We are family!

An EV family.

Ignoring for a moment that we’re in the 2nd National lockdown for England as part of a global pandemic.

@carlacapture and I recently had to change the 2nd car in our household. Our 2nd car has, for many years, been a pure commuting car for @carlacapture to get to work and back. There have been a handful of exceptional journeys (we’ll come on to that) but overall the distance travelled has been a very predictable 10,000 miles a year. The commuting journey being a mixture of busy motorway A-road traffic hell. As the journey distances are fixed, we have tried to tie down the costs to be equally predictable. To that end, we have, for the last 3 vehicles, gone for a 3-year PCP which included service costs for the full 3 years. As you may imagine, I have tracked the fuel costs over the ownership of the vehicles as well. Apart from a couple of non-repairable punctures in the Micra’s the costs have been rock solid predictable for the duration of ownership. So, the prospect of moving to a new model of ownership cost calculation, even with our experience of I-Pace ownership, was quite daunting.

Thanks to that ‘thing we’re not mentioning’ our car shopping was restricted to websites, YouTube and blogs to work out the best vehicle options. Any vehicle we looked at needed to fit the following criteria:

• Not materially bigger than the Mazda CX-3 as it needs to fit in a single garage

• Easy to get in to and out of (This discounts the Mini)

• Speed Limiter - too much time driving on the (badly) managed motorway around Leeds

• Capable of a real-world 235 mile range*

• Be available on short-notice due to tight timescales after Lockdown

• Not materially greater Total Cost of Ownership to the Mazda CX-3

After all this was considered we landed on a choice of:

• Hyundai Kona

• Kia e-Niro

• Kia Soul EV

The Soul ultimately winning out because it was; a) a new First Edition model with loads of standard equipment, b) cool looking and c) slightly shorter than the other two, which would help with the plans for charging in the garage where access to the front of the vehicle is required.

The mentally astute will note that the 235 mile* range requirement was way more than the daily commuting 40-mile round trip. This requirement comes from the occasional exceptional journeys mentioned above. In a lot of cases, people are avoiding EV’s because they don’t have the range of the ICE powered vehicle and they ‘need’ a car that will do 500 miles without filling up. This, more often than not, is not actually a requirement. However, in our case, with family on the other side of the country, we had to consider that there was a very real chance that @carlacapture would be required, at short notice, to travel there. The ‘worst case’ for this would be to leave the house in the morning with 90% battery, do the commute to and from work and then immediately have to travel to Cumbria, our furthest away family. Ensuring that she would arrive there with at least 10% battery remaining for contingency and stress management. So, that 188 mile journey from 90-10% would mean a full battery range of 235 miles. The Kia Soul has a WLTP range of 281 miles but real-world range of 250 miles being reported repeatedly, including users like @carpervert of The Late Brake Show who has a Soul as his current daily driver.

With all that considered we booked an appointment with the only Kia manufacturer dealership in the UK (Bolton), took our Socially distanced test-drive and electronically signed up for a 3-year PCP including service costs on an in stock Kia Soul EV First Edition in Black and Red

Without sharing the specifics of the deal, the TCO is predicted to be within £3 per month of the Diesel Mazda it replaces.

BUT, and this is the sting in the tale for EV owners, Lockdown and working from home means that the vehicles are sat unused and instead of saving over £100 per month in Diesel, we’re only saving £12 per month in Electricity. In other words, until the world returns to some sort of normal, we’re worse off by around £90 per month on the Soul (significantly more on the I-Pace). Still, some of that should be repaid at the end of the contract when the residual is higher than the GFV due to lower annual miles and in the meantime, we have a very smart looking EV in the garage.

Oh and thanks to Russell at Reflectology for the eye-popping gloss and ceramic coating.