We had to replace both of our (10+ year old) Corsas in the last year, and for the second one decided to get a small EV (a Citroen eC-3). The initial six weeks have confirmed pretty much everything I thought about EVs, not least my view that EVs are a solution to nothing much at all, they have their uses and benefits, but they are a long way from being a viable mass replacement for an ICE car.

TL;DR — there is a narrow range of parameters within which EV makes good sense: your daily mileage must be within the (real) range of the EV, you have to have a home charger, and be able to utilise a sensible electricity tariff. Within those parameters, and only within those parameters, an EV is a great choice. (BTW, this is all from a UK perspective.)

Running Costs

If you are able to charge at home, then running an EV is quite a bit cheaper than an ICE car. At the current very high prices of petrol and diesel for us it works out about 50% better compared to my old Corsa SRi 1.0, and about 70% compared to our diesel Citroen Berlingo (8p / mile v. 11p / mile v. 13.5p / mile, respectively, though the Berlingo is, of course, a much bigger vehicle); these numbers are based on the current variable tariff for electricity.

There are, of course, specialised EV tariffs available, such as the Octopus Intelligent Go tariff, which offer tantalisingly low off-peak rates. However, this is smoke and mirrors, and the Octopus claim of 3p / mile is disingenuous to say the least, for you pay for the cheap off-peak electricity with a huge +30% markup on your standard rate — the cardinal rule of energy use is that all energy companies are shisters, and the House always wins.

The standard rate markup means that there is a threshold use of the off-peak rate up to which your electricity will be costing you more than if you were using the standard variable rate, and this threshold is quite high: for the current rates on Octopus Intelligent Go (36.65p between 05:30 and 23:30, and 9p for the remaining six hours) this works out around 33% use of the off-peak rate (on the rates from 1 April it will drop slightly to about 31%).

So if you only do low mileage with the EV and / or have significant electricity consumption during day time, the EV rate will be more expensive for you than the variable one. And, necessarily, the off-peak rate is very hard to make use of other than for charging the EV (the only additional use we have for it is to run a washing machine on a timer, which for us is an inconsequential amount of electricity, and a big inconvenience).

Nevertheless, even using the variable tariff as the cost base, running the EV using domestic charging is considerably cheaper than a comparable ICE car. However, as soon as you have to use a public charger this all goes out of the window. For the Corsa, the equivalent running costs would be ~38p / kWh, and for the much bigger Berlingo ~47p / kWh. Fast charging rates are typically at least 65p / kWh, and often much more, so for long journeys the EV is at least 50% more expensive to run than the diesel van! (This is just silly; as I said many times before, if the government was serious about decarbonisation, they would cap price of electricity at no more than twice that of gas.)

Range

EV range is pitiful and will remain so if not for ever (those cursed laws of physics!), then for the foreseeable future. The eC-3 has a 44 kWh battery, giving it a real range of 150 miles at this time of the year; but obviously, you are not going to run it down to 0 any more than you would run an ICE vehicle to empty, so the working range for us is about 120 miles.

In contrast, the Corsa had a range upwards of 500 miles. For the EV to have an equivalent range it would need 150 kWh battery, which is simply not possible in a car of this size — there isn’t enough space, plus the car is already +30% heavier than the Corsa as is. Even the latest BMW i3X, which is a much bigger car, has only 108 kWh battery in it, and a laughable range of 380 miles or so.

Physical size and weight of such large batteries aside, the real elephant in the room are charging speeds. You read lot of hype nowadays about game-changing batteries with very high charging rates that will charge in 10 minutes, but this ignores the reality of the UK grid — great many UK homes have a single phase connection, which effectively limits the domestic chargers to 7 kW: a 150 kWh battery would take more than 20 hours to charge at 7 kW, which makes the capacity unusable.

The 44 kWh in the eC-3 is just about at the practical limit for home charging, given the EV tariffs are restricted to 5-6h a day; to be able to make actual use of the range provided by bigger batteries will mean using public chargers, which blows the economics of the EV out of the water.

The Driving Experience

The best thing about the EV is the driving; I really enjoy driving the eC-3, more so than I imagined I would have.

Because bulk of the weight of the car is the battery, the weight is distributed much more evenly along the length of the car. This means low centre of gravity, and much less understeer, giving it much better handling than the Corsa SRi (I’d go as far as to say that the handling is not far off the BMW 1M I use to have).

EVs also tend to be over-powered compared to similar size ICE cars; the eC-3 can output 113 bhp, which makes it quit nippy, particularly in the early stages of moving from standstill; this takes some of the stress out of pulling onto roundabouts, overtaking and joining motorways, well familiar to any small car driver.

EVs excel at driving in slow moving traffic, and unlike ICE vehicles have excellent economy in start/stop situations because most of breaking in that situation is regenerative. This one benefit can’t be understated. We drive regularly along the choke point that is the M8 through Glasgow, and I could not believe how little energy that takes in the EV.

In contrast, driving at motorway speeds drains the battery really fast, the increase in consumption seems to be lot worse than in an ICE car, though it could be simply because the relative change is more perceptible (and, of course, consequential) given the overall low range.

What about the Environment?

I’d not bother buying an EV for environmental reasons; the evidence suggests that it’s mostly moving environmental problems elsewhere, and replacing one set with another. There is the whole nightmare of the hazardous materials needed for the batteries; battery recycling is non-existent in the large scheme of things, and given that recycling doesn’t work for pretty much anything else (the sole exception beeing steel), it’s naive to assume it will for car batteries.

On paper there is CO2 reduction to be had for like-for-like comparison, but due to the limited EV range ICE -> EV swaps are not necessarily like-for-like. In any case the electricity grid is a zero-sum game, and recent studies suggest that in the UK the growth in EV charging is simply forcing more hydrocarbons to be burnt to meet the requirements of the grid to the extent that the putative CO2 benefit is completely lost.

Also, this idea pushed by certain energy suppliers (not least Octopus), that it’s possible for me as a consumer to buy ‘green electricity’ is merely greenwashing PR aiming to gain the custom of certain well off, well meaning, economically significant, but ultimately intellectually lazy, segment of UK population — yet again, the grid is a zero-sum game.

The bottom line: if you really want to help the environment, don’t drive. Walk, cycle, take public transport, but of course, the infrastructure realities of UK make that very hard unless you live in a big city.