Of course there are other reasons than cost. If no-one buys these cars then they won’t succeed and they’ll never get cheaper, they’ll never become accepted and we won’t end up with infrastructure for them.

Of course, but it’s quite a big issue for most people.

Anyone know what insurance costs are like.

Miss Withersea with learn to drive next year, so will need to chop in the boy racer fiesta for something more insurable for a 17 year old.

A quick Google for costs indicates insurance costs are likely to be higher, but I’d like to hear from those who have an electric car.

Educator: feel free to continue the electroauto anecdotes; our Zoe should turn up at the beginning of September and I’m SO EXCITED

Our (car sharing, natch) way to work involves a lot of roundabouts and I can’t stand all the ending up at the same speed after having used all your forward motion to heat up the world a bit.

Insurance is around 330e, I can’t remember exactly. That’s fully comp with windscreen and light cover and a 19 year old driver with only 700e excess for him. In France where insuraance is usually more expensive. That’s the cheapest car I’ve ever insured. Make sure they include the leased battery if you lease it.

Electroauto anecdote #4: we drove through the massif central really slowly taking in the sights, the range at the next recharge was 406km, so 400km is possible if you drive between 50 and 75kmh on roads with lots of speed limits and very little traffic. Otherwise it would be plain anti-social.

Something to do with German company car taxation being favourable towards expensive fast saloons.

German taxes favour electric company cars says the German standing next to me.

Company car tax is based on 1% of the gross list price of the car, so electro were at a disadvantage, since leccy car list prices were typically higher for an equivalent spec car. But then there’s a bodge to give up to €10k deduction from that list price for leccy cars.
Charging cars on employers premises is essentially a tax free perk, but surely that must be relatively peanuts? (haven’t the foggiest how much it would cost to charge a Zoe or i3 with typical commuting miles).

Annual car tax is so low it’s not even worth writing home about. Mine is an excruciatingly painful €121 per year. And for a hypothetical 3.5l Euro6 petrol engined Audi that I came up with, the tax was a whopping €1 more. I think leccy car tax would be €45/yr, but exempt for 5 years. Huge saving.

It’ll need a lot more incentive than that and a lot more improvement on infrastructure to get me to swap to leccy. I’d spend more on Europcar for those long trips to Alps for ski/MTB trips than I’d save on tax.

My prediction is that the banning of Euro3 cars from the emissions zones is the incentive that will prompt me to change my car. And its replacement will be petrol.