We’d love an EV, but currently, none of the available ones would tick the boxes we need to be ticked.
It’s a weird one for us – we do suffer from range anxiety (apparently an actual thing), although we do understand that, lets say, 200 miles electric range would cover 99.9% of our needs without having to recharge “in the wild”.
We do live rural, so there’s not that many charging stations around here, which is my second biggest issue. Not that they’re “rare”, but the fact that if you pull up to one and nothing’s free, you’re potentially sitting there for an hour. An hour, just to get to the plug, then however long you need to put some juice back in.
With rising EV numbers, but the infrastructure not growing nowhere near as fast (at least in rural south wales), that’s a grim outlook to me. Regardless of how often i’d be in that situation. A petrol station can service hundreds of cars in an hour – they’re only in there for 5 minutes. A charging point, with maybe 8 plugs, can service what – 10, maybe 15 cars an hour? Meh.
But, as mentioned, the biggest issue is this. For many EVs, the selling point is “being electric”. We’d like a car where the selling point is “the car” which then happens to be electric. For starters (though that’s very subjective, granted): there’s no actually good looking EVs available on the scheme, even less so fitting our “requirements” (size, particularly). We did look at and sit in a few, and one way or the other, it just won’t work. DS3, Mokka E, Fiat 500e, Honda E, Mini E, Leaf – all too small. Kia Soul, awful both inside and out. Mazda MX30, too little range, too slow. 2008 E, same. Kona, too small. Citroen C4 E – it’s a Citroen, not going to happen for me. Ioniq, too small – or rather, too low, and so on. The ID3, well.. It would be the favourite at the moment, but the interior is so spartan that i just can’t get comfortable in it (we sat in it when looking at a Tiguan).
I will say, if the Enyaq iV comes to the scheme, we’ll probably switch if it has a reasonable AP (considering it needs around £3000 in packages to get to a decent spec, plus £1200 for the heat pump). Even if it’s the “60” model. That ticks most boxes in terms of required seating position and size, the interior is nice enough (again, bit spartan but still nice to look at – we sat in the microfibre one).
Other than that, yeah.. EVs are cool and we’d love one, but we do have requirements that EVs (at least the EVs available on the scheme) simply do not match. We currently have an Ateca, we can’t go any smaller (would actually prefer slightly bigger).
If there ever is a Kia EV6 (potentially), the Ionic 5, maybe the DS4, Audi Q4 E-Tron, VW ID4, maybe Nissan Ariya, we’ll most likely make the switch.