So here’s my journey from EV to Jazz as promised:
After a couple of years without a car, I chose a Renault Zoe 22kWh when the time came in late 2018. After all, the future was electric right? The Renault dealer said it’d do 90-100 odd miles, and I knew there was a charger at my local gym so I could fill it up once a week.
At this time, my previous car was a manual Fiat 500 - which was trash - so the Zoe blew my mind at first with its smooth drive and toys (a reversing camera and speed limiter!!)
However... It quickly became apparent that total reliance on one single place to fill up my car wasn’t the greatest idea - there was always the worry that the charger would be out of service or there’d be a petrol car parked in the space, so I had to charge at really odd times like early on a Sunday etc.
The bigger issue was that the real world range was about 70 miles, unless I drove very slowly indeed. So I tried that. The problem is that when you drive in the left lane of a dual carriageway at 60mph, people love to pull out on you at junctions. So that wasn’t great.
Thankfully as it turns out, we didn’t really need a car at the time - so we sold up.
Interestingly enough, the gym charger stopped working shortly afterwards and still has not been fixed 18 months later - I would have been screwed had I kept Zoe, as there are no other nearby working chargers (there are a few broken ones).
After a period of renting EVs for various trips (Zoe 40, e Golf, Model S) where we made use of destination charging, my Tesla Model 3 order finally arrived in late 2019 through a subscription service.
Around this time, we moved somewhere with at-home charging. The best electric car on the market and home charging - what could be better?
Many, many things as it turns out. The “vampire drain” with the Tesla was insane. It would consume kWh after kWh for no real reason while parked and plugged in, even with the recommended sleep settings.
Additionally, the car itself was hugely unreliable. Random and total camera/sensor and nav system failures were commonplace, as well as a flaky update process (I once spent an hour on the phone to Tesla trying to get it to update), and occasional random error messages on startup that seemed to appear and disappeared with lunar cycles or something(!)
The home charger also started playing up, sometimes ignoring my RFID card (as apartment charging, it was owned and operated by a third party) and refusing to start a charge.
So now I had an unreliable car and an unreliable charger!
The car finally embarrassed itself once too often by ploughing into a solid object on autopilot, so after a brief call to the subscription company along the lines of “I’m cancelling my subscription, come and collect your heap”, I (literally) walked away and vowed to stay away from Tesla’s.
Another couple of EV rentals and test drives followed - a Zoe ZE50 and Honda E (crazy overpriced!) were the highlights - but mostly we Uber’d places.
Unfortunately it’s now well into 2020... so Uber drivers had started bathing their car interiors in chlorine, then sealing you behind a plastic screen to choke on it - still asking for 5 stars at the end of the trip, of course (assuming you were still alive)!
I figured it was time to buy another car. The MG eZS had impressed me greatly on a test drive, so I duly picked up a pre reg model with a 1 week delivery time.
The MG was a fantastic car - great performance, features, and range for the price.
Unfortunately, the home charger was still sporadically refusing to start a charge.
Despite endless calls and emails, nobody wanted to take responsibility and fix it - so I gave an ultimatum that if things weren’t sorted in a week, I’d “claim” the charger digitally and reconfigure it myself - funnily enough, things then seemed to improve for a while...
But wait, there’s more!
The final straw came when the charger developed a new fault of stopping midway through a charge. A call to the charging company revealed that they no longer had any interest in talking to me (guess they were bored of me asking them to fix it). Building management were as clueless as ever.
So the next day I went to Honda, asked them to slap some number plates on that new Jazz Crosstar they had sitting outside, and collected it a few days later in exchange for the MG.
The Jazz Crosstar is familiar to me - my old man has one - and I’d always said it would be my first choice if I needed a hybrid. The smoothness of electric motor drive, coupled with the reliability of fossil fuel infrastructure and a ~500 mile range, is perfect for today’s world IMO.
I’m also very impressed with the overall quality - whereas with an EV, a lot of the car’s cost is clearly the batteries. For example, the Tesla has the interior and build quality of a sub-£20k car, and the additional £20k of batteries is what makes it £40k. Likewise, the MG is a £12k car with £12k of batteries etc.
With the Jazz, you can tell most of the cost is the car itself, with a few grand of hybrid tech and a £200 battery on top.
In conclusion, I hope to keep the Jazz for a good while! Would I return to EV? In 5-10 years perhaps, when the tech has matured into something robust and reliable.
Tldr:
Despite manufacturer marketing suggesting otherwise, the main barriers to electric car ownership are the same as they were a decade ago - price, range, and availability/reliability of charging.
Also, Tesla’s are rubbish.
