Subscribe now and choose from over 30 free gifts worth up to £49 - Plus get £25 to spend in our shop
Looking at changing one of our cars to a fully electric car. This will be our smaller car to be used 3 days by my wife to and from work and the other two days by myself for work. Budget 2nd hand is £9000, looking at Zoe, but open to other suggestions. What do I need to know, charging point, buying, battery etc.
Thanks
I'm going through this now.
Older EVs at that budget are so much worse than new models I ended up looking at a lease, since as I had to borrow much of the cash I'd end up shelling out similar monthly payments overall. There's been a spate of ridiculously cheap leases on the lease portals in the last few days.
There are fairly recent Zoes at that sort of price but you may have to pay the battery lease. But even with that, you may find you're not that far behind the cost of a petrol car because of what you save on fuel.
I've test driven a Zoe, a Kona and a Leaf this week but only new models I'm afraid so I can't offer much insight on the older ones.
I always thought Renault were known for their electronics failing after only a few years. Seems a funny idea to buy a whole electric car made by Renault.
You mean the second generation Laguna, that's a good few years.
Our Zoé 40 was fault free, as in absolutely nothing went wrong in two and half years. Our Zoé 50 (one of the first off the production line) went back for a software update in the first month which eliminated a reluctance to fast charge when cold and a warning message, fine since.
Our neighbour had a brand new Zoe and it was almost permanently back at the dealers due to issues with electrics, ECU, and charging issues. They gave up in the end, got their money back.
Our Zoe ZE40 was not particularly reliable, although it was a great car, we loved it and we nearly replaced it with another. We had the 12v battery charger unit fail, which seems quite common; this is a lot easier to fix now but back then it required replacement of the box with most of the drive electronics in. It had a battery module fail as well, and the comms unit fuse needed pulling every now and then when it lost connection to the internet and the app stopped working. This always happened just before going on holiday or something when we really needed the app to work...
That's something I'd fdorgotten, the screen thing. It packed up but came back to life when we crossed the Rhine into Germany. It worked fine in Germany, Poland and Austria, but died again half way across the Pont de l'Europe on the way back. We sent a message to Renault to point out this remarakable coincidence and within a couple of hours of them getting the message it sprang back into life and has worked since.
2018 Zoe 40 has been stellar with no problems at all until today when the R-Link lost signal so I can’t use the app or on board charger timer. I rang the help line which was answered immediately. They were really apologetic, ran me through some potential fixes in the car which sadly didn’t work and so has escalated to their techy people. Was great service but of course not fixed yet. Love the Zoe and we fight over driving it rather than the diesel car.