Together in Electric Dreams – Current Status
As we move towards reducing our reliance on fossil fuels, many people are weighing up the pros and cons of moving to a fully electric vehicle. Ethical Financial Adviser, Rupert Lovesy, moved to electric last September. One year on, he shares his experience of how EV ownership is working out.
Somehow, a year and over 15,000 miles have passed since I made the switch (pun absolutely intended!) to driving electric. As someone who regularly helps clients to align their finances with their values, I meet many people who are curious as to how running an EV would work out for them.
Although I was keen to be an early adopter, living in an area prone to flooding, having a 220 mile trip to the office and needing space for 2 dogs meant that none of the first wave of EVs were that suitable for my needs. However, there are now a multitude of vehicles available that are easily up to the job.
I’ve driven further than I expected over the year – a combination of work, family commitments, leisure and holiday, which only goes to show how well me and the EV have got on!
Real World Performance
Mileage: 15174
Electricity Used: 4,101.1 kWh
Electricity Cost: £854.71
Average Cost per Unit: 20.8p
Average Consumption: 3.7 miles per kilowatt hour
Dealership Visits: None
Fires: None (statistically a lot less likely than for a internal combustion car but you do have to put up with a lot of misinformed comments!)
Practicality
The car has handled everything that has been thrown at it! Rural life, dogs, sailing gear, torrential rain, flash flooding, fords, driving on and off of muddy verges – it’s fair to say I have put it through its paces! We had to undertake a necessary motorway journey home during the Storm Eowyn “danger to life” weather warning and had another very treacherous journey on the motorway at night in snow and ice where the car in front of us lost control and started to spin – I’m sure that we are still here to tell the tale thanks to the combination of the excellent four wheel drive system and electric retardation, avoiding the need to use the brakes.
Range Anxiety
When we first had the car, we had a moderately scary experience, when I thought I knew better than the sat nav, charged the car much earlier on a journey than it said, and then had had to cut things rather finer than I would have liked, as the chargers later on the route were either slow or out of order! The car actually knows what it’s doing and the chargers it chooses are usually the best option. I’ve done as I have been told ever since and had no further issues! Don’t forget that when you charge on a longer trip, you only need sufficient to take you where you are going, plus a margin for safety – you don’t need to charge fully! There is no noticeable difference in range on a full charge since the car was new.
Efficiency
Most people know that EV range suffers during the colder months and with motorway driving – this actually happens to petrol and diesel cars too, but you’ll struggle to find someone who knows the extent of this as we don’t usually talk about range in the same way!
My usual blend of rural and motorway driving gets me around 3.8 miles per kWh. I could actually get 4.5 – 5 mi/kWh quite easily if it wasn’t for the motorway trips, which are less efficient because of the increased air resistance and the limited opportunity to reclaim energy through braking. In heavy traffic, you don’t use any energy at a standstill and you are constantly reclaiming energy so it’s extremely efficient.
Through December, January and February, this took a dip with a low of 3.2 mi/kWh in January. That takes the total range down from 255 to 214 for mixed driving. For me, that means a brief charge on my 220 mile office trip in the winter months (I like to arrive with at least 25 miles in hand), but I actually make the exactly the same 15-20 minute stop, whether or not I need to charge, as I want a break, so it doesn’t slow me down!
En Vacances
One of the more adventurous outings was a holiday to Brittany early in the summer. I did actually consider using our petrol car instead, but was reassured by the apparent similar levels of charging availability. Thankfully, the EV infrastructure there was every bit as good as at home and public charging cost less than half as much! All the chargers we used allowed payment by credit card rather than needing a special app, so it was all really easy.
We didn’t have a charger at the property where we were staying, in contrast to at home. Ironically, St Brieuc was the one place where it was more challenging to find chargers - they’d been a bit eager to get them on the map before they actually existed! We did actually manage to charge there, however, and there was also high speed charging at supermarkets and along the route,so really not a problem.
There was something of a heatwave while we were there, so once again, being able to cool the car remotely before leaving was very welcome!
Costs
Charging at home is very cheap, I’m on a variable tariff and often pay less than 10p per kWh – on occasions, the electricity company pay me to take the electricity off their hands! The car app doesn’t understand a negative charging cost, so my calculations are based on a minimum charging cost of zero and therfore a bit pessimistic. This brings it out at an average unit cost of 20.8p, which doesn’t seem at all bad and is very close to the 20p I estimated in my first report.
I’ve used 4,101 kWh over 12 months at a cost of £854.71. For a petrol car that averaged 40 miles per gallon, I would have used 379.4 gallons, which at today’s average price of £6.15 per gallon would be a spend of £2,333.31, so a difference of just over £123 per month in fuel costs alone.
My car won’t need servicing for another year yet, when it just needs a vehicle check and brake fluid change. My insurance renewal was £385 and for an EV registered before April 2025, I don’t need to pay road tax until April 2026, when it will be the standard rate of £195. Be aware, though, that EVs registered after April 2025 are likely to be over £40,000, so subject to the expensive car Vehicle Exise Duty supplement, bringing road tax to £620 a year in year’s two to six. A used purchase might make a lot more financial sense.
For people with a company car or on a salary sacrifice scheme, the Benefit in Kind value for income tax for an EV is a fraction of the amount (currently 3%) payable for a conventional petrol or diesel vehicle.
Since my last report, an electric car grant has been introduced allowing a discount of up to £3,750 on the purchase price of an eligible electric vehicle. You can also claim up to £350 towards the cost of a home charging unit if you own or rent a flat with off-street parking, or installing a cross-pavement system if you only have on-street parking.
Conclusions
An EV can easily cope with my more extreme demands – in fact, I can’t think of any journey we would be likely to make that would necessitate me taking our other car instead, and I don’t miss visiting petrol stations. I honestly don’t believe that any of my journeys took longer than they would have done otherwise due to charging alone. Although I didn’t set out with expectations of cost savings, it looks like I will save over £6,000 over 4 years, which is comfortably more than the difference in purchase price or leasing cost. Above all, I am avoiding polluting the places I drive through with tailpipe emissions and, as I choose to charge with renewable energy wherever possible, I am reducing my own impact on the environment. The next step is to get my annual mileage down a bit, which will also help!
Written by Rupert Lovesy