Had a sit down and looked at our overall trip to the Alps and its not amazing but not terrible.
Worked out at 15p/mile using mostly 210-350Kw* chargers along the French Autoroutes and a small 10kW charger at the destination. The 2.5mi/kWh is not great but considering this was sitting at 130kph for 90% of the toll roads until you get up into the windy bits I think it’s not too bad for a brick!
*The ID Buzz is 185kW max charging from memory but these were the ones that were available.
Charging availability was on the whole great (on the French side), every large aire stop had chargers and plenty of them, even during what seemed to be the end of the peak French holiday season. Only issues I had was my end with my shared account bank card getting rejected every now and again (Wifes was fine) and my mobile playing up when trying to authenticate bank payments via fingerprint and/or timing out. Only had one charger station that seemed to be bricked.
We had a blip at the M25 Cobham services, Ionity did not want to work at all (even with the App) but the Gridserve round the corner was fine.
We did not notice having to do extra stops for charging over our previous petrol car as now with a 6-month old and toddler in tow (along with the MiL) we were stopping every 1.5-2hr anyway for nappy changes/loo breaks so it was just easy to pug in each time.
Previously we would do this trip in one, overnight non-stop in ~16hrs door to door but the thought of that is just not reasonable now! This time we split it into to two days driving with a hotel stop 2/3rds the way which was much more manageable.
The space in the Buzz was great, we took one of the rear-most seats out which gave us 5x full seats (with armrests, cupholders, tables etc) and a massive load space, only real niggle was it could do with a few more small storage places. Lots of larger bins but just a few extra places to put sunglasses, bottle of water etc would be nice.
It came with a mesh net to go across the back load bay (for when the seats are down) which I used to keep all the luggage from intruding in the rearmost seat which worked really well.
Got to be something medium sized SUV to get past her indoors (more like her in her garden)
Would be lowish mileage, upto 2-3 years old, charge at home mostly - have plenty of time for slow home charging, unless on occasional motorway stop.
Up to £30K
What are views on the Volvo EX30? (She likes).
KIA or Hyundai?
Can’t find a Nissan Qashqai on Autotrader - guess none fit the criteria (yet?).
I do dislike service cost rip offs, like to do as much self mech as possible - not much to do, pollen filter, fit dashcam etc. Guess they are all pretty much the same on that score though..
Personally think the EX30 is one of the best lookers. Check that early software issues are now resolved. I’m sure they are but there was a lot of noise on the webz when they were first launched.
Hyundai Ioniq 5 is quite upright and actually SUV size. Test drove it against a Kia EV6 and BMW i4 4 years ago, ended up with the BMW but the Hyundai was more than fine.
The EX30 does look good though!
If it’s your first EV, there’s a lot to be said for leasing. A two year lease can be surprisingly cheap, and means you get a brand new car and can try out an EV without dumping in a load of cash.
A quick check shows you can get something like a Skoda Enyaq for about £7k over two years with 10k miles. That’s going to be about the same as the depreciation on a £30k used car over the same time.
You can also get the Volvo surprisingly cheap, although there appear to be loads of models and I just can’t be arsed to look through them.
Cool- now calculate the duty he pays on diesel he’s putting in it. For all but the most truly out there EV use cases (the person doing 50k miles a year charging exclusively on public chargers), eVED barely moves the dial in favour of EV use.
We’ve gone lecky to save running costs. Hoping to achieve an annual reduction of about £2k. A 15% reduction in that saving is a significant movement of the dial in my book
It’s still a very significant saving over ICE though and if you feel it’s no longer worth it, you can keep the existing car and realise savings of £0.
Once government revenue from fuel duty dipped below a certain point, it was inevitable that they would seek to redress that. I dislike how eVED is implemented but the costs themselves are not onerous.
The fact that it is on distance rather than energy input jars a bit as well (even though that would be impossible to properly manage) as it does not reward efficiency or self sufficiency.
)
esp in black
