Making EVs easy — try your first electric vehicle with Pure Planet
By: Pure Planet Blog
Tags: Electric Vehicles, Renewable Energy, Sustainability, Green Energy, Electric Car

We’ve partnered with elmo to offer our Members an exclusive discount on an EV

Lease an EV for just three months with no upfront deposit and insurance, maintenance and breakdown cover included

The electric vehicle market is starting to move at pace. The government recently brought forward the ban on new sales of petrol and diesel vehicles to 2030. In October, a record-breaking 12.1% of new car sales were electric, up from just 4.4% in the previous year.

Our latest People & Power Report 2020 showed that 31% of people intend to buy an EV in the near future. Certainly a good sign, but there is still some way to go.

If you’re thinking about making the switch to an EV, you’ll probably have a few questions about how well it will work for you — a survey by Aviva in 2019, found that most people have the same concerns: range anxiety, finding a place to charge, time taken to charge, purchase price and battery longevity.

Our Community Manager, Marc, took the ‘EV plunge’ in 2018 and hasn’t looked back. But if that isn’t enough to convince you, we’ve given our take on the most common worries below.

Range anxiety

What is it? Worrying about how many miles you can drive an EV before needing to charge up the battery.

Range anxiety was a problem in the early days of EVs, when batteries were much more expensive, so tended to be smaller. Today, most EVs have a range of over 150 miles and several models can now comfortably do in excess of 250 miles, some more than 300. This is still definitely definitely less than comparable petrol or diesel cars, but today’s batteries even with a short range of 150 are more than adequate for most journeys — the average car journey is just 8.4 miles.

With an EV, you can plug in at home if you have off-street parking, charge overnight and have a full battery ready for the morning — much less hassle than having to drive to a petrol station — and much cheaper too!

Finding a place to charge

The vast majority of EV charging takes place at home — currently, that’s around 90%. It’s quicker, easier and cheaper with a dedicated home EV charge point, and you can get the smartest one on the market — the EO Mini Pro — from Pure Planet from £545 inc VAT fully installed.

If you’re out and about, there are now over 20,000 public charging stations in the UK. Of those, there are 3,700 publicly available rapid chargers to top up your EV. These are usually at motorway service stations and near to major trunk roads. The fastest rapid chargers — the new 250kW chargers recently launched by Tesla for example — can add a staggering 1,000 miles of range in an hour.

And don’t forget, if you need to, you can always charge up your car from any standard 3-pin socket using a so-called ‘granny cable’.

Time taken to charge

The EO Mini Pro adds about 28 miles of range to your EV for every hour you are plugged in — more than enough to fill the average battery overnight, when it’s often most convenient to charge.

Rapid chargers can charge your battery up to 80% of its capacity in just 20 minutes. So by the time you popped to the coffee shop, it’ll be time to go again.

Purchase price

This is definitely a valid concern… but more on that in a moment.

Battery longevity

Like range anxiety, this was largely a concern with earlier models. EVs have shown themselves to have excellent longevity, with batteries losing just 10% of their capacity after 160,000 miles.

We think some of the most common ‘worries’ about owning an EV aren’t really anything to be worried about at all. Having said that, you’ll only really find out if an EV is right for you by trying one yourself. That’s where purchase price can become a very real barrier. EVs are still expensive — either to buy outright or with a traditional lease. It’s a big commitment to make if you are unsure and although a test drive is helpful, it doesn’t really help you to understand what it is like to live with an EV.

That’s why we want to help Pure Planet Members try their first EV with elmo.

Elmo offers EV car subscriptions. They let you lease an EV for just three months — then hand it back any time or keep it as long as you like. There’s no upfront deposit and the car, insurance, maintenance and breakdown cover are included in a single monthly payment. Elmo will even deliver and collect the EV at the end of your initial term.

The monthly cost is about the same as a traditional lease — you can try a Renault Zoe from £379 or an MG ZS EV from just £429.

Pure Planet Members get an exclusive offer too — a reduced one-off admin fee for their lease, £45 instead of the usual £95. The £50 credit is applied to the first month’s lease payment. To find out more, just head to the Pure Planet + Elmo EV offer site.