My wife drives an 2018 Hyundai Kona: 80 per cent of her driving is city based. She only does 3,000km to 4,000km per year. What electric or hybrid car do you recommend for her? We have solar panels since February this year. – Seamus T, Co Limerick
Thanks for getting in touch. I think there’s one simple answer here, a few other suggestions which might be worth looking at, and then a slight curveball.
The most obvious car to choose is the Hyundai Inster. Assuming you’re happy with the Kona, then it makes sense to stay within the Hyundai family, as the Inster is one of the best electric cars around. Not just one of the best small electric cars, but one of the best – full stop.
However, even given your low mileage requirements, I’m not going to suggest that you get the cheapest Inster, with the smallest battery.
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Go for the Inster Elegance with the 49kWh battery, because not only does that give you considerably more usable range (370km officially, and well able to cope with the odd long motorway journey should you need to), but it also gets the adjustable rear seats, which slide back and forth and which allow you to unlock the Inster’s hugely useful interior.
Then again, there is a €4,500 price gap between the cheapest Inster and the Elegance, and maybe you don’t need adjustable rear seats, so you can take my advice as it best suits you in this regard. Either way, you’re getting a cracking small car that looks great, is good to drive and is exceptionally efficient.
With your solar panels, you should be getting all of your motoring charging needs from the sun. The most common 4kWp set-up can produce as much as 4,000kWh of energy over the course of a year, enough to charge the little Inster up nearly 82 times even if you did go for the big-battery 49kWh version. That would be enough to drive it for more than 30,000km, assuming you got the full 370km out of each charge. Clearly, you don’t need that.
Does that mean free electric motoring? It could do, depending on how and when you charge the car up. The rest you can sell back to the grid ...
There are some other good options for you when it comes to cars. The little Leapmotor T03 is a decent small electric car, and with a price tag of €18,950 it’s certainly affordable, although its maximum 250km range will be a bit on the short side on those occasions when you might want to undertake a longer journey.
[ Leapmotor T03 review: New city car delivers on function, but is it fun?Opens in new window ]
Renault’s adorable 5 E-Tech is a good choice – gorgeous to look at and fun to drive – but it’s pricier than the Leapmotor and the Hyundai, and we have heard of some charging reliability issues, so tread somewhat carefully. Perhaps it would be better to wait until the new year when the smaller, more affordable, even more adorable Renault Twingo arrives on sale. That one will have a price tag below €20,000.
The Fiat Grande Panda Electric is also a solid choice and really quite gorgeous (although it helps if you go for the pricier ‘La Prima’ model). A range of 320km seems like it should be enough.
[ Fiat rediscovers its soul with the Grande PandaOpens in new window ]
The incoming trio of VW Group products – ID. Polo, Cupra Raval, or Skoda Epiq – all make for great choices too, and your driving needs would be perfectly well served by the more affordable small-battery versions of each one, with their circa-310km ranges. The ID.Polo is the star here, but in many ways all these might be slightly too much car for what you need.
I feel like the Inster is still the best idea of the lot – it’s a minimalist car, in the sense that it gives you exactly what you need (plus one or two additional niceties) for not too much money.
However, the money thing does raise its head here, and remember I mentioned a curveball? You need to ask yourself why you’re doing this. Are you determined to switch to electric power? In which case, fine – go ahead and grab the Inster. Or, are you looking to do this to save money at a time of rising fuel prices?
If that’s the case, then changing your car might be more expensive than just hanging on to what you have. It’s for this reason that I’ve not recommended any hybrid cars, as the ‘free’ electricity you’ll get from your solar panels is the only way that this process starts to make sense, from a money-saving point of view.
[ Citroën’s relaunch of a classic could be just what the electric car market needsOpens in new window ]
You see, even the cheapest car I’ve recommended here – the €18,985 Leapmotor – will still be an expensive thing to buy. If your existing Kona is three to four years old then you might only get €10,000-12,000 as a trade-in, which means you’ll have to finance another €6,000-€8,000 for the Leapmotor or the basic Inster, or find more again for one of the other cars mentioned.
At which point you’re into repayments of either a hire purchase plan, a PCP, or a personal loan of some sort. While fuel prices are certainly much higher right now, at your average mileage you’ll still be a long time repaying yourself in fuel bill savings. Make sure you sit down and do your sums thoroughly before deciding.
