Used car intelligence
Is EV battery loan sensible?
Fancy a supermini on a 14-plate with 20,000 miles on the clock for just £4600? Or maybe a family car on a 13-plate with 22,000 miles to its name for £5000? Now, what if I told you that each of these cars has a sterling reputation for reliability and, best of all, will cost you very little to fill up?
Yes, as you’ve probably guessed, both of these prices – real, live examples based on actual classified adverts we found – are for electric cars. The first is for a Renault Zoe, the second a Nissan Leaf. And with prices like these, electric cars are starting to look like very savvy used buys.
However, both of these cars will incur a battery lease charge, paid monthly to their respective manufacturers. What this means is that you own the car and the electric motor that provides forward motion, but you don’t own the drive battery – and instead hire it from the manufacturer.
Prices for these leases usually increase according to the sort of mileage you intend to do. Both are in line with each other, but Renault offers a lower-mileage option – 4500 a year for £49 a month – whereas Nissan’s packages start at £70 a month for 7500 miles a year.
Set against the cost of the car itself, these lease packages suddenly start to look quite pricey. For example, doing 10,500 miles a year on a 24-month contract with a Leaf will set you back £95 a month – almost the amount you might pay for a lowinterest personal loan to afford the whole car in the first place.
But don’t let that put you off too much because there are some mitigating costs. For starters, you won’t be paying for petrol or diesel any more. Doing 10,500 miles a year in a diesel car at an average of 45mpg would cost you around £100 a month, compared with £18 or so spent charging up your electric car at home to do a similar mileage.
Throw in the lower servicing costs – £80 a time on a Zoe, for example – and even with the battery lease, the electric car starts to make more financial sense.
Then there’s the fact that electric cars like these are also proving incredibly reliable. One taxi firm running Leafs in Cornwall retired one of theirs earlier this year with 170,000 miles on the clock. They said that despite rapid-charging it several times a day, they’d had to replace nothing more than tyres, brake pads, wiper blades and a suspension ball joint throughout its life.
What’s more, with the battery lease deal – as opposed to more expensive electric models on which you own the battery outright – you don’t have to worry about the reduction in battery capacity, and therefore range, that starts to affect electric cars later in their life, because both Renault and Nissan will replace the battery for you quibble-free once its capacity drops below 75%.
This is starting to sound like a no-brainer, then, but let’s not forget that these early examples of affordable electric cars still suffer from a fairly limited range. Don’t expect to get more than 80 or 90 miles from a single charge in realworld use and remember that you’ll need to charge the car for anywhere between six and 11 hours if you’re using a domestic socket (although home fast chargers are available from around £280 to reduce that time).
But if you can live with the limited range – for example, if you only need a second car for pootling around town and occasional medium-length trips – a used electric car with a battery lease is fast becoming worthy of closer scrutiny.