Electric Car Advice

DanBoro4499

Well-known member
Thinking of making the switch to fully electric.

Can anybody offer any advice? I think my main questions are:

1) How much cheaper (if at all) would it be to run than a petrol car?

2) Are the any schemes/incentives which push people into buying one?

I basically pay £160 finance on my car, about £40 insurace, £3 tax. £200 petrol (all figures are per month).

Have no idea if buying an electric car would be any cheaper than the above? The finance alone would be about £400/500pm from what I can see.

Thanks in advance.
 
Ive got a Tesla that I lease through a work scheme - I save the 40% tax rate on the cost of the lease. Worth doing if you can do it through work.

Regarding cost of running, I live in a flat so only use Tesla Superchargers or other garage forecourt charging - typically will cost me £20 to go from 20%-80%, so half the cost of petrol
 
My Tesla Model 3 is a company car so the benefit in kind tax is 1/2% compared to about 25-30% on my old diesel Audi A3.
I pay about 10 times less in BIK despite having a car worth twice as much when both bought new (£53k Tesla 2021 vs £23k Audi 2015)
I paid £900 for a Podpoint 7kwh charger which included installation.
I also changed my energy supply to Octopus Energy and I am on the Octopus Intelligent tarrif so I get 6 hours of overnight electricity at 7.5p per kwh.
Currently costs me about £3-4 to add 200 miles to car which in real world terms is probably closer to 150 miles.
 
Thinking of making the switch to fully electric.

Can anybody offer any advice? I think my main questions are:

1) How much cheaper (if at all) would it be to run than a petrol car?

2) Are the any schemes/incentives which push people into buying one?

I basically pay £160 finance on my car, about £40 insurace, £3 tax. £200 petrol (all figures are per month).

Have no idea if buying an electric car would be any cheaper than the above? The finance alone would be about £400/500pm from what I can see.

Thanks in advance.
If there is one thing that I have learnt over the last few months, it is that there is no shortage of people on here willing to offer "advice" on EVs. And when I say advice, I mean shout down, belittle and wind-up anyone who disagrees, asks the wrong question or perhaps has a different point of view.

Good luck.:p
 
Thinking of making the switch to fully electric.

Can anybody offer any advice? I think my main questions are:

1) How much cheaper (if at all) would it be to run than a petrol car?

2) Are the any schemes/incentives which push people into buying one?

I basically pay £160 finance on my car, about £40 insurace, £3 tax. £200 petrol (all figures are per month).

Have no idea if buying an electric car would be any cheaper than the above? The finance alone would be about £400/500pm from what I can see.

Thanks in advance.
The most important question is do you have a drive/ can you charge at home, or at work?
What would be your typical journeys over the course of a month/ year?

Most people tend to do less than 100 miles a day, and maybe 6-12 longer trips per year. If you do that, you'll hardly ever need to use a public charger, and you'll quickly realise range anxiety doesn't exist, or soon disappears.

You need to identify two relatively comparable cars, to see if it's worth it, but I've never seen one instance yet where it's not worth it (for comparable cars).

Electricity is around 25p per kW, and most cars do 3 miles per kW or more, so you're talking around 8p per mile (this is probably worse case).
A 50mpg car is costing around 17p per mile at the minute.
A 30mpg car is costing around 30p per mile at the minute.

1 gallon = 4.5 litres = 4.5 * £1.90 =£8.55, so £8.55/ 50mpg = 17p a mile

12,000 miles is £960 in an EV
12,000 miles is £2040 at 50mpg
12,000 miles is £3060 at 30mpg

The car I've got does 3 miles per kW, and to get a car as quick I would be getting way less than 30mpg, probably closer to 20mpg, so for me fuel is basically a third of the price and saves me around £2k a year, and no £500 car tax/ VED.

Effectively that's "saving" me around £200 a month

If you can get it through a company then they don't pay hardly any BIK and can claim it back against corporation tax, so effectively any company buying cars for its staff, would be insane to not just giving them EV's.

Some energy tariffs do 5p-8p per kW overnight, and any car can be charged fully overnight. So this could knock the yearly fuel cost down to around £200-300, which is unreal.

Teslas, Iqoniq, I3 etc all do over 4 miles per kW I think

EV's are more expensive, usually by around 10-20% for a comparable car, but any extra you pay, you will more than likely get back as they will depreciate less, or at worst the same in £.

So you might pay 25k for an ICE car, and the comparable EV might be 30k. But when you come to sell in 3 years or whatever, the ICE might be worth 20k and the EV 25k. Effectively you've "lost" 5k on both cars. The payments will be more on the EV, but you'll gain that back in equity, it's not really money down the drain.

I wouldn't get a lease EV (unless as a company car scheme, where the company was passing on the savings), to me it seems like you're wasting the equity that EV's will have over ICE.
 
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Hi Dan, good advice about comparing like for like. Other people will give more advice on the the technical stuff, but my story on the economics is that I leased a year old EV for 3 years. The cost of running it plus the monthly lease was less than I paid in petrol alone each month for my old ICE. So for me it was like having a free new car.

If you have a drive at home - and not everyone has - and you don’t do hundreds and hundreds of miles a day then you won’t ever need to charge anywhere apart from at home.

I lost my job and had to sell the EV (and my house) and I have an old ICE banger but as soon as I get two brass farthings I’ll be buying an EV again. Both because I loved the EV and also because petrol is so madly expensive (plus I don’t like the idea of fossil fuels knowing what we know about climate change). The first time I had to pay £60 for petrol at a garage it was a hell of a shock! Hope that helps. Good luck in your decision.
 
"Triggered?".
In my opinion no Andy, and I say this as a massive tree hugger.

The response to the OP's post is related to previous threads about electric cars and certain board members dogmatic views on the topic.
 
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