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?

Electric car if you can put solar panels and batteries on the house as well. We have slashed our transport costs. Our electricity bill is very low now.
Infrastructure is getting better all the time.

I wouldn't ever buy an electric car under any circumstances, including having a gun pointed at my head.

Good job its not compulsory then

You won’t have a choice in the end.

The Chinese EVs are amazing right now. They all have them and it will soon be the case that all homes come fitted with chargers… din’t believe all the crappola in the Daily Heil and the Exprrss abiut them bursting into flames. It happens no more often than with diesel/petrol cars.

Electric car vs having your brains blown out I promise you they are really not that bad.

Thing is, EV owners don't CARE if you buy an ICE car, we really don't so there will be no gun involved
Conversely ICE owners and The media seem very very invested in trying to persuade people NOT to buy an EV

My partner runs a paint shop/body repair yard. Neither of us have electric but not against the idea. He said that an electric car left at the workshop for a couple of weeks needed charging each time before they could move it (he was talking a top of the range Range Rover in particular) - would this apply if the OP only intends to use her car sporadically? Do they drain charge if left standing?

Apparently they do lose a very small amount of charge but we have driven 25 miles to an airport, left the car for 2 weeks (when it was moved offsite and brought back) and we lost about 30 miles of charge I think

Ours loses very little charge. We were away for a fortnight last summer in our other car, the EV was still pretty much fully charged when we got back. Even if it did, OP is planning to have a charger at home anyway so it doesn’t really matter, it’ll be easily topped up whenever it needs. Maybe if you were leaving it for months on end in a car park or something, but that’s not good for any type of car.

Indeed.
I am generally not a conspiracy theorist but I am beginning to suspect that there is actually a coordinated disinformation campaign on this subject.
I mean there are genuine issues still to be resolved - I wouldn't currently opt for an EV if I didn't have off road parking and my own charger for instance - but some of the anti EV rhetoric is frankly so absurd that I find it hard to understand why anyone would believe it. Yet clearly many do.

I've had an electric car for 5 years now and we don't have a home charger, just the 3 pin plug one for the odd time we need to charge at home (DH charges at work for free)

It's totally doable with the right planning, and there are multiple apps, plus the car tells you where you can find chargers when you're out and about (at least, mine does)

@minniecoop make sure you test drive it, the electric mini isn't great for range and they're pretty small inside (only 2 passenger seats in the back) so definitely do your research on which EV is best for you

Charging at home is the easiest way to live with an EV. That said, there is an app called co-charger, that enables us to rent out our home charger when we aren’t using it. A local guy charges once a week roughly, covers the cost of our electricity and he pays a convenience fee to co-charger. It’s really easy for him and for us.

There is a coordinated disinformation campaign. The BBC's "Big Oil vs the World" is good on this, if you can find it.

What a good thing we live in a gun free democracy then. Good luck walking everywhere or taking a electric bus once ICEs are fully phased out. I hope you won't accept a lift in one either.

A petrol car can heat the air "cheaply" but only because it is chucking out so much heat as wasted energy anyway. You're just harvesting a bit of the energy you're wasting every minute it's running. So yes you use electric to warm up an EV plugged in on the drive, but it doesn't affect its range and it's still way more efficient.

Also heating works a bit differently in an EV. In a petrol car mostly you are warming the air, like you use your central heating to heat your home. This is what we're used to and it makes sense when the energy is already in the form of heat waste. But in an EV the focus is on heating the person rather than the air, so you have heated seats and a heated steering wheel as your main sources of heat. It's more efficient just like sitting on an electric blanket can be cheaper than running the whole central heating system.

Really freezing temps do affect the range. But I think it's too easy to see the downsides of something new and be blind to much bigger downsides of things we are used to.

Just got an electric car for the first time. It’s 5 years old and was far cheaper and lower mileage that the equivalent petrol or diesel. Just plug it straight in to the mains using normal socket and use economy7. 99% of the time only doing short journeys and it’s perfect for this. Way cheaper. Very good choice so far

Well if course it wouldn't be draining ge battery if still plugged in while preheating lol

Thanks everyone for the info about charging from a standard outside plug.

Those of you just charging with a normal plug, I’m pretty sure this is not recommended. Im no expert but I thought you need
to use a granny charger to slow the current draw down, otherwise it can blow your house electrics?
Id strongly recommend a bit of research into this if you are doing it, it’s why so many rentals/airbnbs have a blanket ban on charging EVs I think

Maybe I will go EV in the end, I expect I'll have to eventually. But I always treat new technology with extreme caution: I don't rush out and buy these things as soon as they are available, because the design flaws haven't been ironed out until lots of people start using them, and those who rush out and buy them at first are the guinea pigs. And also, the harder sell there is on something, especially if it is sold as a convenience, the more I tend to distrust it. Heat pumps and smart meters, anyone? Also, a curse of modern times is built-in obsolescence: you might spend thousands on something that is useless in a few years' time, because "computer says no". Compare this with when appliances were made to last, a few decades ago: now, you have to keep upgrading them, updating them, and subscribing to them, and feeding them with money. (Is it possible to get a doorbell without a subscription, now?)

Here is an example of car tech which I think backfired spectacularly: keyless entry. It was sold as a massive convenience: no need to put a key in the lock to start your car! Wow! Amazing!! Then it came to light that your car can be be nicked much more easily, so now it's on you to use a Faraday pouch every time. Oops. It reminds me of when they made car stereos "extractable" so you can take them with you, and lug them round with you at work all day, to prevent them being nicked. Oops. I'll be hanging on to my traditional car keys for as long as I can. (In the early 90s, my parents resisted things like electric windows, and central locking, and even TV remote controls, because they might go wrong; I must have learned something from them.)

The advice used to be that if you had a sat nav, to wipe away the circle they left on the windscreen, in case thieves thought you had hidden it in the glove box, as sat navs were so valuable, that they would break into your car for them. Now you're encouraged to have dashcams front and rear. Do we have to hide those away as well after every journey? The advice changes every time the wind changes.

I've had an electric car for almost four years and I wouldn't swap it for anything. They're the best inventions ever.

Electric. I would never get another petrol car now.

Another contented EV owner here. Super easy (and cheap) if you get a home charger. Even before we got our charger it was fine, took it to local supermarket and it would charge in the time it took to do a big shop. The infrastructure is improving all the time in the UK and chargers are more and more common at supermarkets, shopping centres, service stations etc. We drove across France, Belgium and Netherlands last summer, no issues with finding chargers (and it cost way less than equivalent petrol, even using the more expensive motorway chargers). Ours does over 200 miles on one charge so it's only really long journeys you need to recharge on route. As above most naysayers are people with no experience of driving an EV!

This is not true, if you're static with everything on, heating, radio etc it hardly uses any battery.

I have to wait in my car for a 90 minutes once a week while ds is at a sports club. I go in my EV and leave it running with radio, heated seats, heated air, and light on and it hardly uses any battery. When I go in my daughter's ICE car I have to take blankets to keep warm as I'd either need to keep the engine running, not good for environment and uses up petrol, or keep everything off or I'd run the battery down.

So you would sooner die than buy an electric car? What silly bollocks. I love my ev and I wouldn’t go back to an ICE if I could avoid it. But if it was that or die then I would because I’m not a fucking idiot.