About 2 months ago we made the decision to switch our second car for all electric, and about a month ago we picked up a year old, 2020 Hyundai Ioniq, Premium SE full electric. Was expecting to do something like 500-600 miles a month in it, but a month later we've somehow covered just under 1500 miles, so I thought I drop a few thoughts about the car and EV experience.

The more we drive the car, the more we like it. My wife, who normally doesn't care about a car at all as long as it goes reliably, really loves it, both as a car and the whole electric car experience. It's no sports car, but as a comfortable cruiser across town, motorway and rural roads it's great. Perfectly quick enough though, and performance is effortless to access. Massive amount of standard equipment, so not short of gadgets. Plenty of room inside and whilst the boot doesn't have a large volume, it's long and wide, so as long as we don't have to carry anything tall, it actually works as a large boot.

The general drive is so, so smooth. No gear changes, no engine noise, no fuss. Just put your foot down and go.

On the EV side, from a 38kwh battery, we see 180-200 miles from a full charge, getting over 5 miles/kwh easily. (By reputation, no other EV, save a Tesla 3, is as efficient). We considered a bigger battery/range model, but just couldn't justify the additional cost for those very occasional longer drives.

Currently using a 3 pin charger at home, so charging is slow but perfectly adequate. Will be getting a 7kw charger as soon as the house power supply is upgraded for free by Western Power. With solar panels on the house, I guess we're averaging 1-2p per mile in fuel costs, which may well improve when we get a better charger that will take the excess solar power intelligently. Charging at home and with the range the car has, we've absolutely no range anxiety.

Public charging is a bit more hit and miss, and currently if we didn't have access to charging at home I don't think I'd want an electric car in our location (semi-rural Wales). Some chargers are great, the free ones at Tesco worth a special mention. Other ones are unintuitive, can be busy or blocked. We did a weeks holiday in Pembrokeshire with the car, relying solely on public charging: It was a bit of a hassle, as it's not the most well served county for public chargers, but worked out OK. But the charger network appears to be improving rapidly and the more recent chargers are far easier to use than the older ones.

We've liked the car so much we've ended up using it in preference to our 'first' car virtually all the time, and hence the higher than anticipated miles. The petrol car (2019 Focus estate Ecoboost) now being used only for the very long journeys I can do for work, if we need to shift a lot of large stuff, or we need to use both cars together.

Overall loving both the car and the electric experience.

Edited by Hy Sid on 06/06/2021 at 20:01