The cheapest electric car I can see is £2500. It would take me 6 years to get the money back even if the electric was free
Average car does twice that mileage but that’s still a small part of the total cost of ownership.
I got petrol Friday for £1.45 a litre. In July 2022 it was £1.90 a litre, or £2.20 inflation adjusted. In 2012 it was £1.40 or £2.05 a litre inflation adjusted.
Maybe if petrol was in the £2-2.50 a litre it would make sense
If you're buying second hand, like it would appear from the price you quoted, then reliability could be the thing that makes the price worthwhile.
I also don't do high mileage but as our petrol car gets older, it's starting to be less reliable. I've had brake issues - EV regenerative braking should ease that problem - and the engine is starting to use more oil. My car has a reputation for gearbox issues from the Uber drivers that I know.
Every time there is some problem my wife gets more freaked out. To avoid total disaster I'm going to have to get something and if it's an EV I just hope that it will give us some years of plain sailing.
Not bad for £1200.
The killer cost is the massive VED, way more than petrol Tax. I’d far rather VED were removed and the revenue reclaimed by taxing per mile. Seems crazy to have high fixed costs and low marginal, that just encourages driving.
VED is coming in on electric cars, and so is per mile charging. Meanwhile politics won’t allow fuel to return to 2012 levels in real terms let alone expanding beyond.
Far better ways to invest cash - home battery for example - than in an electric car. Maybe in 5 years there will be reasonable specced second hand ones.
That being said, there's an argument that even basic EVs are often much more pleasant to drive and less hassle overall, which could be a reason for them to command a sustained premium on the used market.
"datePublished": "2024-09-26T13:11:00.000Z",
SMMT publish monthly data too
And which ever way we look at it electric cars are becoming more popular
But a lot of UK housing relies on on-street parking, and there's flats with car parks where charging isn't currently practical. So far there's very little attempt to solve this, leaving green tech mostly as 'expensive toys for the rich'. Roll-out of public chargers is slow, and they're always going to be vastly more expensive to use compared to home charging.
Similarly, many people are locked out of heat pumps and home solar due to 'incompatible homes'. Most problems the UK faces come down to the excessive cost of housing.
(And meanwhile, the government are quite determined to keep the majority of PLEVs - e-scooters and >250W ebikes, entirely illegal, while illegal use grows rapidly and is policed very inconsistently)
hdgvhicv•1h ago
zeristor•1h ago
https://www.racfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/spa...
politelemon•44m ago
edent•19m ago
Flats and terraced homes aren't the majority - about 55% of people live in detached or semi-detached houses. See the ONS Census data at https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/housing/...
My terraced house has off-street parking, as do most of them in my area.
Houses with separate garages are also fairly easy to upgrade - we had an armoured cable buried in a new trench to connect our old property.
Similarly, most flats with car-parks are especially easy to add chargers to. They can either be 7kW points or just regular plugs. We had slow chargers installed in our old flat.
Yes, there are many properties with no easy way to add charging. But none of those places have a petrol pump attached either.
mytailorisrich•28m ago
grey-area•9m ago