”?

Do you often completely run out of petrol and find yourself stuck down a country road with no petrol station for miles? Or do you plan ahead and make sure you have enough fuel for your journey, factoring in stops for fuel if needed?

OP, it is true that some areas have more chargers than others. But like PPs have said, if you can charge at home then it’s not an issue for your day-to-day journeys, and for your occasional longer journeys then as long as you choose your EV carefully then it could comfortably do a 100mile journey there and back without needing charging. And there will almost certainly be public chargers somewhere en route on a journey of that length.

I think the main consideration would be cost: EVs are certainly cheaper to run, but more expensive to buy, and so it depends on whether you think that extra cost is worth it.

(We have 2 EVs and we love them!)

Another vote for electric here. Never had a problem charging it (although only need to do this on 250 + mile journeys). We have 2 now and are about to trade first one in and get a 3rd. Charging through solar panels or at night is great value.
There are upfront costs (charger 1k +) but you can keep using it for future cars too.

We have an electric car and have not had any problem with charging it. We go on long journeys at least four times a month.

We have a drive and can charge at home. It costs just under £1000 to have the charging point put in at home (so you need to factor this in).

However, overall not only have our monthly car costs decreased significantly but our electric costs have as well. Even though we use more electricity each month (than before we had an electric car) as we run our dishwasher, washing machine, etc. at night the costs are much lower (as we have a cheap rate from 11:30pm).

If you’re mainly charging at home, an electric car could be really good. We have an EV and an ICE car. The EV is used for all day to day stuff, we can charge it for super cheap overnight so it’s far more economical and second-hand EVs are quite often now similarly priced to ICE equivalents, so the initial outlay isn’t necessarily bigger. In fact we weren’t considering an EV until I saw it was the same price as the ICE models I was looking at, and ran the numbers on how much we would save on petrol and then it became a no-brainer. Do budget in the charger too, around £1000 for supply and install. But if you’re on an EV energy tariff, all your usage overnight is cheap, not just the EV, so it’s great for other stuff too. I time my washing to go on at 5am!

We use the ICE car for long family holiday journeys as it’s a bigger car in general, but the EV is much nicer to drive! Very quiet and smooth.

Ours has a range of about 180 miles (capable of more but I’m not very economical on the acceleration and like to drive at 70!) and can be fully charged at home overnight so we’ve only ever charged away from home a couple of times.

Honestly wouldn’t be buying a 5 year old electric car. Most (of the ones I looked at) have a 5 year or 100000km battery warranty and the cost to replace if if they go is astronomical.

Electric with those parameters, without a doubt.
We have one full electric and one old ICE car which I keep hoping will die so I can justify a second EV. We almost never use the ICE. It feels like a dinosaur compared to the EV.

We've had an EV with a home charger for 18m. Like a pp, we queued for a charger once, and we struggled a bit with slow chargers at my sisters house until we worked out that there was a fast charger down the road. Now DH goes out for a coffee and charge up first thing.

We also have a petrol car that we use mainly for multi stop beach trips - long drive to get there and lots of miles away from fast chargers while we're there. That sort of thing just isn't workable at the moment but I'm sure it will be soon.

Im not a big driver but do quite a lot of local miles, ive gone from spending about £100/month on petrol to about £20/month on extra electricity.

In your circs I would definitely go electric.

Nope will be buying one of the final new petrol or diesel cars and keeping it going I guess. I drive miles every day as a carer going to the most rural communities and wouldn’t be able to do it in an electric car. No off road parking here. So far we have two measly charge points in the whole of town. No plans for anymore. The place is swarmed with tourists looking for them in the summer as it is. I don’t have time in the middle of my day available to leave the car on charge so I can continue to work for peanuts.

I was going to go electric for my next car until I saw the problems my father had with his. It wasn’t a year old and needed a new battery and it was quoted around £15k. Luckily for him it was a company car but I could never afford that, I think I’ll wait until the prices drop for batteries.

Currently the average life of batteries is around 10 years, the cost to buy new batteries between £5k and £15k. Also, if you drive it for 5 years your 10 year old car will have very little resale value because of this.

Another one echoing the "electric as long as you can charge at home" sentiment.
If you put environmental issues aside, the biggest advantage of EVs for the user I the cheap running costs and that only really applies if you do the bulk of your charging at home. We're saving about £100 per month on fuel since we swapped one of our cars to electric and when mine needs replacing I'll go electric too - we fitted a double charger at home in anticipation of that. But if you are reliant on public chargers for most of your charging it's expensive, and obviously a lot less convenient.
We've had an EV for 3 or 4 years now and we live in a rural area and do lots of long journeys. My DH does over 20 000 business miles per year for starters. We had a few minor niggles when we first got one because you do have to change your mindset a bit when it comes to refuelling but since then it's been absolutely fine. The last time we had to queue for a significant amount of time for fuel was to put diesel in my car at the weekend.
Most of the "horror strories" you read about charging issues are quite frankly, people being stupid. If they shared the same kind of stories with regard to an ICE vehicle people would say "So you ran out of fuel, you're an idiot, I have no sympathy" but failure to recharge your EV in a timely manner is somehow the car's fault. It's not like nobody ever runs out of petrol/diesel. A quick Google suggests that 800 000 people, or 1:7 drivers do so every year, but you don't see them in the press with their sad faces because everyone would recognise that for what it is - user error. And there are now about 76 000 public chargers with over 110 000 charging ports between them in the UK, so no, it really isn't that difficult to find somewhere in most of the country.
No doubt there are some very remote places where it's difficult, but you know what, they probably don't have petrol stations on every street corner either, or cashpoints, or shops. If you are going somewhere out of the way you do have to do a bit of planning around charging, but you do with other things too. Rural life is less convenient than urban living in a variety of ways.
I can't remember the last time we struggled to find anywhere to charge. We don't even look in advance on long journeys these days unless we are going somewhere very out of the way. Obviously there's still room for improvement, which equally obviously will only come if there is a demand, but most parts of the country are reasonably well served now.
But it sounds like the OP will be doing mainly short urban journeys anyway so recharging is unlikely to be a big issue. Provided she has private off road parking and can fit a charger I'd say an EV is likely to suit her very well. I wouldn't recommend one at this stage to anyone who can't reliably charge at home.

Because some people are dumb and think they can just get another couple of miles out of it when it’s empty
or they get diverted and don’t account for the extra mileage
I have picked up electric cars before that have run out of electric 2 doors away from home because the owner decided to gamble on being able to make it
and once they stop they stop and are so much harder to push than normal cars

Because you can charge at home I'd go electric.

We did go on holiday in Yorkshire last year and found charging a bit of a nightmare, we had to hang around in a supermarket carpark for an hour 3 times in the week we were there because there was nothing local to see or do near the charger and the NT place we'd just been to had the electric charger spaces taken up and the beaches we went to had no chargers nearby. If we went to that part of the world again we'd take a petrol car. Same when spending time in Cumbria where my parents live, chargers are difficult to come by at times.

‘Secondhand electric cars are fantastic bargains.’

Until you need a new battery….

We're looking at buying a second car for similar use later in the year, we'll be looking for electric, but have a decent size drive and can put a home charger in, we will also have the bigger petrol car for longer journeys, European holidays etc (we drive to France and the Netherlands)

We have only electric cars and drive across the UK. There are loads of points to charge nowadays.

Running out of fuel happens with ICE cars too.
EV owners are far more likely to plan a route and breaks to prevent this happening than ICE drivers who think they can just about make the next service station.

Sure, some drivers are dumb. That's not the car's fault, no car is idiot-proof.

The cars I was looking at at the time were the 5 series and e class and BMW and Mercedes were only offering 5 years or 100000km. The replacement on those is closer to the 15K mark and the battery wasn’t covered under the used car warranty. It’s something to bear in mind. A 2 year old car I’d have no problem but a 5 year old with no warranty on it not a chance.

Hybrid or petrol. Electric cars round the houses are probably OK but with longer journeys to do, I don’t want to be stopping to charge. I can do 500 miles on one tank of fuel which gets us to PILs with a very quick swap over driver stop.

Just be careful with an EV, the batteries cost thousands to replace. Everyone says "they have 8 year warranties", they DONT.

Any physical damage what so ever to the battery case will void the warranty. So a stone chip, a scratch, anything that can't be cleaned off WILL void your warranty. In practice this means that no EV on the road currently has a valid warranty.

I lost 6.5k to vauxhall because the Mokka EV that I drove had a two inch scratch on the battery casing. The issue was to do with the cooling gubbins, but they voided the warranty because of a scratch on the bottom of the battery.

We were early adopters of electric cars, dh is on his third one now and we have three at the moment. I’ve never one been in a situation where we couldn’t charge. Dh does surfing in wales and that’s the place with the fewest chargers that we have encountered but even then it’s fine. Even DD’s car (bought for £2500) tells you where the nearest charger is and whether it’s being used or not. And there’s countless apps.

I have a plug-in hybrid which I think gives me the best of both worlds.

I charge the car at home and all my local journeys are done from the battery (we have solar panels, so filling the battery doesn’t cost much). However, I make reasonably frequent long journeys to a part of the country where public EV chargers are in very short supply, so am not ready to go fully electric.