When will you buy your first EV?
The question is no longer if you will ever drive an Electric Vehicle (EV) but rather when you will drive one.
The 2030 deadline for banning new petrol and diesel cars is fast approaching which means you’re probably going to get behind the wheel of an electric car within the next ten years.
So, when will you buy your first EV?
Maybe you are still struggling with range anxiety? Or perhaps you are put off by the prices of the cars?
But the range of a typical EV is now in the region of 150-300 miles on a single full charge, and this is predicted to rise to 400 miles in the next few years. Given the average daily UK journey is just 11 miles, range anxiety probably shouldn’t be a thing anymore.
With nearly 40,000 public chargers available in the UK (compared to 8,365 petrol stations) if you do run out of juice you are probably never very far from somewhere to top up.
Prices of cars are also coming down with plenty on the market for the same price as a basic family car, and some even available for less than £10,000 on the road.
The club is growing
There were 267,203 EVs sold in the UK in 2022, and the RAC estimates there are 712,000 zero emission cars on the roads alongside 400,000 hybrids.
You can buy an electric car, an electric truck, or even an electric motorhome now. Plus, the cars themselves are multi-purpose, even serving as battery capacity for homes with green energy producing technology, such as solar panels. Increasingly new cars are equipped with the ability to feed energy back into your home as a cheaper alternative during high tariff hours, or when the grid is overloaded.
Worried about burning fossil fuels to power your car?
The EV industry is also making moves to offer a smarter way to save the planet by driving an EV powered by green energy instead of burning fuel.
Smart chargers enable EVs to maximise the use of green sourced, low-cost energy by integrating data from the cars with data from the national grid. They can ensure you are only charging your car using renewable sources of energy as well as making sure you are buying the cheapest electricity.
There are even accessories available now which allow you to power your car through solar panels or wind power. One car even has a solar panel on its roof!
Plus, the raw materials which are used to build and create the cars in the first place, can be traced and understood better through some manufacturers who are making the whole process far more transparent. Batteries, in particular, are a key focus with the industry spending huge amounts of money and time trying to reach a breakthrough which will mean battery technology can move away from the use of lithium-ion.
The future of driving an EV seemed a long way off just a few years ago. But in reality it is very close. In fact, you may already be thinking about buying an EV or have already bought one.
Either way it seems the time has come for Fixed to take a close look at some of the issues, technology and of course the financial realities of owning an electric vehicle.
We’ve dedicated the whole issue to it!