If you don’t have a driveway, I guess you cannot pre heat the car, I have a trick it’s warm water from the tap in a plastic bag, great at de-icing, especally for me as i have bad shoulders and i cannot do that scraping. It’s north yorkshire i go to he he.. I don’t think my daughter after school will thank me for the time spent waiting for a charge to get home back to notts and i already leave 2 hrs before i due to pick her up we get back to the midlands about 5pm ish. So its 3 hrs at least constant driving, there and back, mainly motorway and of course the parts of the a1 that is not motorway still.. So until a cars on the scheme that can deffo do that trip. It’s just a non starter and is why i asked. As for the kids they are the future so someone has to have them or we will be all extinct.
You can preheat the car if it’s not plugged in, it just takes a kWh out of the battery doing the preheating. Other constraints on my car are things like needing more than 50% state of charge for preheat to work. Pre-cooling the car last summer when it was 35C was also most welcome.
Currently the only 2 cars on the scheme that will do those mileages in winter are the Kia Soul & the Hyundai Kona 64kWh, you’ll get 160 miles or more even in winter, the summer ranges are at leat 260 miles. The car we need on the scheme is the Kia eNiro with the same sort of range but better load space.
In 3 years time I’m hoping that EVs with longer ranges will be available on the scheme, say 350-400 miles, but it’s wait & see.
As for children, they are indeed our future & I also hatched one for that purpose, I got around the snot-in-suede problem by simply replacing the car with a new one & giving the son the old one…. he gets to deal with his own snot.