Car musings: To switch from petrol-only to hybrid or full electric?

I've been wrestling with this for several years now but I think at last I'm coming down to a decision, at least for the medium term. And I'm hoping that my deliberations might help others, readers, who may have been debating along similar lines.

(This is in the UK, by the way, so some aspects of the breakdown below may/will be different in other countries.)

I should start by saying that I've been driving a Ford C-Max 1.0l EcoBoost for the last five years and it has served me well. It's now 8 years old and (aside from a major clutch server failure, requiring a whole new flywheel and clutch) has never gone wrong in any way that has inconvenienced me. It drives very well, despite the capacity, thanks to a turbocharger, and I get 35mpg worst case, short journeys in winter, and 45mpg average the rest of the year, plus 55mpg on motorways. 

It's also classed by the government as only needing to pay £36/year in road tax, and this will apply for the life of the car, as is traditional in the UK. This low figure may well come back into my thinking below...

So... why am I thinking of 'upgrading' to a hybrid, plug-in hybrid, or full electric car? Good question. The thought crosses my mind every time (about every two weeks, in my case) I plug a petrol hose into the car and fill the tank, at roughly £60 a time. Meanwhile all around me I see hybrids and electric cars gliding around silently in the suburbs, seemingly with no effort and no fuel being burnt. This is, as you might suspect, a slightly misleading thought, but hey, it's what flies through my head anyway.

There are two realistic motivations then:

1. The Green Ideal

Everyone wants to be 'greener', right? Less burning of fossil fuels and more use of renewable energy (solar, wind, tidal). So having electricity as a fuel is potentially cleaner. At least with a pure electric car, or plug-in hybrid. Though even with a regular hybrid there's the efficiency of having braking energy reclaimed by a battery and used to power the car at low speeds in traffic.

This is perhaps the biggest draw for me. I want to be greener, I want to be living in a more future-sustaining way. And, if I didn't own a car at all right now, then of course I'd start with (probably) a plug-in hybrid. 

But the situation is that I (and many others) currently own a fully working car and, arguably, it's greener to get more life out of this rather than scrap it and start afresh with another vehicle and its whole new carbon footprint from its manufacture.

2. Saving money

Over and over again, I see and hear the marketing. hybrid vehicles getting 60mpg, plug-in hybrids getting '250mpg' (however the heck that's calculated), and pure electric vehicles getting their 200+ miles on a single 'clean' charge. When compared to even my car's good-ish petrol economy, surely there's a money-saving argument here?

Which is interesting, as the situation is more complex than you'd think. Firstly, there's the not-insignificant factor of putting out (say) £25,000+ for a nearly-new hybrid/electric vehicle. Obviously, £25,000 would buy a lot of petrol - in my case, I spend up to £1,500 a year on fuel. So, without even thinking about the cost of electricity (and/or more petrol, in the case of a hybrid), there's already a 17 year payback time, way longer than the life of any car. 

But this isn't strictly logical, since the current car would have to be replaced in a few years anyway, at which point I'd be at the 'if I didn't own a car' stage again and would have to invest money in a vehicle. So let's ignore the capital expenditure side of things for now, as it gets in the way of thinking about annual running costs. Which are perhaps the heart of the matter and way more interesting.

The thorny issue of road tax (duty)

In the UK, at least, there's the matter of 'road tax', which every vehicle is liable for and which helps pay for the road infrastructure (which is fair enough), though it remains curious that, for cars registered before 2017 (like mine), the tax remains constant for each car through its life. So my C-Max will only cost me £35/year for as long as I own it.

For cars registered after 2017, there are some set tax bands, with some caveats and special rates - it's complicated. See the UK government official information. But to keep things simple, for a hybrid of some kind that was less than £40,000 when new, road tax works out to £170/year. For an all-electric car (again under £40,000 when new), tax is zero until 2025, when it reverts to the same £170 (or so)/year. I'm trying to simplify things here, and am including 'discounts'.

If a car is over £40,000 when new (as is largely the case for all-electric vehicles in 2024), then it's actually £520/year for the first six years. Ouch.

Maths

Time to do some maths though. With my personal mileage and use case, of course. Say 10000 miles at most, but that's a nice round number. 

Let's compare my current C-Max to (say) a 2020 Toyota Prius plug-in hybrid and (say) a 2021 VW ID.4 electric car (over the £40k tax threshold). Rough, back-of-envelope calculations all round, of course! We'll look at costs over the next three years, which seems realistic.

Year	2015 C-Max 1.0 Ecoboost	2020 Prius PHEV	2021 VW ID.4
1	£35 road tax £1500 petrol £600 service+repair+tyres = £2135	£170 road tax £700 petrol+electric £600 service+repair = £1470	£520 road tax £500 electricity (90% home) £400 service+repair+tyres = £1420
2	£35 road tax £1500 petrol £800 service+repair+tyres = £2335	£170 road tax £700 petrol+electric £600 service+repair = £1470	£520 road tax £500 electricity (90% home) £400 service+repair+tyres = £1420
3	£35 road tax £1500 petrol £800 service+repair+tyres = £2335	£170 road tax £700 petrol+electric £700 service+repair = £1570	£170 road tax £500 electricity (90% home) £500 service+repair+tyres = £1170
Total	£6805	£4510	£3910

So, for a car that was owned and paid for, over a full three years of my family's life, there would be up to £3000 of saving in all-in running costs. Again, 'finger in the air' rough calculations, but still...

Which isn't a huge amount in the grand scale of things, but notable. And when I talk about the scale of things, I'm referring to absolute outlay and depreciation. In other words, if I buy a four year old used car for (say) £25,000, that's not only 25 grand that I'm out of pocket up-front, but there's also deprecation at the rate of another £2500 (or so) a year. (Almost literally, money spent which is disappearing into thin air.)

Should this depreciation be added into the costs above? From a strict monetary (out of pocket) point of view, I'd argue that it should. So let's try anyway, again guesstimates all round:

Year	2015 C-Max 1.0 Ecoboost	2020 Prius PHEV	2021 VW ID.4
1	Starting value £4000 Running costs £2135 Depreciation £800	Starting value £23000 Running costs £1470 Depreciation £2500	Starting value £25000 Running costs £1420 Depreciation £3000
2	Running costs £2335 Depreciation £700	Running costs £1470 Depreciation £2500	Running costs £1420 Depreciation £2800
3	Running costs £2335 Depreciation £600	Running costs £1570 Depreciation £2500	Running costs £1420 Depreciation £2500
Costs total	£8905	£12010	£12560

In other words, driven by money alone (and even discounting having the money to initially invest in buying a newer car in the first place),  it's significantly cheaper to keep the older car going than switch to either hybrid or full electric options.

Takeaways

Although there are other factors involved, see the next section below, it's pretty clear that both from an ultimate 'green' and a financial standpoint, it's sensible to keep my current car for longer. I already own it, it has long since passed the point where depreciation is savage, and although its day to day running costs work out up to £1000 a year more, this delta would be massively outweighed by all the costs of upgrading right now.

Having said that, it's also blindingly obvious that, when the time does come to consign my C-Max to the scrap heap (or similar, when it becomes uneconomical to repair), its replacement should indeed be a hybrid of some kind or a full electric car. As to which, of the two, is 'best' (for me, at least), the situation is again complex. Which is where part 2 of this analysis/diatribe (and well done for reading this far, by the way) kicks in, as I have some observations, worries, and concerns.

Other factors

Weather

This being the UK, of course the weather plays a part in my thinking. Not least that for five months of the year I have the heating on to some degree in the car - and usually wipers and headlights too. And here, whereas a traditional petrol engined car would have its own unlimited supply of heat and electrical energy, a byproduct from the engine working normally to drive, so all power is essentially 'free' and doesn't impact costs or range, the same isn't true when driving on battery. 

Whether in a hybrid or full electric car, having the heating on involves drawing power from the main batteries and so reduces the range on a charge, significantly so in winter. (In a mild hybrid, the engine is started in the normal way, of course, but in a plug-in hybrid (within its local range) or electric vehicle it's the battery doing all the work. Ditto wipers and headlights.

So range estimates on battery power for cars will always be quoted in optimum conditions, but stick on the heater/fan, put on wipers and lights, and a 200 mile range is suddenly 100 miles. So 50 miles there and back, assuming a full charge when setting out. And things start to get a bit tight. As I say, here in the rainy, cold UK at least. 

So weather is definitely a factor. Which is almost totally discounted in a traditional petrol car, since the fuel efficiency is hardly touched by everything being on. But not so when looking at battery-driven vehicles, where there's no natural source of heat.

Ride height

This is a personal thing, but I've been so used to driving MPVs and campers, that when I sit in a regular height car, I find the driving position to be too low down. With admittedly cursory research, it does seem that to get a 'high' position with a plug-in hybrid or electric vehicle you have to go to the high end, for example the BMW electrics. With all the surrounding extra expense (tax, service costs, part costs, etc.) 

Whereas 'high' petrol cars are common - I've driven and liked C-Max, Scenic, Versa, Picasso, and so on.

Simplicity

Quite aside from green considerations, there's the issue of simplicity. Which works both ways.

So, for example, a petrol engined car needs oil, has spark plugs, a timing belt, and alternator. While an all-electric car has none of these, but does have a very heavy battery pack, plus extra DC converter boxes, battery heaters and coolers. (In fact, that battery pack is SO heavy that the car will go through tyres at 50% extra wear rate.) While a mild or plug-in hybrid will have both conventional engine, with all its requirements, AND a (smaller) battery pack, with one of several solutions for melding power between engine and electric motors.

Critics of petrol cars point out rightly that there's quite a bit to go wrong - and I'll admit that there's less to go wrong on the all-electric front, since there are less moving parts, but it's also worth pointing out that conventional cars are very well known and can be serviced and repaired yourself or by any garage, while electric cars need very specialist equipment. So I don't think there's a clear winner here, of the two extremes.

While hybrids have either the best of both worlds (no range anxiety, but still all electric and fume-free in traffic) or the worst of both worlds (all the things that can go wrong with conventional or electric cars, while having the weight of both all the time). Hybrids are definitely more complicated overall though - I've been losing my mind trawling through YouTube explanations of how each manufacturer's gearbox works. And, as an engineer myself, keeping things simple is usually the best way to go.

If you're dismayed by how long this article became then join the club. Yet the truth is that I've only scratched the surface of the subject - who'd have thought, 20 years ago, that choosing one's next car would one day be such a complicated matter?!

Comments welcome, of course - I do appreciate that I've done quite a bit of guesstimating and simplifying above, in order to keep this article at a reasonable length!

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