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Hi,
I'm thinking it's time to trade my 160,000 mile bmw 335d in for something electric. Any suggestions?
Needs
Lots of leg room. I'm tall and my two kids are 6 and 2. They are in child seats.
Range. From Nottingham to Edinburgh 270miles, at Christmas loaded with family, presents and child junk on one charge.
Budget £16,000 ideally less.
Reliability is key over speed. My current car is much faster than I need. I'm not going to do 150mph even if I ever get on the autobahn. Current car is 0-60 in 5 I just don't need to accelerate that fast.
Should take 4 bikes in some way. Roof or tow bars are acceptable. We are unlikely to take bikes to Edinburgh, sadly.
I've been eyeballing Tesla 3/Y/S and X.
My wife is not a fan of Elon Musk and is unconvinced by a Tesla.
Suggestions welcome
Range. From Nottingham to Edinburgh 270miles, at Christmas loaded with family, presents and child junk on one charge.
This is an odd requirement but the sort of thing you hear all of the time when people are buying EV's.
You are spec'ing your car range requirements based on one journey a year rather than the day to day requirements of the other hundreds of journeys you do. You have two kids so I assume you will be stopping at some point on your 5 hours journey to Edinburgh, so is it really such a chore to stick your car on a fast charger for 25 mins to get you longer range? Yes, you will pay quite a whack for a rapid charge on or near a motorway, but you point out this is only once per year.
Get your skates on. Australia are a couple of weeks ahead of us in feeling the impact and apparently EVs are selling fast:
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/apr/06/secondhand-ev-prices-rise-fuel-crisis-australia
Agree on the 270 mile journey, unless your destination has a 7kw charger, you’ll need to go and fast charge during your stay to get back home. So do a 20 or 30 minute rapid charge on the way and the same again on the way back, 30 mins won’t have you waiting long once you’ve walked past every single shop meandering to the toilets and back.
It will give you a much better choice for your 16k if you consider vehicles with a more typical range.
even in my shit show range of an e-rifter ( i knew before i bought it *) that's only 2 short(20mins) stops at a fast charge. Almost anything on the market could do a better job of a trip like that if you compromise on one charge.
*we do trips of this length even less regularly than you it seems.
I'm 6 weeks into owning a Polestar 2 long range single motor. 2023 32k miles, one lease owner (not ex rental), no 'packs', 97% battery, and it was £16.6k.
Today I went out to Fife early in 12*c weather via a-roads and it's showing a dynamic range of 300 miles (factory claim of 340 miles). The day I picked it up from Nottinghamshire and drove back to Stirling (270 miles via Huddersfield to see family) it was 1*c, raining and snowing and windy, and real winter range was nearer 210 miles...but, a 20 mins charge on the Supercharger on Penrith and I was sorted.
Pros:
- range is great, predictions on range alarmingly accurate, use of onboard Google maps on long journeys is great for telling you where to charge and for how long plus it prewarms the battery, charging is fast, really nice place to sit, majority of stuff is like a Volvo so "it just works" and it takes a couple of journeys to understand the tech/wrangle the screen, updates and the car connection to the web is free, if you like Android it's all very familiar, comfy seats, good heater, good stereo, enough room, super duper headlights, feels well built, phone apps (you need one for car, one for Polestar charging settings and one for my home charger and Octopus) all talk to each other smoothly after a first faffy set up. It's not a Tesla. Volvo XC60 parts for a lot of things. You can use Superchargers (not all ev's can).
- the digital everything is a leap, boot is not as big as you expect, back seat legroom is good but headroom for my 6'3" son is 'toight', feels 4cm wider than it needs to be, roofbars second hand are proving challenging to find, I've become an EV charging geek.
We're still in honeymoon period but loving it as a car. Mrs_oab was intimidated by the tech on day 1 and I wondered if we had made a mistake, but she's now loving it.
I'm loving 3.4p overnight charging rate and that it's a lovely place to be.
Fwiw, we also looked at the Kona EV and Niro EV (not eNiro). Kona we discounted on the boot size, but seriously good value car. Niro EV we had issues of cars that were not maintained within terms of Kia Warranty for sale and more expensive. Both of them had much slower real world charging compared to Polestar 2. Do though look at HubNut and his two videos on 300,000 mile Kia eNiro - inspiring.
Thanks!
In terms of range, several times both kids have been asleep after the first stop. I'd much rather keep on going until they wake up than stop and wake them.
We head up to see my family three or four times a year, we see my wife's family another four times a year and they are are half the distance so over night charging at theirs and heading back. So maybe 8* 270 mile journeys each year.
Will an electric car fill up overnight on a domestic socket?
Thanks for the enthusiastic pole star review review. 😃 Can it take a toe bar bike rack?
It'll be topped up if there is already a good amount of battery power there...it won't charge overnight via a standard 3-prong plug. It'll certainly top up but it won't charge to full unless you have a fair amount of battery already charged.
Anything with a range of 270mile won't charge to full on a 3 pin .
Looking at 30+ hours
We head up to see my family three or four times a year, we see my wife's family another four times a year and they are are half the distance so over night charging at theirs
Do you currently ask for your relatives to pay for your petrol when you drive up to visit them?
Will an electric car fill up overnight on a domestic socket?
Thanks for the enthusiastic pole star review review.
Can it take a toe bar bike rack?
Ours fills up on a proper SyncEnergy charger from 10% to 80% between 11pm and 8am. I don't think it would fill up on a 3-pin plug and extension lead... See JohnDoh earlier on this thread.
Polestar does take roof rack and a towbar. Fitting a towbar on any car isn't cheap...
And look carefully at Polestar 2 - even though nominally all long range are same battery, software and I think maybe slightly hardware improvements mean that from just before facelift (2023?) they all got 20-40 miles more range. The Facelift ones are better, newer and very different hardware so even more efficient.
Do you currently ask for your relatives to pay for your petrol when you drive up to visit them?
Yeah, I've had to reign in mis-placed expectations of charging on family and friends driveways.
I went to Huddersfield last week to visit my dad. I plugged it in to the commercial slower charger round the corner for half a day...and noted that next time I can use one of the four fast chargers they were fitting the day I was there...
We head up to see my family three or four times a year, we see my wife's family another four times a year and they are are half the distance so over night charging at theirs
Do you currently ask for your relatives to pay for your petrol when you drive up to visit them?
No, but being super tech-savvy I have learned how to transfer money to friends/family. Cutting edge stuff
I would say that five hours without a break isn't sensible, so the advice about a 20 minute rapid charge is sound. Be aware that carrying bikes on the roof absolutely shreds efficiency so you'll need more frequent stops.
I'm currently in the French Alps having driven here in an eNiro. The car was excellent and I reckon we needed one extra 30 minute stop compared with previous journeys in a petrol car. Not a big inconvenience.
Be aware that carrying bikes on the roof absolutely shreds efficiency
Same as with any car. Driven steadily, mine does 60-65mpg on motorway unladen, but more like 50mpg with just one bike on the roof.
Same as with any car.
It has a much bigger effect on an EV.
Slight thread hijack coming...
It has a much bigger effect on an EV
Happy to accept that, but am curious as to why? What's different beyond simple aerodynamic or wind resistance effects?
I'd guess it is the extra effort required to maintain the speed with a bigger air brake.
Suggestions welcome
Skoda Enyaq?
I've been looking for a new car (ideally estate style) but the Enyaq kept popping up as a well regarded "family SUV" or SUV-esque estate and it was a regular special offer on my work's salary sacrifice lease offer too.
Two options, a 62 and 80 kWh battery. You can find a few of the 80kWh ones for £16,000 but obviously the 62 one is much more prevalent at that price.
They get really good reviews.
Happy to accept that, but am curious as to why?
An ICE is what, 30% efficient? So most fuel consumption is heat loss etc. Whilst additional drag from bikes on the roof does increase fuel consumption, it's only the portion which is doing useful work. In contrast, an electric motor is something like 90% efficient so most additional drag is coming straight off fuel consumption.
We head up to see my family three or four times a year, we see my wife's family another four times a year and they are are half the distance so over night charging at theirs
Do you currently ask for your relatives to pay for your petrol when you drive up to visit them?
Never really thought about it like that. My Dad always offers to let me plug in to the garage when I'm there. Saves a charging stop on the journey so wouldn't have thought to turn him down. Is it really that different to say cooking your visitors lunch before they depart?
For the OP, have been looking at a few cars in that price range, Ioniq 5 felt the most cavernous inside. EV6 felt similar to the Polestar 2, not big enough inside for the vehicle footprint. Not sure you'd get anything with 270 range and that size for £15k, but like others don't think you need it.
Never really thought about it like that. My Dad always offers to let me plug in to the garage when I'm there. Saves a charging stop on the journey so wouldn't have thought to turn him down. Is it really that different to say cooking your visitors lunch before they depart?
I guess it's costing your host circa 75p an hour for you to plug in via a 3 pin socket - maybe a bit less if the charger throttles from from 3kw to 2kw as some of them seem to. Depending on who is hosting you and how many hours you are talking about that could be a liberty or totally fine.
OP - I'd say that sort of range in a fully laden (even assuming on the inside rather that roof boxes or bikes strapped to the outside) in winter temperatures at Christmas at motorway speeds (EVs are the other way around to ICE cars in terms of efficiency - worse on motorways and better on an urban cycle) for £16K is very unrealistic. And even if you could, you've got to get back again which will mean charging up somewhere if you can't do the whole thing on a granny. But a longish coffee stop in either direction and a bit of granny at the destination would do you.
I've got the Kia Niro EV and whilst I like it I probably wouldn't recommend it to you because the DC rapid charge speed is not great. No biggie to me as we very rarely charge way from home. As you are a bit sensitive about stopping at all on longer car journey's I'd say you probably want to be looking for a car able to charge faster to make those stops barely longer than a queue for a Costa. Obviously Tesla's are great for that if you can stomach the Musk association. We couldn't. I do like the look of the Polestar like Matt's but I'm not convinced I'd call it a proper family car in the modern sense. The rear is styled very much like a coupe even though it's a hatch so it's not going to swallow a mountain of crap young families seem to need to take with them in 2026.
What's the use of the car when not doing the big long haul jobbies? Any mileage in a small cheap EV for day to day use and hiring something for the long hauls?
I hate to say it, but car purchasing is one topic where i've found Claude Ai really helpful. If you put in all your requirements in as much detail as possible it will do a pretty good job of working out some options for you, provide comparison tables and make recommendations. Do some checks against its responses and if you spot mistakes you can ask it to update. I was interested in depreciation, lifetime costs, real world fuel economy (as opposed to published) etc, and it worked nicely.
I've got the Enyaq - nice place to be, but the driving range depends on weather. I get about 170 miles in Central Scotland during winter with temperatures around 0c. In summer with temps above 20c, I get 260 miles per charge.
Other than that variance, it works well. I've a 60 (or 62), so is suggest the 85 as that does have more range.
I've got the Enyaq - nice place to be, but the driving range depends on weather. I get about 170 miles in Central Scotland during winter with temperatures around 0c. In summer with temps above 20c, I get 260 miles per charge.
Other than that variance, it works well. I've a 60 (or 62), so is suggest the 85 as that does have more range.
I know they all have reduced range in cold weather, some more than others. Do you have a heat pump?
No, I was expecting a drop, but my usage has also gone up so I'm charging it more often than I expected to - which isn't ideal when only public chargers are available (no home charging)...winter has been rubbish this time round as I was charging far more than expected.
Aware that is the case with all electric cars but the drop caught me out...I was expecting almost 200 miles. Which doesn't sound much more but it would have allowed 2 charges instead of 3 a week.
I know they all have reduced range in cold weather, some more than others. Do you have a heat pump?
I have a Hyundai Kona and it has a heat pump, its kind of hard to see how it makes much difference. In warmer weather, I can happily do 4.5 - 5.5 miles per kWh. In cold weather, I struggle to do 3 miles per kWh on the same journey. The cold really does hammer the battery.
I know they all have reduced range in cold weather, some more than others. Do you have a heat pump?
Reading up prior to buying the Polestar it seems that there's mixed results with heat pump. They take longer to warm, but do on longer journeys save some. How much in the overall plan of a 2ton 60mph vehicle seems less clear. There was a post on the Polestar 2 Reddit group from a chap who drove in the USA one way with a loan car (with heat pump) and back the way with his car (no heat pump). Seems there was very very little in it over a 2 hour journey in freezing conditions...
Heat pump....I've got one. In hindsight I paid too much for a high spec version of the car I bought to have it on the car.
But....and every use case will be different...in mine in the colder Highands I 'think' it makes a positive difference. In summer I was averaging 3.8 and in the winter in constantly sub zero commuting I was averaging 3.3. Not being too generous with the car temp and relying more on the heated seat and wearing the winter coat I'll need at the other end probably helped with that.
What I did notice in the depths of winter is I seemed to be using quite a few more KWh of juice from my smart meter than the KWh the car was topping up with. The cold batteries(-6 to -10 deg overnight temps) seemed not to take charging very nicely. So if you care less about range and more about kw of power from the mains it's taking you to get from a to b that's probably more of a concern.
Interesting, I pick up our 1st EV on Thursday. It comes with a heat pump as standard, guess I won't find out until winter now what the drop in range is like.
Car is showing 17c outside and my 20 mile round trip has been done at 5.1 'things', 2 weeks ago with temperature about 12c same trip was 4.1, during the cold spell.we had it was 2.5. the heating is set to 16c and the air vents are on the windscreen and same speed setting (no air con on either)...other than the external temperature, everything is incredibly similar, but the temperature really does make a huge difference.
I was aware of this and I was fine with it, but as my circumstances had changed, it was a nuisance during the cold spell. Home charger would be a huge help. The charging part isn't the problem for me, it is the frequency and the slow chargers.
Next EV I'll hopefully have that issue reduced or removed so shouldn't be the same concern as just now.
Sorry to bore but hopefully not a thread derailment. I think the point I'm poorly trying to make it that a home charger would definitely help solve charging concerns - plugging in overnight and slow charge would make things far easier as the car would be getting charged whilst it wasn't being used.
I'm sold on an EV vehicle, really don't think I'll go back to petrol or diesel now.
KIA EV6 ticks a lot of your boxes.
Leg room is huge in front and back. I'm 6'7" and don't have the seat all the way back, kids have acres of space.
320m range in summer. 260-280 in winter.
Decent sized boot storage.
My 23 plate now on 97k miles. Sailed through MOT with no issues last month. Had zero issues since I bought it last July for under £15k.
Easy to mount a tow bar rack... Just looking at doing this myself currently.
I would normally suggest one of the Kias and, basically, I still do. I think they have good specs, are not crazy priced and have a good warranty. I'm very tall and the front seats (especially driver) have enough leg and headroom for me. You'll maybe need to charge halfway but, honestly, so whjat. Take a break, have a coffee... You're buying an EV because of the 95% of the journeys and not the 5% where you have to go far.
I did see a Skoda Enyroq(?) Enyrow(?), basically the smaller version of the Enyaq in town yesterday and it looked nice, not so obviously huge as the Enyaq. I don't like huge SUVs and the smaller version is a bit more acceptable to me.
For bikes though, you'll probably need a rack or a tow-hoiok thing and that will impact range a bit.
Please do not buy a Tesla. The QC is not great and they are forever tainted by the connection to that ******** Musk.
we drove up from perth couple weeks ago - and we were sitting on a 4.2mi/kwh trip average in our mobile brick on radar cruise at +14 and sun.
we got to brechin and changed no other parameters other than the weather dropped the temperature to +4
Our trip average plummeted to 3.2mi/kwh - But got home with 30% left.
On the outbound leg - we were buffeted by a 50mph head wind . we had dropped to 50% charge by Forfar and elected for a lunch stop and a charge at the myrie. On arrival at our destination a quick calc suggested we would have made it but with only 4% charge. ABRP and Electroverse both suggested we should have made it with 30%
despite that - i still like the car - but in the same breath i still have access to a diesel van if needs be - id have bought a different EV if i didnt. but as it is this covers 90% or more of my journeys while remaining convenient for putting the kids in the perth trip was an outlier and we took the EV was was in no rush , fuel prices are through the roof and to see how it worked on a longer trip. Under normal use we are good to round trip without charging to braemar/the lecht/stonehaven/bennachie which is about the limits of our normal trips.