Electric Vehicles

id say from the last few years its more the time spent than the cost. Ive had a petrol car these past few weeks and did 450 miles for £60 as it was a very new engine Nissan courtesy car from enterprise. I got my EV back and just did yorkshire to london down the M1 for £15, which is better than petrol but only by a few pounds. The trick is the time, we did one stop, 25 minutes using a rapid and had enough time to have a coffee. The range on my older EV lasts about 1:30h-1:45h so if youre going further than Yorkshire to London you will add 25 at each stop. So thats a factor to consider. Getting a longer range new EV will still mean stopping for 25-30 but your range is basically double to 3 hours, maybe 3:30h. Which is more than a decent comparison to petrol.

Cost wise, ive done some calculations recently which show roughly what I describe above. If youre paying at a rapid, contactless units will be costing between 60p and 80p per KWh, and you get about 4 miles to a KW, with a 50KW bcapacity battery. So depending on where you charge at these rates it will be roughly similar to petrol. However anything under about 45p per KWh and it starts to really add up savings wise. Many operators of slow chargers are charging between 35p and 45p. These take many hours longer but cost alot less. Finally, if you can plug into a wall socket overnight at a hotel, many are offering this now, you wake up in the morning to a full battery free of charge. Its not free to the hotel but its the cost equivalent to them of running a few kettles worth of energy overnight, or an aircon unit.

Finally the law swill be changing in the coming year or so. All operators will have to be open to all, so Tesla will be open to all vehicles instead of just Tesla cars. Only 20 sites are currently open to all, but their new units on the north circular have contactless pads ready for this change. They are currently charging under 40p at some sites late at night, and generally are cheaper than most operators. The other law change is the use of subscription services will become widespread as all operators will have to offer deals to buy electricity in bulk. Currently Bonnet and Elli are the main providers and you buy a monthly package to buy in bulk. In practice this means you get discounts on various operators like Osprey and Ionity in return for £13 a month, which is great if you do loads of miles. Currently gridserve and instavolt do not offer any subscriptions, but when they and Tesla do get forced to open up there will be real bargains to be had as competition will bring the price down.

The other thing id mention is Electroverse which is a payment card and app which bills your house electric bill and offers some discounts here and there. Octopus Energy offer these but i think anyone can have one. Double check that. In operation you open the app, toggle electroverse and navigate. Really clever stuff and probably the future if they can work out how to make it cheaper than Bonnet or Elli which are the same idea but just a billing system not connected to your house billing.

im sure i forgot something