EV versus ICE

There are a number of reasons not to buy an electric car over their petrol powered cousins.  Below are just a few.  I have used the cheapest options where possible.

1) Cost.

In the UK, the cheapest available electric car is currently the Dacia Spring, costing from £14,995 upwards, depending on specification.  It has a claimed range of only 140 miles (Electrifing.com estimate a real world range of 100 miles, with a worst case estimate of only 70 miles in cold weather), and it takes around 5 hours to charge at a charging station.  As such, it is described as a city car.  Given those figures, you certainly aren't going to go continental touring in it!  A 5 hour wait every 100 miles would prove somewhat tiresome.

The similarly sized, petrol powered,  Dacia Sandero is available from £13,795.  That is £1200 cheaper, and you won't need to install a charging station at home to be able to use the Sandero.  The carwow site estimates around £2000 for this).  Car tax for the Sandero is about £200 annually (depending on the engine chosen), while electric cars like the Spring pay no road tax at present.  Personally, I doubt that electric vehicles will remain road tax free for much longer.  We have a government that is searching for additional income, and a class of cars that because of their additional weight cause more wear to our road network.  That contradiction of interests cannot last.

With petrol currently costing £1.29 per litre (£5.86 per gallon), then even allowing for 3 years of road tax, your first 5000 miles or so of driving are fuel cost free in the Sandero if only the cost difference between it and the Spring is taken into account.  Add in the cost of the charging station, and you get nearly 22,000 miles worth of fuel for the same cost. Let's not forget too, that even electric cars cost money to charge.  

Now to resale values, or rather to the lack of them.  See this quote for the residual value of a large and originally very expensive  electric Audi!  "I bought a brand new Audi Etron RS GT in Jan 2023 for £130K. I sold it in Feb 2024 for £65K! This was the best price I could achieve, even though I had only done 4300 miles. This cost me nearly £1000 per week in depreciation and over £16 per mile! They are a complete con, driven by political motives".  That level of depreciation is simply not going to happen with a petrol or diesel car.

Petrol wins in terms of cost.  No contest.

The Dacia Spring (photo from the Dacia web site)

2)  Range and performance.

Now we all know that manufacturers performance claims tend to be a little 'optimistic' (to put it mildly!).  Let's look at the Sandero in this context first.  Dacia claim 53.3mpg overall for the Sanderio, but Auto Express managed an average of only 49.3mpg.  That isn't a huge difference, so well done Dacia, you are exponentially more accurate in that mpg estimate  than Vauxhall was in their estimate for my Astra!

On performance, the Sandero is claimed to max out at 108mph, while the Spring does just 78mph.  Even at 70mph, I'm sure you would be able to watch the Spring's battery drain like water going down a plug hole, reducing it's usable range even further.  Yet, 70mph all day shouldn't be too much of a problem for even a modest car like the Sandero.

I admit that not everyone wants to travel hundreds of miles every day, still, owning an electric car like the Spring would be very limiting, it does not give you the choice.  Electric cars seem to bring out the sort of diametrically opposed views that are seen in American politics these days.  People either love them or hate them.  There are numerous reports on line from people who tried them, but because of their limitations now wish to return to liquid fuel powered vehicles.  I'm not surprised.  I don't think I could live with the constant need to plan on visiting the next recharge point, and those points are almost universally limited to main roads and motorways, boring roads at best.

Perhaps the most balanced view of range anxiety comes from James May.  See this YouTube link: James May still isn't convinced by electric cars

Petrol wins in terms of both range and sustained performance, no contest.

3)  Environmental issues.

This well publicised article in The Guardian states, using research form Volvo, that EV car manufacture produces 70% more greenhouse gas emissions than standard car production (I love electric vehicles – and was an early adopter. But increasingly I feel duped | Rowan Atkinson | The Guardian).  By that measure, and assuming that you can fill the car's battery with sustainably produced electricity, then EV's will need to be used for many miles to make any difference to the environment.  While this is possible, range anxiety and long recharge times are not conducive to it actually happening.  There is another problem for EV's too, and it centres around battery fires.

See this report BBC report on an EV battery fire:   'Why did our electric car parked in Spratton burst into flames?' - BBC News

Now, I am in no way claiming that electric cars self combust regularly, although if you read the exaggerated reports online, you would think that our roads would be littered with the burned out wreckage of the damned things.  The problem is the minor bumps and dings that seem to happen to the vast majority of cars.  I'm sure that you will have noticed a large increase in your own car insurance bill over the last couple of years?  Apparently this has been caused by minor accidents involving EV's.  It seems that, because there is no good way to know if a battery has been damaged during an accident, insurance companies are playing safe, and replacing them if possible after even very minor accidents. But, because these batteries are so expensive to replace, many relatively new EV's with very minor damage are just being written off, and will not even be resold into the second hand market for repair because they are considered dangerous.  See this Reuters article ( Insight: Scratched EV battery? Your insurer may have to junk the whole car | Reuters).  I can see the logic in this.  Having looked at reports like the BBC one above, would you risk leaving your kids in a repaired EV while you nipped into the shops for a loaf of bread and a litre of milk?

All this makes me wonder just how many EV's actually make it to the magic mileage milestone where they start to become a part of the solution to climate change.  In terms of reparability, liquid fuelled cars certainly have an advantage over their electric counterparts, and the ability to repair and reuse things will certainly be an important part of any greener future.  For the moment, I'll reserve judgement on the environmental claims made for electric cars.  In an ideal world, yes, they would be the clear winners, but this is not an ideal world.