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.