Blog Post: A day in the life of an EV owner in NI

Author: Michael Thompson, 28 July 2021

I took delivery of my first EV last week, and given that my company has recently branched into installing EV charge points I wanted to share my experiences of converting to the EV revolution in Northern Ireland.

I suspect I have all the same concerns around range, running out of juice, cost of ownership, technology unknowns etc that most will have when considering a switch. Admittedly, I’ve gone for a car with one of the biggest ranges (300+ miles they say) but with battery technology advancing at pace I think this will be the norm in a few years. Most new EV’s released today are showing ranges of 150 – 250 miles, and this is improving all the time. But is that sufficient for a normal user? We’ll soon see!

Access to charging is also a hot topic – one of the reasons our engineering business has developed this is as a service. The Public charging network in NI has many known limitations with work ongoing to drive improvements. But this will only be one part of the mix along with home, workplace and destination charging which will need to evolve to cope with the ramp up in EV ownership in the coming years. Rapid expansion of access to charging along with the required improvements to the NIE Grid have already been the subject of Energy Strategy consultations – this is the critical issue in decarbonising our transport system.

Now I know I’m lucky enough to have been able to go for a premium car – The Tesla Model 3LR is expensive but I really like it. And given the company car BIK rates of 1% for EV’s it should work out as a similar cost to own and run as the outgoing privately owned Mercedes C-class (itself a really nice car that I’m sorry to see go). I’ll be monitoring the costs for comparison to see if this has proved a good financial decision.

I’ll report on all these issues and more over the coming year in this fortnightly blog (should be weekly, I’ll try my best).

Michael