To buy a petrol car

[Goldenbpineapple]

Buying a new car, we do not normally lease or pcp.
I can spend up to £40k but we will not be able to replace the car for at least 10 years, preferably longer.

Would i be stupid to buy a petrol car?

I think fully electric would be silly to buy outright as the range will be so much better in 4 or 5 years time, and an older electric battery will loose a lot of value.

I have an electric car. I will never go back to petrol or diesel. Quieter, faster, smoother, cheaper to run. Love things like being able to defrost it from the house

I love driving my EV! It just floats along, honestly. Not only does it handle just fine everywhere but one thing I didn’t expect is how great they are with road humps. Ours slows down when you take your foot off the accelerator so if you time it right (and it’s not hard to do), you just glide over them. None of that jerky slowing down, gear change and acceleration once over the jump.

If you get a model with braking regen, you might experience what we did in north Wales - drove up some pretty steep hills and by the time we’d got down the other side, we had more charge than when we went up!

Everyone I know who’s tried an EV has loved how they drive.

Nice language. Why so defensive? And aggressive? I don’t think it helps your case.

I am merely balancing some of the anti-EV nonsense that is being posted here about fires and whatnot. I am not being “evangelical”. I’m pleased to see others joining in with their own positive experience of driving an EV to help the OP make a decision.

I have an Kia EV6 and love it. I drive about 60miles a day, 4 days a week and the electric charge is about £25 per month from home. I've only used public charging once as the range is pretty good. We hired an electric car on holiday and the fast chargers are so quick that I pop to the shops, quick break and it's charged up.again. Much more pleasant experience than petrol.

We're looking for a second car and trying to find an ex showroom EV3. Don't think that I could go back to petrol and definitely not diesel,

In our area, there simply isn't the charging infrastructure and it's not likely to change. At work, we keep getting companies calling up to fit reduced price charging spaces- which they said they whole village would be able to use. Turns out that the electricity cables for the area are simply too old; I think it was still 2 phase?

I am not a “motoring journalist”, but I have driven many different cars in the mountains of Scotland, Wales and France. I don’t race, or even attempt to drive particularly quickly, so I’m not interested in that

So why are you preaching about “driving dynamics”?

Because that’s the one thing that’s become clear; EVs don’t have that. May well be perfect for you but don’t try and make things out to be something they’re not.

Personal anecdote; brother in his Tesla left from London to Wales the other day on holiday. Rocked up to the charging station in Heathrow… 2 hour wait as there was a massive queue. Had to resort to trickle charge for massive £££ at some random garage.

Eventually arrived with their extremely tired kids at the cottage in Wales at just after midnight…

Petrol all the way. Buy a 2nd hand petrol in excellent condition. Do not go electric, it’s a mugs game.

I get car sick in my dad’s EV as well!

I have also just replaced my car and gone for will petrol. My reasons were:

• We want to move house so don’t want to fork out for a charger
• I don’t like replacing my car often and I’m not convinced EVs aren’t going to get significantly better in the next few years as the OP says
• I’m not ready! I wasn’t planning on getting a new car and the idea of the change was stressing me out so I just decided to stick with what I know. Maybe next time!

I’d go for either petrol or hybrid. I currently have a hybrid that was 7 months old when I bought it. Ex VW management car with 4500 miles on it and saved about £12k off the price brand new. Unfortunately it does mean that I’m stung with £600 road tax though because list price over £40k 😭
However…if I was planning on keeping it 10yrs I’d go Toyota/lexus
and nothing else purely for reliability.
Engine wise, a lot of the Japanese companies are going back to old school petrol engines ie large cc with no turbo fitted instead…they are so much more reliable!

I didn’t realise how heavy they were until recently which has me wondering if they are contributing to the dreadful pothole problem

I voted YANBU. I have a petrol T-Roc. I was going to trade it in for an ID4 which is like the electric equivalent, but I’ve heard the Labour Government is bringing in pay per mile for all electric vehicles now, so I won’t touch it with a barge pole now and will be sticking with my petrol car.

Because the driving dynamics of the EVs I have driven (Tesla, Polestar, Nissan Leaf) have been superb. But I’m not a professional driver, so cannot claim I have driven anything more than those kinds of vehicles or petrol cars of similar cost and class (Volvos, BMWs, Mercedes etc.)

I have never driven a “sports car” or something in the Porsche/Ferrari league, so perhaps that’s your bag. It isn’t mine.

It’s because of the lack of proprioceptive input. The smooth drive means you are moving without any connection to the ground or feedback from the road or noise. The outcome is you are moving but your body doesn’t necessarily fully understand why…I do get car sick in the Lake District whatever the car though!

If it’s your main car, go for petrol. I’ve got a small EV which I enjoy as it’s quite quirky but I have never needed to charge it anywhere other than home ( the charger did cost £££) or at work (small fee) or the gym (free!). It’s a great runaround. I kept my petrol SUV as I do quite a few long journeys and CBA with queuing for a charger or finding they’re unavailable etc. I also have a Porsche which actually has the best range on a full tank and has the best mpg as well as being tremendous to drive: obviously petrol too.

Funny that the “EVs are heavy” thing cropped up just when the fossil fuel industry wanted to slow down the growth in their sales.

Nothing was ever said about Land Rovers and other SUVs getting ever bigger and heavier in the last 20 years.

I don’t think EVs are the cause of the potholes when 40T HGVs and 2.5-3T SUVs are allowed on urban roads

I have a hybrid with a ridiculously low electric mile range purely because all of my journeys are within a 5 mile radius. For the rarer longer ones I do I have the petrol as a back up.

It barely costs anything to run on electric but the miles on a second hand one just weren't enough when we looked. I needed something I could do 100 miles in in the middle of winter without charging but there was nothing in our price range unfortunately. The most we could find was 60-70 miles which would have meant a charge on the way to my parents with 2 kids and the stress of planning.

My husband has a fully electric car and I've witnessed how difficult it is finding somewhere to charge just to top up. Some chargers don't work and some are full and when you can charge it's not as quick as putting petrol in so for me it's a no go until I can get 100 mile range with the heating on in budget.

That's without wondering how to even charge, I've often wondered how we will have the infrastructure for house/flats without a private drive if everyone in the future is going to be electric. I'm not hugely convinced by them but because I have the charging abilities and they are cheap to run I won't object to having another with more range in the future.

Have you driven one?

I haven’t RTFT so apologies if this has already been suggested but I would suggest approaching this as buying two cars over a 10 year period that way less risk of things going wrong with an older car and having unexpected bills.

If you buy each on a PCP then you can plan it all out. If you’re happy to spend £40k on a car then you could break it down as follows:

Think of it as having 20k to spend over the first 5 years.
Deposit of 5k on a 5yr pcp, if it’s a new car then you can get a APR of about 4%. If you choose a new car worth £28k then you’d have a monthly payment of £250. So after 5 years you’ve spent £20k. Then after 5 years you give the car back, there’s usually some additional equity on the valuation vs the balloon payment to use towards your next deposit. Worse case would be that you give the car back with no extra equity but that’s still fine cos all you’d do is repeat the process for the next 5 years with a new car.
Downside is that at the end of your second PCP you may not have loads of equity in the vehicle, but tbh if you had bought a 40k car and kept it for ten years then it would only be worth c5k by then anyway.
And having two cars each for five years means that you’ll have a warranty both times, so would have lower repair bills. You could have a petrol/diesel the first time and then after 5 years switch to electric if the range technology is better developed by then.

EVs are constantly improving, which doesn’t mean that older ones become valueless. The Nissan Leaf I bought secondhand in 2018 is now 11 years old and still going strong. Its main driver still loves it, and it has suffered very little range loss (although it is only driven locally and charged at home)

And a modern one? For £40k you can get a vehicle which is likely to have a battery that will outlast the car, since the thermal management is typically excellent nowadays.

As more people try one, and discover how lovely they are to drive, and the fact you can preheat/cool them remotely before you drive, more will appear on the roads so it’s likely that petrol retailers will close even more sites than they have already, and I suspect fuel availability will begin to be a serious problem in some regions by 2035.

We’re fortunate because in London we have a lot of EV chargers on lampposts. Without that we couldn’t have one, since we don’t have a driveway and have to park at some distance from our house.

We have had zero issues finding chargers on longer journeys, but that was in EVs with 250+ mile (winter) range. I totally agree that 100 is just not enough for long trips. I wouldn’t feel comfortable with anything less than 200 tbh.

It true that a newer car will lose its value quicker however it does depend on personal circumstances and how you finance the car. For example I was looking at deals last week and APR on a new car was 3.9% whereas used car finance was 12% (same dealership). So if you buy for cash or via a personal loan then yes makes financial sense to buy used, but if you’re taking finance out then it’s not so clear cut, in this instance it would cost me an additional £7k in interest to buy an older car

2 hours wait! Really??

We have used Tesla charging (in the UK, France and Belgium) a lot, and never had to wait. The app and car tells you how busy the site is, so the route planning will take you to a different one.

We’re now using Tesla public charging a lot (in a Polestar 2) and the app still tells you how busy their sites are, so you can avoid them if you can’t face waiting a few minutes.

If your brother waited 2 hours to charge at a Tesla site (which I don’t believe), then that’s on him, not on the EV he was in.

Buy whatever best suits your needs. We have both a petrol and an electric. I absolutely wouldn't get an electric if you can't install a charger at home.

The petrol is a bigger car and gets used for holidays/ longer drives as it's still obviously way more convienient to just fill up at a petrol station.

The electric gets used as a day to day car and charges overnight. The petrol is a car bought a few years ago while the electric is on a salary sacrifice lease - personally I think leasing an electric is by far the most sensible way to go still.

The electric is far, far cheaper to run and far more fun to drive.

Is that “self-charging” meaning you fill it with petrol and the petrol engine drives the car and charges the (tiny) battery a bit, and it recovers some of the energy from slowing down? Which means that it’s a bit more efficient than a pure petrol car, but is mostly just a petrol car.

or is it “self-charging” in the sense that it’s magical and you find it topped up in the morning by elves?

2 hours wait! Really??

Perhaps he was lying to me about his experience about arriving past midnight on holiday with a car full of his kid when I spoke to him a couple of hours ago. Does that fit your narrative?🙄

He admitted he should have pre planned charging before travelling, sure, but life got in the way for him in this instance and couldn’t sort things out before.

Doesn’t change the fact that EV charging and availability is a massive factor in why people (with the current infrastructure) dont want to rely on it. It takes me 3 mins to brim my tank btw.