Tell us about your EV journey

I drive a Volvo C40, and it is my first EV.

My previous car was a Porsche Macan GTS, which I sold during COVID when the secondhand car market was buoyant, and I sold it back to the dealer for more than I had originally bought it for!

It was the first time I had ever made money when selling a car and I couldn’t refuse the offer.

My C40 is a company car, so I am lucky not to incur the purchase costs, but having driven an EV now for over 2 years, I don’t think I would return to ICE and would buy an EV in future.

I have a drive and a charger installed, and I do not miss going to the petrol station and standing in spilt fuel whilst filling up.

My C40 has a 68KW battery, and is relatively small compared to newer vehicles in the same category, but it costs less than £5 if I was to fully charge (compare that to £146 to fill up the Macan!)

I often do a 200-220 mile round trip and I have never had to use a public charger, only when I went down to Cornwall was I dependent on public charging and that’s when the costs can become equivalent to an ICE vehicle.

As others have mentioned, torque on an EV is incredible, and a two motor version of the C40 will beat most sports cars 0-60.

I drive with one-pedal mode activated and on most journeys I rarely use the brake pedal. It takes a short while to get used to, but soon becomes second nature. 

My advice to anyone looking to buy an EV is generally:

• If you have a driveway and can install a charger, do so, as it will be the cheapest means of “filling up”
• Consider your normal daily mileage and buy an EV with a range capable of achieving it without having to rely on public charging.
• Consider how you will buy the vehicle. Personally, I would favour a PCP deal as it gives the option to return the vehicle at the end of the leasing period and not suffer potentially low residual values.

We’ve had the Hyundai Inster for almost one month now, the monthly fixed payment PCP deal being within our budget as pensioners, previously having had two elderly Renault Clios over the last 20 years.  Our first foray into EV driving has been painless, it’s a remarkable experience and we absolutely love it.  The idea of going back to an ICE car would be anathema to us now, as we find EV driving smooth, effortless and thoroughly relaxing. I am 74 and my wife is 69 and we find we adapted within a day or so.  
 

Charging had been a major worry pre-purchase, but actually is absolutely nothing to worry about, with one proviso, see next paragraph! The car’s range is approximately 220 miles which is slightly more than our weekly driving average. So we aim to allow the car never to drop below 20% at which point the car warns that you’re getting low and have about 45 miles of range left, and then we plug it in overnight once a week or so. In reality, we find, three charges later, that we can drop to around 15% the evening before charging without stressing over things. The car schedules the charging at cheap rate between 12 midnight and 6 AM and starts and finishes charging without any active supervision while we are asleep.  You can tell it to finish charging when it reaches 80%, which we do as it’s supposedly better for the battery. If we don’t programme it for 80% it keeps charging up to 100%, which is no biggy as we use it nearly every day and it wouldn’t stay at maximum charge for long. The dealer actually handed it over at 95%.
 

The one charging proviso: you need to allow for a one-off expense probably of around £1000 to install home charging if your house doesn’t already have it installed. We don’t have electricity in our lock-up garage across the street where the car normally lives, but we have a dumb charger on a 32 Amo CEE “commando” socket in our very roomy shed (the former home of our ancient campervan when we had it) at the bottom of our 120 foot garden, I park it up there on the evening before a charge, around 3PM or whenever we finish driving on the day preceding the charge, plug the charger in, and forget about it until I fetch it out again next morning charged up only during the cheap rate period. We live in a terraced house with no drive and although on-street charging in the Sunderland area is now very recently possible, insurance company approval, plus the installation and maintenance of a gully under the pavement, even with the generous Sunderland grant towards doing this, add enormously to the expense of enabling home charging.  In addition, there is no way in my neighbourhood that I would leave the Inster out on the street unattended and charging at overnight cheap rates, so you would have to be on an “anytime” energy tariff for daytime charging, and that’s when we would want to be out and about in the car.  The 51 metres of thick cable from our consumer unit to the socket in the shed was a major cost, hence the cheaper dumb portable charger rather than a more expensive smart wall-mounted chargepoint.  One day in the future I guess folk will be linking house and car more or less permanently plugged in to manage smart tariffs, but for now overnight at 9p per kWh does us fine.  The Inster (in summer at any rate) does around 5 miles to the kW, we drive onky in ‘eco” mode, so at a cost of 2p per mile we are seeing enormous savings over our former ICE fuel consumption: a weekly charging cost of under £3 gives us our “full” tank for a week or so of motoring.  When we come to do our occasional long journeys then we will have to investigate public chargers, but, for our “normal” driving weeks, home charging is a priority for us because of lower costs. 
 

So, no (direct) emissions, incomparably cheaper to run than an ICE equivalent, no appreciable insurance hike, at any rate for our age bracket and for this modest EV, and really fun relaxed driving, what’s not to like?!  Admittedly, we’ve just spent on getting electric roller doors for our shed/garage, but that’s an extra that we can’t directly blame on the EV!  The whole experience has been so much better even than we anticipated, as we didn’t know anyone who had a full battery EV, only non plug-in hybrids, so it was a bit of a leap of faith.  I would advise anyone to go full EV as soon as their budget allows it. 

Thank you  ​@waltyboy

With a commentary like this I feel we are coming out of the ‘pioneer’ phase of EVs. It used to be a lot more difficult with very limited range cars with AC only charging. Now you have a smaller car like the Inster with a very usable range, rapid charging and a lot more charge points around these days. The only fly in the ointment is the cost of external charging but a lot of people do 90%+ charging at home so it doesn’t have the major impact that it would suggest.

Peter

Morning ​@waltyboy, I hope you’re well and had a nice weekend.

I just wanted to drop by and thank you for this post - it’s great to hear that you’ve been able to run your EV with simplicity, and also so cheaply in comparison to a petrol / diesel equivalent. What a great advert for EV ownership!

How are you finding the Hyundai to drive? We haven’t seen too much about them yet on the Forum, being such a new entry to the market.