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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Li Shenron" data-source="post: 9441955" data-attributes="member: 1465">The best advice I can give you is to only collect information from people who have or had EVs. Their experience varies, so you'll have to weigh pros and cons depending on your own situation. There are forums on the web but less than I would like them to be.We switched to EVs about six years ago and our experience is very positive but we are probably in the best demographic for them. We live in Northern Europe. As a family we drive about 20000km per year, neither too little nor too much. The more you drive the more money you save compared to petrol, but also the more charging you need. Most of our trips are within 200km back and forth (a range which most post-2020 EVs can cover even in very cold winter) so we don't need to charge at public points for them, we charge at home with basic 240v, which means adding 15-20km of range per hour (even if we find ourselves with very low battery, charging overnight brings it up to our typical longest needed range next morning). We never needed to buy a L2 home charging station so I can't help you with that.When we take a longer trip, we look in advance ahead where are possible charging points and pick a place that has other stations within reach in case the first is out of order. We always carry with us the 240v travel charger and a L2 charging cable as a backup in case all planned L3 stations are down. Stopping to charge for 30-60min is never a nuisance because we would stop anyway at least every couple of hours for eating. EVs tend to charge fast up to 80% and slow down for the last 20%, so if you want to save time see if you can make more shorter charges along the route rather than full charges. Charging points availability is only getting better here. Six years ago our first EV had 100km range only and we still managed to never be in trouble, but a couple of times we really wanted to go on holiday trips in the middle of nowhere and decided to rent a petrol car. Nowadays it is a non-issue.For us an EV is even less expensive than a petrol car. The purchase price is clearly bigger but charging at home costs almost nothing. We haven't made calculations recently but on the first year we had an EV we estimated saving 1100-1200 euros and we drove less than 10000km on that year. Maintenance costs about half, but be aware that there are still mechanics who overcharge on EVs just counting on the fact that people think everything costs more on newer technologies. I see almost only positives for us with having EVs. They also drive much better with an excellent response (in Europe almost all petrol cars still have manual gears for instance) and even smell better, our garage almost doesn't feel it's a garage anymore <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f600.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":D" title="Big grin    :D"  data-smilie="8"data-shortname=":D" /> The one and only negative is that when winters temperature drops below -20C (it happens here) EVs start acting weird and can go in "turtle mode" which means speed capped at 50km/h, which can be a big deal if you need to drive out of town; to avoid this, we need to remember to turn pre-heating on and charge the battery at least a bit e.g. half an hour before driving IF we had parked outside (not a problem if coming from a garage). That said, you need to pre-heat the engine of a petrol car as well in such weather or you might damage it, and I have heard that diesels simply don't work at all below certain temperatures.</blockquote>

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