EV - am I missing anything?

[wonderstuff]

So my current car costs £50 a week in fuel and seems to go to the garage for repairs about twice a year, it’s a Fiat 500X with 86k miles on the clock, a 66 plate, so should have a few years life left, I was planning to drive it til it dies, thinking that most economical. We’ve a few big bills/loans that end in a year, so was hoping it would last until then. However we also have solar panels and a battery at home. And oldest child is now 17, so days of big family camping holidays are now behind us. Only time we really need a big ‘family’ car is to go on holiday and those are possibly going to be 3 of us rather than 4 going forward.

So anyway I looked last night and I can get a Vauxhall Corsa electric car for about £10k, 2/3 years old with about 20k miles. I can get a fast charger for about £1000, and a loan for £8k for 4 years for about £200 a month, so the same cost as running my current car and after 4 years I’m better off. Corsa battery is guaranteed for 8 years or 100k miles and predicted to last 10-20 years.

Is trading in my car a no brainer?

i like my EV. i used to spend 35 per week on fuel and now spend 7.50. I could do it cheaper if i could work out how to do scheduled charging. It would be 3.50 per charge. The only problem if you go on long journeys you need to be prepared and EV charging infrastructure isn’t as good as it could be. All in all i am saving money and the car is paying for itself.

What range does this Vauxhall have?

About 200 miles.

Yes, it probably is if you don't do a lot of long journeys, say over 80 miles so you can mainly charge at home. The odd time like going on holiday or going to an event, then just plan charging into it

I can’t comment on your financials but I have just got a plug in hybrid and love it.

i do the majority of my day to day on the battery and just charge it overnight on a 3 pin plug. It’s about 50p for 50 miles. No expensive charger needed. Then there is a petrol engine for when I need to go further, so no worries about charging on long trips. I’ve not put any petrol in it since April.

It’s quiet, quick, cheap. No complaints at all.

We have an EV car (Polestar) I was a little worried about it at first but it has been great. We have toured around Scotland for a two week holiday and didn’t find it difficult to charge up. We have a charging point at home and charge up overnight (we are with Octopus and it is ridiculous cheap at night).

I am with octopus, is getting a charger installed straightforward?

We actually had an independent electrician to put in the charger, but it was very straightforward to set up with Octopus. We are actually spending less money on electricity than before having an EV (because we run our dishwasher/washing machine etc. overnight) even thou we are using more electricity.

Vauxhall is owned by Stellantis, and Stellantis is shit. They also own Fiat but you’ve done well with yours. However, the underlying EV software has changed significantly since your ‘66 Fiat. Avoid anything owned by Stellantis like the plague.

Interesting, my Fiat has been a massive ball ache, lots of pricey repairs.
e-Golf I can get for a similar price but there’s fewer about and it would be a 2020 model with about 40-50k miles..

I have a Vauxhall corsa-e and I really like it. It’s 5 years old (I’ve had it 18 months) and the range is max 180 which isn’t a lot these days but it works fine for me. I did have some things that needed fixing in the first few months (and I must say that nobody else I know with a EV has had any issues at all, though they’re usually leasing) but because I bought it from a dealer it was all under warranty.

Aren't Stellantis behind the recent stop drive Citroen recall

Will your solar panels charge it enough in winter?

We have solar panels and battery but we’re still attached to the grid so we do have access to other power… not many people are completely off grid?

Have you seen the octopus stuff with BYD? Under £300 a month for car, charger, and driving. At that price it might make sense, especially if you can wangle salary sacrifice too.

No, but it would still be cheap on an overnight EV tariff, I think it would be free to charge from April to September most days we produce more than we can use, and export rates are obviously much lower than import. We currently pay about £40 a month for combined gas and electric.

Will look, that feels a little more than I want to spend.

We have recently switched to an ID3. My old car was getting to expensive to run.
VW works with a company to have charger fitted, they in return were also highly recommended by Octopus. The purchase, fitting charger and changing tariffs was done in the space of 10 working days.

Cost wise, I am laughing all on the way past the petrol station. Cost down to approx. £5.- from £30 p/w. for commuting to work.

You could in theory add the fuel savings to your car purchase budget. That's what we have done when taking out finance.

Sounds good. Ideally I want the fuel savings to be the budget, I want to make it as cheap as possible, we’ve got a lot of expenses currently (one kid in independent school for the next year and then supporting 2 kids through university) so if I can reduce my car costs I’m winning. DH drives distances for work so needs a petrol car, but i basically commute 25 miles to work and back and rarely do more than a 60 mile round trip.

Saving money is my primary motivation. We’re on a serious budget for the next 6-7 years by which time both kids should be done with university and no longer a serious drain on resources.

We had a charger installed by Octopus, no problems at all, really good communication, tidy pleasant (female!) installer and the rates are apparently great.
We love our ev, charge it overnight at home but have also travelled with it and charged whilst away with no problem (there’s an app called Zapmap)

I make regular trips to a part of the country with very few public EV chargers, so didn’t dare risk a full electric car. Instead, we have a plug in hybrid, which I love.

Almost all of my local driving is done from the battery, which is particularly satisfying when it is all “free” because of our solar panels.

Octopus installed the charger. It was very simple to set up and cheaper than the quotation I had from a local electrician and from the person recommended by the garage where I bought the car.

The monthly lease for our BYD hybrid costs a lot less less than the £600 I discovered my DH was spending per month in fuel alone! He can do the daily commute on an overnight 3- pin charge, and we have solar panels which keep the cost fairly low.

As we already have an external socket a few meters from where the car is parked, we haven't yet seen a reason to install a dedicated charger.

I imagine a fully electric would benefit from a faster, dedicated charger though.

Ah, in that case, tell Stellantis to piss off and avoid. Seriously, I never had as many issues with an EV as I did with my Stellantis EV. Audi e-Tron, great. Polestar, amazing! Stellantis, seriously wanted to drive it off a cliff.

I’ve driven a VW iD4 and it was brilliant. I presume e-Golf would be similar due to shared architecture. I cannot stress enough - swerve Stellantis.

From experience, I’d never ever deal with Stellantis again. I had an e-corsa which I loved but swapped for more range as realistically it was around 160 on full charge. Still have an EV tho. Also with octopus, charge at night when it’s cheap. We have solar panels so charge from those too which is effectively free fuel. Long journeys just need a bit more thought if you’ll need to top up. We also use zap map.

We leased a BYD one and it’s much cheaper to run than our old petrol card. I think we have a similar setup to you with the cheap overnight tariff, solar panels and battery. At this time of year it’s actually cheaper to charge the car and top up the battery overnight, then sell any excess from the solar panels to the grid. Mind you, we don’t do many long journeys so haven’t yet had to charge anywhere else.