An electric year

One year ago, I drove into a petrol station and, for the last time, filled my own car’s tank with petrol. Ever since, I have got around using 100% electric drive. Now seems as good a time as any to appraise the experience.

I’ve long since become used to jokes about only going as far as the extension cable will stretch and, in fact, I’ve noticed that those jibes have become rarefied. Indeed, the tone of queries from people has changed from fascinated curiosity of something strange in their midst, to thoughtful questioning about the pros and cons. You can tell folk are beginning to take this seriously.

What has been striking is the question I often hear when minds are already made up. “What’s the range?” It's natural resistance to change; a normal human reaction to distrust the new and gimmicky when there is a dependable means to hand that is well understood. Almost with unconscious ease, they will reach for the one property that they know will make the old ways look good. With a slight weariness, I trot out what has become a standard answer; worst case for me is about 60 miles, best case is 100 or more – it depends on many factors. And then I wait for a comment that sometimes comes, that such and such a diesel will do 500, 600 between refills.

I generally leave it at that. I’m finding there are increasing numbers of people that want a fuller appreciation of why an electric car ought to be considered. Although I’m an early-adopter fan-boy who might unintentionally gloss over the technology’s shortcomings to paint an image of clean, electric happiness, I have 52 weeks and 7,500 miles experience and I’ve developed opinions on the matter. So I’m going to lay them out.

The future

Electric driving is the future of motoring. This fact seems clear and simple. Once the kinks are ironed out (the aforementioned range and the infrastructure), it will become the obvious choice. Already, when I sit in morning queues on my way to work, the sound of ticking-over engines surrounding my peaceful, silent car, I feel that the internal combustion of organic fluids for the sake of movement seems so last century. When it seems that everyone else is oblivious to the dirty air they are pumping out with every beat of their car’s reciprocating heart, I become amazed at how capable we are of ignoring the damage to our collective health by the unnatural compounds and particulates that we are forced to breathe in for as long as we stay in a conurbation.

Electric driving doesn’t suit everyone and I realise I’m in a good position to try it. We are a two-car couple and if we need to go longer distance, my wife’s car is an able alternative. Many would be loathed to make a short range car their only choice. Surprisingly, I struggle to think of an occasion when we've opted for the petrol car. For the most part, people in cities don't do long journeys.

We have our own house with a driveway and space to install a charger. Many folk live in apartments and terraces where they cannot park on their own land and where dedicated chargers might be difficult or impossible to install. Public chargers are still few and far between and are very much a secondary source of power, even when free.

These drawbacks ought not to completely mask the delight I get from electric motoring. Road tax is free, electricity is about one fourth of the cost of petrol per mile travelled and there are instances when it is free. The car is extremely quiet and this really does make driving a less stressful task. I especially like going up hills because inclines are handled with the same quiet eagerness as any level road. This is especially true coming up my steep driveway to the house because the control I have of speed is a delight – at all speeds. Typically in a conventional car, a burst of engine noise is required in low gear to turn into the driveway and get up the hill. Now the most noise I make when arriving home from work at some late hour is the car door closing.

I don’t have a sporty car but it is astonishingly responsive. I often drive in Eco mode as much to rein back the instant responsiveness and give me and my passengers a smoother ride. It takes a very powerful car and a switched-on driver who is ready to pounce to get away from the lights faster than I do. I recently came up against this when getting caught in the left lane when wanting to turn right 160 metres ahead. A Jaguar to my right decided he wasn’t for letting me get ahead and tried to pace me as I took off from the line. I still easily pulled ahead and indicated for my junction but I sensed that he wasn’t happy at being trounced by some mid-range family car. I don’t normally do that!

On regular occasions, I’ve given friends and colleagues their first flavour of an electric car. It is remarkable to see preconceptions fall away. They say, “It’s just a car!” Then it’s, “Ooh, that’s so quiet and smooth,” as I manoeuvre out of the car park. When I get to a quiet straight road and floor it, their delight and astonishment is palpable. It’s not what they expected at all. Oh, and just by the way, I’m not putting out any noxious gases whatsoever. Just imagine our cities were full of such vehicles. Whether it’s Oxford Street in London or Renfield Street in Glasgow, the air would be as fresh as that in Glen Coe.

The direct costs

Enough of the fun and frolics. What have I had to pay for this? The first thing to say is that, as an early adopter, I’m in the sweet spot of incentives designed to attract us away from environmentally damaging machines and my costs for this car will surely not be attained in the future. The market is very good at finding ways of leeching cash out of our bank accounts and I don’t doubt that the same will be true of electric motoring once it becomes main stream. In particular, I stumbled across a leasing deal for a Nissan Leaf that was extraordinarily generous. Here’s how it came out, as best as I can decode the dealer’s paperwork from a year ago:

Retail price of car:  £22,031.58
Tax disc:  £0.00
First Registration fee:  £55.00
Less government incentive:  -£5,000.00
Less Nissan contribution:  -£3,200.00
Less customer deposit:  -£1,999.00
Total amount for credit:  £11,887.58

The credit amount comes from two sources; the guaranteed value after the 2-year lease was £10,872.82 which left me to pay £1,014.76 over two years.

I’m obviously missing a small detail because 24 payments to make up £1,014.76 yields £42.28 whereas I’m actually paying £39.99 per month for the car. In addition, this is a ‘Flex’ deal which means I’m hiring the battery at £80.00 per month which makes £119.99 per month for a rather posh (in my terms) car. In one year’s time, having had the car for two years, I’ll hand it back and walk away from the deal to see what’s available.

What about other costs? Here’s what I can come up with:

A 30-amp charger on the house was paid for by both the UK and Scottish governments. I bought a charging cable, a case for it I never use, floor mats and the first year's service. Total cost: £310.94.
I got an Ecotricity smart card for free (more on this later) and a Charge Your Car smart card for £20. I just renewed the latter for another £20.

I suppose I ought to add the cost of car hire last January when we took a full Vauxhall Insignia to Reading and back to attend a wedding. This was £226.78 plus whatever diesel we had to buy (about 90 litres). I did another long trip in October but Nissan were good on their promise and lent me a car for that journey. Add another tankful of diesel.

That’s about all of the direct costs I can think of. However, as well as the cost of electricity, there is another cost I’m aware of and it won’t hit me until I hand back the car. My £80 per month battery hire is based on an annual mileage of 5,000. In my first year, I drove just over 7,000 miles and assuming I do the same in the second year, I’ll have 4,000+ miles excess mileage at the end of the deal. The conditions of the battery hire state that these extra miles will be charged at 10 pence per mile so I should expect a £400+ additional charge. Interestingly, 10p/mile was the cost of petrol I was paying in my hybrid Yaris when getting 50mpg.

The cost of leccy

So to the cost of electricity, and this is a very hard one to determine. This is because the electricity that goes into it came from various sources. Any time I’ve had a charge away from the house, it has been free. I don’t know the exact amount, but I think it is only a small percentage – 5% at a guess. A chunk of that was our Great Spring Electric Adventure when we went to Shropshire and back last April. The electricity for that came from the Electric Highway network of chargers located at most motorway service stations.

Just this month, the owners of that network, Ecotricity, started charging for the service. However, apart from that adventure, I never tend to use the network so it isn’t a problem – at least for now. Ecotricity’s price seems similar to running on diesel. The rest of my electricity when out and about came from the Charge Your Car network which, so far, has been free at the point of charging but I pay £20 annually for the privilege.

I ought to give a shout out for three relatives who let me plug my car into their domestic supplies on a very few occasions during visits. All the rest of the energy for my driving came through the charger on my house wall – but even some of that was free. Having solar panels, if I see that the car needs a top-up and there is excess energy coming out of the array on my roof, I plug the car in to mop it up rather than allowing it into the grid. I’m getting paid for generating it either way so I might as well use it.

One way to look at it is to compare my total house consumption for the year before the Leaf with that consumed when the Leaf was being recharged.  It turns out we consumed 684 more units of electricity last year than we did the year before. That makes an additional cost of £80.44. Of course, that takes no account of other factors that affect our total electricity spend nor does it show power that came from the Sun to help the house, but it gives us something to think about. Actually, a daily comparison of the two years is interesting. At times, the two years are the same.

One other source of information was the Nissan Carwings Telematics system. If I gave permission, Nissan would collect usage statistics like miles travelled and power consumed on a daily basis. These could be viewed on their website via a username and password. Unfortunately, after a vulnerability in the system generated headlines, this hasn’t worked properly. The stats I do have were up to April and that had logged 1,100 units, although many of them would have been direct from the Sun.

To do the same distance in my last car, the hybrid Yaris, I would have spent about £700 in petrol. I think it’s fair to guess that, including the £20 for Charge Your Car, I’ve spent no more than £150 to power the Leaf.

Way to go

Electric cars are refined, civilised, relaxing, efficient and clean. They don’t go far enough on a single charge unless you can acquire a Tesla S, but that’s changing fast. The charging infrastructure is in its early days and has a long way to go but I mostly charge at home.

I don’t like the roar of an engine and the smell of exhaust fumes when going about my daily life. I don’t like pumping clutch pedals and flicking gear sticks just to massage an inefficient, antisocial, health-damaging internal combustion engine into the narrow zone in which it works reasonably well. I don’t like when every time a car slows down, it dumps as heat all the expensively acquired momentum it has rather than recovering energy to use again.

I particularly don’t like taking carbon that was locked away in the ground for the best part of a billion years and placing it into the modern environment for the sake of a little easy energy when doing so contributes to planetary changes that could be very damaging for us in the long term. It seems particularly narrow minded given that our Sun pours far more energy across the planet then we could ever use were we to wrest ourselves from the vested interests.

A year ago, I last filled my car with petrol. I really don’t think I ever will again.