Things you wish you'd known when researching / buying your electric car

Real world range

Effect of cold weather on range

Motorway effect on range

Poor public charging infrastructure and particularly unsuitability of 22kw chargers to modern large battery evs

That I’d never need to use public charging and shouldn’t worry too much about it.

also not to allow smart meter be installed.

What's wrong with a smart meter? I got a letter saying I'm getting one this year, should I decline it?

And on Things etc... No regrets and couldn't afford one until 2019. Main issues with takeup are dealers still pushing ICE cars because they are often clueless and don't own or believe in EVs (at least in 2019/20 but that is changing now). Best thing I did when shopping around with my father back then was to chat to owners at the fast charging point out the back of the dealership (a taxi driver and a holiday-maker both in mark 1 or 1.5 LEAFs).

I dont have a top 5 myself but just from looking at what gets posted on the forum alot, is confusion around the home charge points (tethered, untethered, priority switches, grants, costs, features like Solar integration and app support etc).

The cost of them, I think, catches alot of people out as the charge point is usually only something they look into once they've already put a deposit down and then they come here for info on the charge point. Everyone knows what a car is and how to drive, most have no idea about electrical stuff and its a key part of EV ownership.

I know you are primarily a car reviewer and not an electrician but since everyone buying an EV needs to know how to charge it, it might make sense for you to do some home charge point reviews? Show the various types, positives, negatives, costs etc. Maybe poll the forum to get volunteers for each charge point (EO, Zappi, Andersen, Rolec etc) and do an interview type thing where they/you show it and discuss it with the owner. One for each charge point.

Well done Mark, you were very quick editing this into your latest video🙂

Just how cheap they are to run when you do mostly home charging on night rate

the myriad of apps “required”

+ a million to both of these.

to NOT under any circumstances. They do not benefit the consumer. They only allow price gouging.

I don't fully agree, yeah the winter range in my old PHEV was about 25km in winter (and I'd to drive carefully to get that) - but a lot of my journeys were done on full electric despite that limitation. It was annoying to have to plug it in basically after every drive but that was the compromise of getting a nice affordable car to dip my toe into the EV world.

I only charged in public to test my ability to charge in public, 3.6kW on a home wall box is ok when it's plugged in overnight, but i wouldn't hog a public charger for 2.5hours to fill my 8kWh battery.

Having a PHEV for 3 years convinced me to go full BEV, so I was converted, hopefully the new owner of it gets converted too.

Their benefits ARE primarily to the ESB network and the actual creators of electricity as they can attune to and shape demand through variable pricing. Now to the customer, I can understand this gets bagged up with the evil water meters and the pay by weight for waste changes, yet both of these have environmental objectives but the whole water thing occurred at the peak of horrible cuts and bailout demands and were just not politically acceptable.

Once smart meters are installed, and they will be to all but a handful of holdouts, there will be demand and pressure to favour consumers and avoid overly expensive peak demand costs for electricity. As a consumer, it suits me to have a moderate difference between day and night due to heavy daytime usage and no car commuting, but that might change.

OT alright, but a lot of wind power gets curtailed during the night. Partly due to nights tending to be windier and also low demand across the grid overnight. Nightrate still solves this oversupply issue - all be it it doesn't happen every night.

I think you need to have look at the current rates that are being provided by suppliers to customers with smart meters. There are none that are comparible to people on standard non-smart meters.

I understand what you are saying about how it benefits the network, but at the moment, anybody moving to smart plan is paying a lot more than people who don't. I really don't think that once there is a majority of smart meters in the marketplace the suppliers are going to suddenly start dropping prices.