Jaguar I-Pace

REPORT 6

£ 69,995 OTR/£78,490 as tested/£785pcm

WHY IT’ S HERE

Can this new breed of Jaguar tackle the dominance of Tesla?

DRIVER

Paul Horrell

WE KEEP SAYING ELECTRIC CARS ARE CHEAP TO ‘FUEL’. BUT HOW cheap? That is an exceptionally hard question to answer.

Because I don’t have off-street parking, I charge at the SourceLondon posts around the corner. You don’t pay by the kWh, but by the minute. That’s £3.54 an hour. The Jaguar ingests at 7kW, so to get from 10 per cent to full, you need about 11 hours (77kWh). Or £38.94. That’s not cheap, given it hardly gets you 200 miles in winter. But luckily they have a night cap – from 8pm to 7am, you pay for only four hours max. Which is £14.16. Now we’ve got a true bargain. It’s pretty well as fast as an F-Pace SVR, and, in that one, £14 of petrol would take you just 60-ish miles. Also you can get a discount if you pay £4/mo membership.

In some places (it happened to me at a Pod Point in Bath) you have to pay for parking on top of the electricity. In other car parks you don’t. My sneakiest charge was over the Christmas holiday when I was in Oxford. The Mini plant was shut but its car park was open, and there’s a 50kW rapid DC charger that gave me a full charge for absolutely no cost.

I also spent an overnight at my brother’s house in the middle of Herefordshire, miles from a charger. But 16 hours on a domestic threepin socket gave me about 65 miles’ range. I guess it cost him, at domestic rates, about £4.80.

Over the past couple of weeks I’ve done journeys from London to Hereford to London to Bath to Oxford to London to Oxford and back to London, and only once needed to actually break a journey specifically to grab 20 minutes rapid DC charge. Otherwise the car has quietly charged while I’ve been doing something else that I’d have been doing anyway. Nearly all EV owners say that this soon becomes the pattern.