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.

Love my electric car. I’d personally spend £20k now on a second hand car and then £20k again in 5 years.

i bought a new electric car on PCP. The amount it’s depreciated is insane in 18 months. It had a decent range so would be great second hand

Batteries US, unserviceable.

I took US to be shorthand for useless, so pretty much the same thing.

I drive a Tesla (sorry, it was before we knew Elon was a dick). Does over 200 miles on a charge which costs about £15 on the home charger. With Octopus there is an EV tariff of 7p per Kw/h or with their variable tariff we’ve even been paid 50p for a full charge! There are chargers everywhere - a full charge takes about 30 minutes on a supercharger at a service station, enough time for a coffee and a wee, which you’d probably need after a 200 mile drive anyway. If you can get your own charger the savings are an absolute no brainer. I wouldn’t go back to petrol - my next car probably won’t be a Tesla, but it will definitely be an EV. I think a lot of garages will close as demand for petrol cars declines over the next 10 years, and of course petrol isn’t going to get cheaper.

I read recently that batteries need replacing around the 90k mile mark. So if you buy a new car and drive average miles you will possibly need a battery replacement after 8 years. And for some time before then the battery won’t be achieving full capacity on a charge. I have an electric mtb, not used it much and the battery now only charges to 92%, this was an expensive 3k bike not a cheap import.

if buying a second hand car it’s something which needs considering when the bill could be 15k for a battery. Who is going to spend 15k on a 9 year old car? I think it will seriously affect second hand prices.

Im not in a rush to buy Electric. I’d get petrol. I love diesels but sadly I think that’s not a good choice these days, apparently demand is dropping so much that fuel stations might stop selling diesel.

I wouldn’t even consider electric as a personal user. Petrol is convenient, easier to fix and you don’t need to plan any journey. I didn’t even go for it when considering BIK and have gone for a hybrid.

I love my 4 year old vw ID. 5, have had it for 3 years with no issue whatsoever. I have a chamber at home, paid €1100 for it and got €600 back from the govt. I charge on average every second to third night, I ferry the kids everywhere so it is our workhorse.
We tend to travel around €250km so a bit of forward planning is necessary. Charge car to 100% night before and by the time I get to destination city, at is down to 32%. I stop at my charging station, plug car, go to the bathroom, buy the kids a snack and back in the car. Car is charged up to 60% and away I go. Easy peasy, and on my way back I charge car up to 100% and get home with 32%.

I remember DH telling me in 2022 that the technology is not there yet for EV. My response was that we would use whatever technology is available and being used by other EV drivers. So far no issues whatsoever. I don’t understand the EV hate.

Mmmm, so you’re essentially saying that some people would drive from London to Edinburgh pretty much non-stop??

When I was a student, I used to take a flask with coffee in it. And stop for around 30 minutes twice, to walk about and stretch a bit. More than once I had to have a short nap too, since 440 miles is a fair distance to drive and I often travelled late at night to dodge the traffic.

A professional HGV driver could only legally drive London to Edinburgh with an absolute minimum of 45 minutes break (after 4.5 hours of driving), so your suggestion that 15 minutes is acceptable is deeply irresponsible tbh.

It didn’t cost me much money to fill the flask, so your “coffee adds a huge expense” is an exceptionally weak argument.

All the major charging networks offer discounted rates if you pay a membership fee, so if I was doing that 440 mile trip as regularly as I did as a student I would sign up to one and still make sure I stopped at least twice, even though our Polestar 2 could do the trip with just one 30 minute charge en route.

I don’t have the luxury of charging at home, but so far the Polestar 2 is costing me around 2/3 of the cost of fuelling my last ICE car (a Volvo estate), even with 100% public charging, so I’m happy.

Where did you read that? You do know that the fossil fuel industry is spending vast sums of money to ensure that misinformation around EVs is spread far and wide? It sounds like nonsense to me.

The “batteries will have to be replaced” argument was a lie as soon as it left Jeremy Clarkson’s mouth, and the only reason the BBC didn’t lose the lawsuit brought by Tesla was because they argued in court it was an “entertainment show” and not expected to be factual.

EV batteries have far more sophisticated charging, discharging and thermal management systems than your phone or toothbrush has, and are now expected to typically outlast the vehicles they are in.

And it’s not as if ICE technology was ever trouble free. I had a gearbox failure in one car and an engine/gearbox failure in another. The former cost £1,000s to repair and the latter caused the car to be written off. For every ICE car that has reached 200,000 miles or more there are dozens that barely make it to 100,000.

You don’t need to plan a journey with a petrol car you say. Is that really true?

How come the AA have to deal with 1,000s of drivers every year who have run out of fuel? I would suggest that they are the kind of people that live life by your “I don’t need to plan my journey” rule, and it didn’t end so well for them.

As the AA say themselves: “Most of the out-of-fuel cases the AA sees are a result of driver misjudgement, and the police have the power to give a warning or a penalty if it is deemed to be careless driving or causes an obstruction“

To be honest, the only reason I plan my EV journeys is the same reason I used to plan my petrol ones - I want to stop where I want to stop, and want to pay what I want to pay.

DS and his girlfriend, however, took off from the south of England in her EV and did a totally unplanned trip to Aberdeen and back, eating and stopping to charge as necessary. And they were fine too.

For me there's just not enough variety yet. If I want something sporty I can get a decent second petrol pretty cheap but less so with electric.

There are petrol stations all over the place and it takes minutes to fill. I typically fill up before I start a long journey as I live near 3 petrol stations. I realise this is lucky but I don’t think looking at your gauge and thinking “I better top up” constitutes planning in its official definition. I’ve never run out of petrol as I always top up before I have 100 miles left. People who do, generally do so because they just assume it will be fine. I’m not in the same category.

@Ayebrow genuinely intrigued to see how much of a change it was for you to go to electric? I may have to for work. I agree that on any long journey you have to stop anyway but I do a lot of long journeys for work and personal life. I don’t think I could stand to wait around at a charger when I desperately wanted to get home and I think this is something that I would need to do often.

That’s a very good question, and I’m humbled to be asked. Firstly, it’s been a long journey of discovery for us, and one of the reasons I want to post here is in response to some of the nonsense I see, but also to help genuinely curious people bypass some of the learnings we’ve had.

I used to have to do long trips for work and covered around 1,000 miles a week at one point, but that was a while ago now. Nowadays we mix short local hops to the shops or to drive DDs 2&3 around (DD1 has left home) with much longer trips where we’re either together (so can share the driving) or on our own.

The first EV we bought was a secondhand Nissan Leaf in 2018, which is still going strong at 11 years old, but it was only ever intended to manage the short local stuff.

For longer trips we started by hiring Tesla Model 3s from Hertz, and then Polestar 2s. We took one on a 1,500 mile road trip (to the north of Scotland and home via North Wales) and then another one from the south of France into the Ardeche Mountains.

And what we learned was that the pleasure of driving long distances in a Tesla or Polestar, the almost silent power, the adaptive cruise control, the single-pedal driving etc. makes any small irritation around charging niggles just disappear. Driving small distances in London, where road-humps are ubiquitous, is almost pleasurable. I still keep a screenshot of the consumption/regen chart as the car was driven 10km up an Ardeche mountain and then 10km down into a valley, recharging the battery the whole way down as it navigated steep hairpins - the brake pedal wasn’t used once.

When we took the plunge and finally got our own car, we decided the Polestar 2 had everything we needed. Driven carefully, from 100% to 0%, it can manage 400 miles, but you will know by now that you don’t do that. What matters is how far you can go from 100% to around 10%, if what you’re doing is a road trip where you know you will plug in and charge at the end.

On that basis, I would happily take the Polestar on a 300 mile trip and not need to charge it, but one of the learnings is that it is so easy to just plug it in when we stop we often just do it rather than parking in a normal space. One of the reasons people fill their fuel tanks to the brim is that visiting a petrol station is objectively horrible, and I’m very happy I never have to stand in one again waiting for 60l of toxic liquid to be pumped into my car.

One of the game changers is that Tesla has opened up a lot of sites to non-Tesla drivers, and we recently tried a new site they opened just south of where we live that has 20 chargers. We have taken the car to Brussels and back, using Tesla charging en route and destination charging at the hotel car park.

So it does take a mindset shift, as others have pointed out, and we have had to learn which charging locations suit us best. Because the rates charged vary a lot more than for petrol, we’ve also had to learn which networks suit us too. That has been hugely assisted by various organisations aggregating charging access, so we use just Tesla’s app and the Octopus Electroverse one, with the Lamppost charging done through the Char.gy website.

If I was doing regular long journeys for work, I would first work out whether I could get home without charging, and if not where I would most likely need to stop to have a break, and see what rapid charging is available there. If destination charging is possible I would take advantage of that.

TL;DR - it’s been quite a change to shift away from petrol, but it’s been worth it. I loved all the ICE vehicles I’ve driven, but I don’t miss the refuelling of them, and the Polestar 2 leaves all of them in the dust. I am never going back.

One other thing. It’s vital to get an EV with a heat pump if you’re going to do long journeys in winter. Without one, the car can only be heated by consuming a lot of the battery. With one, the waste heat from the battery and motor is recovered and you barely notice the impact on range.

We drove the exact same trip in October, at 16°C, and in December, at -1°C, and the difference in energy consumption was minimal. Without a heat pump we could easily have used 20% more or worse.

Thank you for taking the time to write such a considered answer. People who have electric mostly tell me how it’s easy enough but there’s still a part of me that just doesn’t dare to take the jump. I didn’t realise about the heat pump but colleague has a cupra something and has said there’s a dramatic drop in winter.

I’m also scared that a charger would set fire to the house as we slept 😳

@WhatWouldDianeLockhartDo

It’s a genuine pleasure. There is still so much nonsense posted by people that just haven’t given them a go, mostly misinformation that can be traced to the fossil fuel industry wanting to delay their take up. But that misinformation would not have taken hold if there weren’t elements of truth buried within it.

And since we have had the benefit of learning a lot over the last 8 years I’m trying to balance that misinformation out, and it’s nice to see at least some others doing the same here.

An EV charger is as likely to catch fire as anything electrical in your house, which is to say very unlikely. The one that was installed 8 years ago (PodPoint) to keep the Leaf on the go is still working brilliantly. DS and his girlfriend use it to charge their EVs too (BMW i3 and Hyundai Kona, both secondhand). All electrical work and products in the UK are heavily regulated to keep safety as the No.1 priority - the installation of the charger, with its armoured external 30A cable from the consumer unit was done to a very high standard. And I’m an electrical/automotive engineer by training so I feel qualified to judge.

But like anything, I guess there’s a small risk that a cowboy installer will fit some kind of knock-off unit. EVs have been tainted by association with e-bikes and e-scooters, some of which have been imported with shockingly bad batteries and chargers.

My sister and her husband took the leap by accepting an offer to buy a secondhand VW ID.3 when they traded in their Mercedes 2-seater, on the basis that they could return it within a week and have the Merc back. They then had a dramatic adventure by taking it on a trip beyond any realistic estimate of its range and not knowing much about how to charge it. They weren’t stranded, and were close to thinking it wasn’t for them, but fell in love with driving it so much they have kept it.

So don’t take the leap without learning a bit more - if there’s one truism in life an EV owner will happily tell you the good and the bad.

But there really isn’t much bad. DS didn’t buy his i3 before he’d borrowed the Leaf for a month to do his 35x2 mile commute for a few weeks, and he’s now got a colleague that has upgraded from a plug-in hybrid to a Peugeot e3008 through seeing more of what his full EV can do.

His petrol head colleagues couldn’t help notice when they were still scraping ice off their cars this winter and DS could simply get into his (preheated) EV and drive off.

Ok so the depreciation of a car within 10-12 years will be huge especially on electric. If it lasts that long. Which I doubt.
if you have £40k to spend I would spend half on an approved used vehicle with low mileage. Save the other 20k put it in cash isa so when the time comes you have money for another car.

if you do short trips do not buy diesel. It will be a big financial mistake.

I would steer away from any known unreliable brands and stay away from the new Chinese brands. ( jacooo, cheery)

so I’ve googled the car that would be a pool car coming my way and it doesn’t have a heat pump - a few colleagues have it and say the difference is drastic summer to winter but even this weather counts as warm enough. I do have my car at 24 degrees with a heated seat on so I’m not sure I could handle anything less 🤣 you’ve made me genuinely consider so I am grateful. It’s possibly not my choice but if it is, I feel more comfortable going in.

I don’t imagine anyone expects to be able to sell a car for much after 10-12 years. My neighbour has a 16 year old leaf and proudly states the battery is still going strong.

🤣🤣😭😭 bless thy neighbour. When the world is ending we know where the getaway vehicle is!

He's really not! We have a lot of narrow winding country lanes....

I'm the one known for the sports car driving style!

@TheWytch

I'm the one known for the sports car driving style!

Since motion sickness is largely a proprioception phenomenon (which is why looking out the window at a distant object helps reorient the brain’s sense of where it is, compared with what the car’s movement are telling you, and why staring at a book can be bad), there is something in your husband’s driving style that is unsettling you - maybe he’s unwittingly using the regen to slow down more aggressively than your mind is expecting (I’ve heard that some EVs are not as smooth on that front as a Polestar, Leaf or Tesla is) - I can certainly imagine that might be the case - like someone downshifting to get rapid engine braking in a manual, when as a passenger you’re waiting for the car to slow down more gradually.

I’ve heard some ideas that the very quietness of an EV can cause issues too - if you’re the sports car driving one, maybe the weird feeling of acceleration without the engine/gearbox noise cues telling your mind that it will be speeding up is the issue

And there is the immediacy of the acceleration - the fact that an EV just goes when the driver touches the accelerator, whereas with an ICEV there is always a minute lag (or worse, with a turbo) before there is a response?

But that’s just conjecture on my part.

I know lots of people with EVs and cumulatively we have driven 10s of 1,000s of miles, and the only time I have heard of anyone complaining of car sickness was in a car I was driving on a particularly twisty road in the Lake District, and it wasn’t the EV that did that. As I said before, my passenger was sick out of the window of my petrol car on the same road. I learned to drive much better with passengers since that day, and driven the same road dozens of times since with no issue.

The difference was that we were late to my best friend’s mum’s memorial service and I was pushing the Polestar just a bit harder than I would normally. And at least my passenger didn’t actually vomit this time.

Before you buy, new or used, check the car tax. A petrol or diesel car with a list price, not the price you pay, has an extra luxury car tax to pay for the first 5 or 6 years, just over an extra £400 per year. Evs the limit is £50k. We have a new EV, and got nearly £10k off the list price including the EV grant and home charger. Not had it long, but it has a range of over 300 miles, so suits us fine for everyday use. The public charging system is improving rapidly, batteries have an 8 year warranty, and it is brilliant to drive. Yes, the tech is developing, but if you keep it for 10 years, and can charge from home, you will save £100s in fuel costs and servicing costs. But, do your home work so you know what to expect. The range drops in cold weather, not been a problem for us, as the reduced range is still well over 250 miles. Looking at photos showing the queues at petrol stations today, remind me that it is not always rosy in the petrol car world.