Absolutely true (well, if you don't count the blood, sweat and tears I put into my day job, I guess)! But how much did you think it set the company back?
Buying a 2nd hand car instead of an EV
- Thread starter northernchappy
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Absolutely true (well, if you don't count the blood, sweat and tears I put into my day job, I guess)! But how much did you think it set the company back?
Apologies. Got you mixed up with Brigadier.I was???Not sure I remember that one?
Plenty of people put blood, sweat and tears into their day job without the benefit of a car. Anyway, it will set the company back a lot less than it would cost a private motorist as all those costs - purchase/lease, tax, insurance, maintenance, depreciation etc will be offset against tax.
I have a petrol engined car worth about £1.5k and certainly won’t depreciate less than half that amount no matter how long I keep it. It costs around £250 to insure fully comp, £35 a year to tax, does 50mpg, parts and repairs are cheap and easily obtainable and I do approx 6,000 miles per year. What benefits will I and the environment get and how long would it take for me to break even if I changed that for an EV including the cost of installing a charging point?
Daft question.
You'd have been better off not buying the hybrid, and getting the EV though
They'd be welcome to mine, if they can handle it! That was the deal when they took me on. Some folk get paid more money but don't get a company car.
Them's the breaks. Other companies could do the same. But let me put you out of your misery. As a private motorist, you'd get change out of £300 and a cheery wave from the dealer saying "see you in 2 years"! So just to put that into perspective, my car had its FIRST service at 40,000 miles, at the end of 2024. Hasn't been near dealer since, and it cost less than £300. I won't have to bother going back again until the end of November this year.
True, £300 is quite a lot for a pollen filter and a brake fluid change, but in terms of annual servicing at main dealer prices it's absolute peanuts every other year. Hardly worth claiming any tax back on, really...
If you bought one with similar performance, I imagine it would do about 4 miles to the kWh, so depending on what electricity tariff you went for, would cost around 2p/ mile to run - probably a bit less. More like 1.5p / mile. For 6000 miles a year, that would be about £90. Your diesel is probably costing you about £700 a year. Then you'll have a service on top of that - which I'm sure you'd do yourself, but you'll still have to buy the oil & filter. For 6000 miles a year, I don't know if I'd bother with a home charger. I'd probably just plug it into a 13A socket and use the "granny charger". However, if you shopped around, I daresay you could just about cover the cost of a cheap home charger in the first year. Older 2nd hand EVs (pre-2017 - remember, we're comparing like-for-like here) are paying £20 a year VED, so that's another £15 you'd save.
And as you're obviously not into buying new cars, this old second hand EV will have long since broken-even on its manufacturing CO2, which means it would start saving the planet from the moment you first turned the key. As an added bonus, it will help improve your local air quality.
I did consider the PHEV version but I suspected I would end up not bothering to charge it after the novelty had worn off. It was about £5k more (including a home charger) and I wouldn’t have had room under the boot floor for a spare. Also, I don’t think I’d have saved £5k in fuel costs over the time we planned to own it so decided against.Daft question.
You'd have been better off not buying the hybrid, and getting the EV though
Bought a new one last year, Tucson Ultimate - self charging hybrid.
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