If you only do journeys over 50 miles on a very occasional basis, why not just hire a conventional for those trips and have an electric car for the rest? This wouldn't work if everyone did it as the economics of hire car companies mean they need a good market for the 'nearly new' cars after they've finished with them, but at the moment may make economic sense for some people.

However, it takes an awful lot of 50 mile journeys to make any useful savings. Average mileage is 12000 per year, which costs about £1200 in fuel. Of that 12000 miles, probably only 7000 was journeys less than 50 miles, so about £700 in fuel. To do a full charge of an electric car costs about £3 on conventional electricity rates, and to do 7000 electric miles would take about 100 charges, or £300. So, even just looking at fuel costs, you'd only save about £200 per year.

You could argue that for people doing a lower total number of miles it makes more sense, but then the average daily journeys become so short (7000 miles pa is 20 miles per day) you may as well not own a car at all and use a push bike or bus.

Personally, I'm unlikely to fit the category for an electric car any time soon, I do about 20000 miles a year, almost exclusively on journeys of more than 150 miles. On the other days, my car goes nowhere and any 1-3 mile trips I do locally is done on my push bike.

If you buy a new Leaf (or maybe even a second hand one or ex demo) from a Nissan dealer, there's an arrangement where they lend you a "proper" car for occasional long journeys, such as holidays.

My ex's mum bought one in 2014 and she got three free uses of a standard petrol or diesel Juke per year.

Edited by Gibbo_Wirral on 14/09/2016 at 14:13

In London, drivers don't have to pay congestion charge (£10), if they happen to have an electric car. Many more City centres will be looking at similar schemes to reduce pollution.

I recall Councils have a duty to provide electric charging points.

Battery chems, are getting better all the time. Once they fix the energy storage issue, I suspect it may be the end of the combustion engine.

If someone has a solar panels, they get their energy for free.

LCC is £11.50 now, but the free for all electric cars may be changing soon,rumour has it Hybrids may also be charged....

Here in France the government is really bigging electric cars up big time- they started with free charging points in all towns - that has now backtracked to a small charge of €1.50 or so for 1.5 hours connection to a charging point.

From what I can see on the road, there are very few if any elecric cars about, and of the widely publicised charging points I have yet to see a car connected to one.

The supermarket car parks in a biggish town however, are full of Audi's Merc's and BMW's.

It's blindingly obvious, once people have jumped on an apparently mega cheap transport bandwagon, encouraged by govt, that the govt of the day and their local authority chums will seek to replace the revenue lost from fuel tax, road tax, vat, congestion charges and any other ways they can dream up to extract most of the money the public have left after general taxation.

They have form for this, promoting Diesels only to turn the hymnsheet over to page 666, Diesel Is Bad.

Surely no one in their right mind believed that electric for charging private cars and their costs of ownership would stay almost free for long, or that Dick Turpin wouldn't be plundering their wallets, just like everyone else without the benefit of offshore accounts (now who do we know who recently jacked their non job in) or superb accountants like some coffee houses.