Any mention of electric cars on social media will cause a primitive, tribal response – either that electric cars are the saviour of humankind or that they’re being pushed onto us against our precious free will.
This guide lays out the pros and cons of electric cars, so you can decide whether an EV will suit you based on your actual life and driving habits. No bias, no exaggeration, just straight up facts and friendly advice.
- What is an electric car?
- Advantages and disadvantages of electric cars
- Should I buy an electric car?
- How to drive an electric car
- How to charge an electric car
- EV running costs
- Advertised vs real-world range
- How much range do you really need?
- Battery health explained
- Should you buy a used electric car?
- Are used EVs expensive?
- Are used electric cars reliable?
- What to check when buying a used electric car
- Are electric cars good for the environment?
- Will I have to replace the battery? Should I be worried about EVs catching fire?
- EV glossary – jargon-busting abbreviations and terms
- Best electric car lists – find your perfect EV
What is an electric car?
Let's start with the basics. An electric vehicle, or EV, is solely powered by electricity.
The electricity is stored in a battery – usually mounted underneath the floor of the car – and is used by one or more electric motors, which drive the wheels. An EV's battery pack usually stores enough electricity for several hundred miles of driving, and can then be recharged from a mains electricity supply.
Electric cars might also be called BEVs (battery electric vehicle). If you come across anything with 'HEV' (including PHEV and MHEV), this is a type of hybrid car – meaning the vehicle has both an engine and the electrical parts just mentioned. Read our guide to hybrid cars for more information.
Advantages and disadvantages of electric cars
| EV pros: | EV cons: |
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Should I buy an electric car? Will it work for me?
| An EV would suit your lifestyle if: | An EV may not be right for you if: |
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Electric cars will definitely suit your lifestyle if you have a regular place to charge and you mainly drive in urban or suburban areas. They’re convenient to charge from a home wallbox, and many EVs will do more than 200 miles on a full charge – and you’re almost certainly going to want to stop before then on a long journey.
If you’re happy to use public chargers and plan your journey ahead of time, electric cars can absolutely work for repeated long journeys. There’s no mechanical reason why electric cars aren’t suited to racking up hundreds of thousands of miles on motorways. However, using public chargers can be expensive and time-consuming, so we’d still recommend a diesel car for mega motorway mileage.
For drivers without a dedicated off-road parking spot, it’s harder to live with an electric car, but not impossible. You’ll need to work out whether you can run a cable from your house to your car without causing a hazard to pedestrians, or if you can rely on local chargepoints when you need to top up.
How to drive an electric car
Driving an electric car is easier than driving an engine-powered car. All electric cars have an automatic gear selector. Besides Neutral or Park, you’ve either got forwards or backwards to choose from. Electric cars don’t have gears, so there’s no gap in power like you’d get in a petrol or diesel car – just linear, smooth acceleration.
Engines typically offer maximum power high up the rev range, whereas an EV’s electric motor offers maximum power immediately. As a result, most EVs are much quicker off the line than engine-powered cars. Acceleration in an EV is strongest at lower speeds but usually isn’t as gut-punchingly strong at motorway speeds.
Electric cars typically offer brake regeneration. When you come off the accelerator, the car may slow down more quickly than you expect. Energy that would be lost during braking is harvested to top up the battery – so electric cars are remarkably efficient in stop-start traffic, unlike engine-powered cars. The strength of the brake regeneration – or how quickly you slow down when you take your foot off the accelerator – can usually be adjusted. You might prefer less regeneration on the motorway, for example.
It soon becomes natural to use the brake regeneration. Some EVs offer ‘one-pedal’ driving, where the regen braking can slow you down right to a stop. You’ll still use the physical brakes for emergency stops, but most day-to-day driving situations can be done just with the accelerator.
Driving an EV in town
EVs are simply brilliant in urban areas. Getting up to 30mph is easier than in a petrol/diesel car, so you can nip out of junctions and roundabouts in a gap that wouldn't be big enough for a petrol car to get out in. The aforementioned brake regeneration makes driving in stop-start traffic relaxing – and you'll be topping up the battery as you're driving. EVs don't produce exhaust emissions so you're not polluting the local environment.
Driving an EV on country roads
Electric cars perform well on country roads. Having the power available instantly makes light work of accelerating up to the next speed limit or out of a tight corner. Electric cars are usually quite efficient on country roads. You'll probably want a medium or high brake regen level on country roads to help you brake quicker if you suddenly meet something coming around a blind bend.
Driving an EV in hilly areas
This is a bit of a hidden talent of EVs. Most electric cars have plenty of power to get up a steep hill without any fuss whatsoever, because the power is available right away. In a fuel-powered car, you might have to shift to a lower gear to have the power to get up the hill – if you're in the wrong gear the car will struggle and lose power.
Steep hills will reduce your range, but you'll regain some of the energy lost on downhill stretches.
Driving an EV on the motorway
Like many petrol cars, electric cars are less efficient on the motorway than on slower roads – and therefore your range figure will go down more quickly. If you're thinking of driving an EV to save money, it's worth dropping your speed to 65mph or even 60mph on the motorway – it'll only add a few minutes to your travel time, but is much more efficient than doing 70mph and above. As long as you bear that in mind, EVs are easy to drive on the motorway and are more than capable of racking up hundreds of thousands of miles.
Driving an EV long distances
The longest-range electric cars can now match a petrol car for how far you'll go on a 'tank'. However, these are often quite expensive, and many EVs will do a couple of hundred miles between charges. For these EVs, long-distance driving is perfectly doable but may need some planning. Luckily, apps such as ZapMap and A Better Route Planner (ABRP) give you realtime data on local chargepoint availability.
Read our guide to planning a long journey in an electric car here.
How to charge an electric car
| EV charging types | AC – slow | DC – fast |
| Common speeds | 2.3kW to 22kW | 50kW to 400kW |
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| Cost | Cheap at home, but costlier for public chargers | Expensive |
The best way to charge an electric car regularly is to do so from a home wallbox, which usually gives around 7kW of power. At this rate, most EVs can be fully charged at home overnight – so you can wake up to a full battery every day if you wish, or limit the charge to 80% to maximise the lifespan of the battery. Many drivers find this very convenient – plug in when you get home and unplug when you leave for work.
Most electric cars have an accompanying smartphone app. Usually, you can schedule when you want charging to start or finish – handy if you know you have cheaper electricity costs in the early hours of the morning. You’ll also be able to pre-condition the cabin, meaning you can set the temperature you want it to be inside the car from your phone – perfect for cold wintry mornings or scorching summer days.
Almost all electric cars offer some sort of fast-charging capability – the Peugeot e-2008 can charge at a maximum rate of 100kW, for example. You’ll not always see this maximum rate – it’s dependent on the charger you’re connected to, outside conditions and the state of the battery. You don’t have to stick to chargers rated less than 100kW, however. If you plug in to a higher-power charger, the car and charger will work it all out and the charger won’t give more electricity than the car can take.
In the vast majority of cases, you'll pull up to a charging station and find it available and working. Perhaps you might have to queue in particularly busy times (such as driving home for Christmas or on a bank holiday when it seems everyone in the country is driving somewhere), but having a difficult experience at a charger is thankfully rare.
Some public charging networks require you to create an account and faff around adding your payment card, but the major networks often let you tap your card to start and then tap it again to stop the charge.
Read our full guide to charging an EV at home and about the different EV charger types.
Electric car running costs – are they lower than a petrol car?
- Electric cars are very cheap to run if you can charge at home; public charging is considerably more expensive
- Work out the cost of a charge by multiplying the amount of kWh you're adding by the cost per kWh (i.e. 30kWh at 50p/kWh is £15)
- Insurance costs are often high and tyres may need replacing more quickly
- Road tax costs the same as petrol cars, and servicing/maintenance should be cheaper
We’ve got a more in-depth guide to electric car running costs here, but the topline is that electric cars are generally cheaper to run than petrol or diesel cars – especially if you can charge at home. Take advantage of an EV-specific home electricity tariff and you can usually fully recharge overnight for less than £10. The size of the battery and the car’s efficiency (usually measured in miles per kWh, or mi/kWh) affect how much an EV costs to recharge.
The cost of electricity varies drastically depending on where you charge. It’s cheapest at home, but some motorway service station chargers can be five or 10 times as expensive – at which point there’s little difference in cost between an EV and a petrol car. The EV could even be more expensive to charge up. A figure like 80p/kWh might not sound like much but, if you have a car with a large battery, that can quickly add up.
You can expect insurance costs to be higher for an electric car than an equivalent petrol one, due to the extra cost of the electric powertrain and higher repair costs. Electric cars now have to pay VED (road tax) from April 2025, including an extra ‘expensive car supplement’ if the car costs over £50,000 new (it's £40,000 for fuel-powered cars). VED can be paid monthly if you’d like to spread the cost.
Electric cars should cost less to service and maintain because they have fewer moving parts. Brakes can potentially last the lifetime of an electric car if you use the regenerative braking a lot. Service intervals are often two years, rather than yearly for petrol and diesel cars.
Bear in mind that the heavier and more powerful an electric car is, the harder it is on tyres – so a performance EV might wear through its tyres quicker than you might expect. Read our guide to electric car tyres here.
Advertised vs real-world range
- Cars are tested to the same standard for fairness
- Your actual mileage will vary based on how and where you drive
- Batteries are most efficient in temperate conditions
All cars – electric, petrol, diesel or otherwise – go through economy and emissions testing before they go on sale. This is called the WLTP figure, and allows you to compare cars because all have been tested in the same way. But that doesn't mean you'll achieve the quoted economy or range figures in real life.
As an example, the Renault Megane E-Tech (pictured here) has a WLTP range figure of 280 miles from a 60kWh battery. To match that figure, you'd have to achieve 4.7 miles per kWh. That might be possible if you're driving right behind a truck on the motorway for the duration of your journey, but most drivers will see a bit less than 4.7mi/kWh, and therefore fewer miles than Renault quotes on its website.
Like humans, batteries have a happy operating window. We don't like it too hot or too cold. Batteries are less efficient in cold weather, so you'll get fewer miles between charges during winter. As mentioned, EVs become less efficient at motorway speeds, and they'll drop miles if you've got the air con running at full blast.
Back to that Megane. In our experience, you can achieve:
- 230-260 miles in summer
- 180-210 miles in winter
- 180-210 miles on the motorway
- <180 miles on the motorway in winter
This is broadly comparable with most electric cars, although electric cars with a heat pump are more efficient in winter than cars without one – so you may see less of a drop in winter than in our example.
While it’s true that electric cars might not give you their maximum quoted range figures, the same is true for petrol and diesel cars. It’s incredibly difficult for most combustion-engine cars to reach their quoted miles-per-gallon (mpg) figures, which means their range estimate is lower than what you’d achieve if the car was returning its quoted mpg figures.
How much range do you really need?
- Most EVs have enough range for at least a few days' commuting
- EV owners don't typically suffer range anxiety
How far an EV will go on a charge is the main figure many buyers are concerned with. While it’s true that the vast majority of EVs can’t go as far as a fully fuelled petrol or diesel car, there’s almost certainly an EV with enough range to suit your needs. Considering the average UK commute is a round trip of 30-40 miles, even a car with 150 miles of real-world range will only need to be charged every few days.
Many EVs can manage over 200 miles between charges, while an increasing number can crack 300 or even 400 miles.
If you're buying an electric car as your main/only car, you'll probably want a car with a 300-mile range to feel comfortable – or less if you don't drive very far. But if you've got a car for longer journeys and you're buying an electric car as a second car, you may not need a big car with a big range.
Once you regularly drive an EV, you'll realise that range anxiety isn't something to worry about. Even when you drive further afield, there are plenty of chargers around (unless you're somewhere quite remote).
Battery health explained
- All batteries degrade over time but cars have long battery warranties
- Battery technology is constantly improving and EVs are becoming even more durable
- Charging more slowly, and little and often, can help to prolong the life of the battery
Over time, all batteries start to degrade. You'll notice it on your phone as that gets older, and the same is true – to an extent – with electric cars. The difference is that EVs have sophisticated battery management systems to allow the cells to be charged up and discharged without losing too much capacity.
Many used electric cars are now sold with a battery state of health (SOH) report, which tells you how much of the battery's original capacity is left.
Carmakers typically provide an eight-year warranty on the high-voltage battery pack, and usually this includes a stipulation that, in these eight years, the battery won't drop to less than 70% of its original capacity.
Battery technology has dramatically improved since electric cars first hit the mainstream. At the very bottom end of the market you'll find early Nissan Leafs that have lost about half their initial battery capacity, but these days it's not uncommon to find EVs with over 100,000 miles on the clock and still strong battery health.
Read our guide to how long electric car batteries last for more information.
Should you buy a used electric car?
More and more drivers are realising that an electric car will suit their lifestyle, and buying a used electric car means you can save thousands of money versus a new equivalent. Like any car, you should do your research into the history of the car you're looking to buy – request a battery health certificate, check the car's MOT history and make sure that servicing has been completed on time. Used electric cars are typically affordable, reliable and high-tech.
Prices – are used EVs expensive?
- EVs lose a lot of their initial value quite quickly
- That makes lightly used EVs a bargain versus new equivalents
- Electric car depreciation slows over time
Electric car technology and powerful battery packs are still expensive, and that’s reflected in the cost of new EVs. Often, a new electric car will be as much as £10,000 more than an equivalent petrol model so, even with lower running costs, it’ll take a long time for private buyers to break even.
An electric car’s depreciation (how much value it loses) is steepest in the first year. Almost as if buyers are telling carmakers how much they’re willing to pay… But, as our guide to electric car depreciation shows, they won’t continue to lose money at the same sharp rate – in fact, the amount of value an EV loses per year becomes very similar to an equivalent petrol or diesel car.
Electric cars are often fantastic value on the used market. At the moment, many used electric cars are now similar prices to a petrol equivalent after just a couple of years on the road. So, whether you’re after a frugal family car or a second car runabout, you’ll find huge savings versus new cars by searching the used market.
Are used electric cars reliable?
- Electric cars are relatively simple compared to petrol and diesel cars
- EVs are less likely to break down than fuel-powered cars
While we can't guarantee that the car you buy will last forever, used electric cars certainly should be reliable because there are far fewer parts than in a petrol or diesel car. Combustion cars typically have around 30,000 different parts, whereas EVs have about half of that. And there aren't many moving parts in an EV's powertrain.
In fact, electric car breakdowns are most commonly down to the small 12V battery – which every car has – and punctures. Major powertrain faults are few and far between.
What to check when buying a used electric car
Before you commit to buying a used electric car, make sure you check:
- The MOT history and service records, if applicable
- The battery health status
- The condition of the car inside and out, including the wheels and tyres
There's more detail in our exhaustive buying a used car guide.
Make sure to also check how much you'll be paying for car insurance because, as mentioned, many electric cars are in quite a high insurance group compared to petrol equivalents.
Are electric cars good for the environment?
Electric cars are good for your immediate environment, as they produce no local exhaust emissions. Delve deeper than that and it’s a tricky question to answer. The battery contains materials that are mined in faraway countries and shipped across the globe, and it takes a lot of energy to make a car. Some energy providers say they only use 100% renewable energy for electricity, but their claims can be hard to back up.
As with any car, electric cars produce minute amounts of particulate matter as the tyres and brakes wear away, so we can’t say that electric cars are truly emission-free.
Will the battery need replacing? Will my EV catch fire?
- Batteries are lasting longer than many people realise
- EV fires are vanishingly rare
Electric car batteries are expensive, and you won’t want to be footing the bill for a new one. But worries about battery longevity are largely exaggerated – EV batteries should last the lifespan of the car or longer if treated well, and battery tech is improving all the time. Buy a modern EV and you shouldn’t need to worry about it at all – most EVs are covered by an extensive battery warranty. Some EVs now, such as the Volvo EX60, have a sealed-for-life battery pack – which suggests brands have serious confidence in the longevity of the cells.
As for electric car fires, they really aren’t worth worrying about at all. Especially if you’re currently driving around in a fuel-powered car that relies on flammable liquid being exploded multiple times a second. A study by the Swedish Civil Contingencies Agency shows that electric cars are 20 times less likely to catch fire than a petrol or diesel car. When EV fires do very occasionally happen, it's a newsworthy event – partly because of how infrequent it happens and partly because some media outlets are in the pocket of large oil companies.
EV glossary
Unfortunately, there are a lot of abbreviations and new words to get your head around if you're looking to buy an electric car. We've produced a jargon-busting alternative fuels and electric cars glossary to get you clued up on what all these terms mean.
Find the used electric car for you at Motorpoint
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