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?

Exactly
I love my EV and when anyone asks whether they should get one I list the reasons why I like it. It baffles me that in any discussion about them non EV owners trip over themselves to list the reasons why they are a VERY BAD IDEA
EV owners don't do the same for petrol/diesel cars

I think the daily Mail have run an anti EV agenda for a while and some have gone along with that.

Nope. I have my own business where diesel is delivered to my own diesel pump. I’ll be just fine.

You realise that when anything goes wrong on your electric vehicle your bill will be more than it’s worth.

For example, we picked up a Zoe from the main dealer last week as the repair bill was going to be £7000. It went back on the owners drive. She owes £9k on finance. The car is worth £10k on a good day. She can’t afford to fix it. It’s 4 years old and worth part money. Sadly this isn’t a one off.

In 8 years of driving EVs nothing has gone wrong with mine (which wasn’t of my own making). I sold my first EV when it was 5 years old for more than the balance on the finance, during the last petrol crisis. My personal experience has been wholly positive.
Glad you have your own diesel supply, obviously that affects your personal views.

I don't know why so many petrol drivers are so keen to tell us how crap EVs are. I love my EV. I was spending over £300 a month on petrol and now I spend approx £20 charging. Works for me!

If someone I know gets a new petrol/diesel car my first reaction is never "oooh, I could never buy an ICE car, because <shite reasons with no basis in fact>"
Because that would be rude but so many people feel obliged to share their opnion on EV's with me

The debate will be ended within a decade due to :

More chargers.

Solid state batteries these will produce cars with longer range (maybe double the current ones) that are lighter and more rapid to charge (charging time will become dependent on the charging power available rather than the batteries ability to charge). Better temperature performance. Even afer and less prone to fire and more stable in an accident.

These batteries are being tested now and the first cars using them will be released in the next few years.

ICE will go the way of the steam train.

Funny watching those cling to the past!

Imagine there were Edwardians adamant that the coach and horses would remain the best option and these new fangled “motor cars” would never catch on and anyway caused accidents 😀

Stand by being wrong, depsite people pointing to actual evidence to the contrary.

I have an electric car - if you pay attention to your battery levels and find charging points before you travel you are no more likely to get stuck down a country lane without power than you are to run out of petrol. I have a charger at home, and know where the chargers in my local area are. If I go long distance I do some planning. It’s not complicated

Wasn't there a massive to- do when compulsory seat belts were introduced?

(mind you, it's true that that has had a downside- far less young, healthy organs available for donation nowadays 😬)

Fair enough. Few more miles than the outlander with its 31 mile range

Agree the vitriol some ICE drivers have against EVs is really weird. It’s pretty much all one way.

i would be too polite to say in real life but would like to ask whether ICE drivers feel bad about the air quality? I live in a beautiful city but in a dip and you used to be able to see the fug of fumes hanging over the city. I felt guilty sitting in a traffic jam pumping out fumes as little kids walk by. It’s not right.

Telegraph the same. Clear anti EV propaganda from the right wing press, gets lapped up by the climate change deniers and other dinosaurs unwilling to accept newer technology.

I've been critical of EVs above, but I am currently driving one. It's on a 3 year lease and I'm switching back to owning a car at the end of the lease, can't afford a new one, so it will be an ICE. DH has bought a hybrid twice, both under 4 years old. The first one's battery burnt out within 10 days of purchase, the second wouldn't run on its battery and if we'd had to pay for a repair would have been over £1k. Both from main dealers. So he's back to ICE as the technology just doesn't seem robust yet.

Do you have an outside socket @BestDIL? I'm considering an EV but could do without the grand to pay for the charging box, and we don't have a garage.

I don't think you can get away with a standard plug on a full electric. Unless you hardly use it. My plug in hybrid takes about 1 hour for 10 miles, so if you have a full electric you are talking about almost a day for a full charge off the standard mains. If you don't use it much then you could get away with it, but then why would you want to spend all that money on battery capacity if it was hardly ever used.

You also have to make sure your electrics are in good shape, because although they can charge off standard plugs, the current draw is a lot more than most appliances and occurs for a very long time and if your wiring is shoddy then it could be risky.

I've been charging a PHEV off a standard plug for a year and it works fine. But the wiring/socket is in good shape. And I never charge at night or when I am out.

We used a granny charger (3-pin) for about six months with our full EV. It’s doable but annoying, I wouldn’t view it as a permanent solution unless you are very low mileage. It takes almost 24 hours to charge the car from empty and makes it harder to take advantage of the cheap EV tariffs, which tend to be about 6/7 hour slots overnight. If you’re very low mileage it might work, if you’re doing only 20-30 miles a day or something and plug in every night overnight, but a proper EV charger is worth it for most people.

We had to rely on the ICE car more when we used the 3-pin as sometimes we couldn’t get the EV charged in time for what we needed so would have to take the petrol car. Now we use the EV for probably 90% of our day to day driving and the petrol car is used for second car duties and holidays, as it’s a v big car with giant boot.

And yes to what PP said about the wiring too. Get a proper granny charger like a Masterplug and set it to 10amp for safety instead of 13. Constant high use on a standard plug socket can be risky, especially if you’ve got older wiring.

When we first got our EV we leased for 6 months to see if it worked for us so it wasn't worth getting a charger fitted so we charged with a plug from the garage.
I don't know the details as DH set it up but he did buy an exterior extension cable.
It wasn't as fast as a charger but we just kept the car topped up and it worked fine and it was set to charge overnight for cheaper electricity (Octopus).
The charger cost around £1000 but I am saving around £150pm vs petrol so it paid for itself in 10 months

It's a state of mind. If you want an EV and believe in them you won't mind the charging, just like if you want a petrol car you don't moan about having to go to the petrol station.

At the moment I think EVs make more economic sense if you make more journeys. Petrol probably still works out cheaper for those who don't have high mileage. It depends how much of your decision is about cost. Our EV is lovely to drive and SO much safer with all the tech. But it's only cheaper because we do enough miles to outweigh the higher upfront cost.

Yes, we have an outside socket. It was installed with the aim of getting a proper charger installed so the electrics have been uprated but like you didn't want to spend the grand on getting a charging box. The outside socket works just fine.

@GasPanic mine is a full EV and yes, it can take some time to charge but I never let it get so low that I need to charge for 24 hours. I wait until I am around 50% ish and then stick it on charge overnight. It's full in the morning. I can get 250 miles in the summer and 150 in the winter so plenty for my needs.

One of our neighbours also charges his from an outside socket which hasn't been uprated and has no problems at all.

I probably average around 250 miles a month so not a huge amount.

There are some bargains to be found if you are prepared to look around. I got my Zoe last September from a main dealer. We found mine, top spec with only 36 miles on the clock and it was 18 months old. A pre-reg which had sat in storage and the cost was £13k which is not much different to a petrol car with same level of trim/mileage etc.

I think that was my point. At 250 miles a month you are doing on average less than 10 miles a day, so abour 1 hour per day on average using a granny charger.

At 250 miles a month it will probably take you at least a decade to recover the cost of the battery, even if you were charging it for free. You might be saving £500 a year in petrol tops unless your alternative car would be a huge gas guzzler.

Of course you have the tax, lower maintenance and BIK as well to factor in (maintenance although probably cheaper is a bit of an unknown).

At the moment I think EVs make more economic sense if you make more journeys. Petrol probably still works out cheaper for those who don't have high mileage.

Yes, I know a few people who pre-covid did the sums for running a car based on purchase price and fuel/electric cost and found that EV was cheaper based on the average number of miles they did. Then come lockdown they were still paying a lot for their car whilst it sat doing no miles and the mileage they do now means the upfront costs of the car results in no real savings.

I think already though the premium for electric cars has come down from what it was