I regret buying our family an electric car

For years everyone laughed at the idea of electric cars[1]. The battery would have to be the size of the car itself! The expense would be insane!

Then Tesla[2] came along and made the electric car thing look not just like a possibility, but like the future. Then other manufacturers, envious, had a go. The government, also keen to look like they were doing something about reducing emissions, offered incentives and tax breaks on the purchase of electric vehicles.

It was in this climate of hope that we bought an electric Jaguar i-Pace, in 2020. Up until then we’d driven about in an elderly Ford Fiesta, which smelled of ancient biscuit crumbs, coffee stains and old fag smoke. Driving the Jaguar, by comparison, was like being in a spaceship.

It was so clean, so quiet. So un-smelly. The luxury was immense.

“This is the future,” we said to ourselves as we purred about the place, feeling self-righteous and chic. But then we tried to leave town. And we quickly discovered that you cannot reliably charge up your electric car on the motorway.

Ever. Anywhere. Charging up the car at home was bad enough.

It took days and required nabbing a parking space outside the house (never a certainty), and then feeding a long cable out of the window and across the pavement, with special rubber mats laid on top. This is all fine in the summer, when fiddling about with cables through windows and across pavements is tolerable. But in the dead of winter, connecting or un-connecting the blasted cables in freezing temperatures or, worse, the driving rain, handling wet dirty cables covered in dog piss and slug slime did not feel like a luxury experience.

It felt like a pain in the arse. But, we told ourselves, this is probably just what the future looks like. The lack of reliable chargers on the motorway, however, was extremely scary.

An app exists called Zap Map which in theory tells you where your nearest rapid charger is. But if that rapid charger is occupied, or in fact not rapid, or out of service, you are stuffed. The words “Zap Map” now send chills down my spine.

It was quickly apparent to me that buying this car had been a huge mistake.

What the hell is the point of a car that you can’t reliably drive from London to Scotland? I don’t have to drive from London to Scotland, but I want to own a car that hypothetically can. Even my first car, a Toyota Aygo, which had an engine only one step up from a MagiMix, could do that journey with minimal fuss.

Added to all of this hassle, the car kept on being stolen. Although, frankly, by the second time it went, I was starting to think that the thieves were welcome to it. I imagined them struggling to charge it up on their get-away drive and gave a nasty laugh.

Around the same time that this regret was dawning on me, other electric car users noticed the drawbacks, too, and negative stories started creeping into the media. (And the bad news keeps on coming: last week it was reported that Britain’s public car charging network is so expensive that the cost of driving an electric car[3] is now up to twice the price of running a petrol or diesel vehicle. More terrible PR for an industry already hit by terrible PR). But my husband does not like admitting defeat and believes that any problem can be overcome if you just work hard enough.

Admirable. But also a bit annoying? So we stuck with that car for two years, even though things kept going wrong with it (the heater, the central locking system), necessitating months off the road while it was fixed by engineers who didn’t understand the car any better than we did.

Any long journey was filled with high anxiety about where to charge. The last straw came at the end of 2022. The week before New Year we drove from Gloucestershire to Cornwall to see my sister and it took most of the day as we spent hours tracking down working chargers.

We arrived jangly and exhausted. That was miserable enough, but in the final stages of the return journey the car made a series of weird noises and died. While my husband waited for a tow truck, I took the children and walked the remaining two miles to the house, through the cold December drizzle.

I arrived home with my eyeliner smudged down my face, my hair plastered sideways and overnight guests due to arrive in under an hour. “I never want to see that car again,” I said to my husband. Finally, he agreed.

The car was sold back to Jaguar and I punched the air. For long journeys, we now own a third-hand Volvo, which is a juddery old jalopy but what it lacks in looks it makes up for in stamina. I might drive it to Scotland one day, just for a laugh.

What have I learnt about owning an electric car?

Don’t – unless you never leave town.

References

1. ^ electric cars (inews.co.uk)
2. ^ Tesla (inews.co.uk)
3. ^ is so expensive that the cost of driving an electric car (inews.co.uk)