prabhuNew research by carwow has revealed that electric cars win big when it comes to value for money and mileage, as they can take passengers further on just five pounds than rival modes of transport in London.
Unsurprisingly, public transport – and our national railway in particular – is the worst value for money.
Despite almost 1 in 5 (17%) of UK consumers believing that electric cars are more expensive to run than ‘traditional’ fuel types, electric cars eclipsed the travel distance and proved better value for money than diesel and petrol power, alongside popular public transport choices such as the bus and train.
Carwow’s research has revealed that electric power allows you to travel for an average of nearly 50 more miles than the closest competing transport type.
A further 35% also admitted that their biggest worry about driving an electric car was the concern of ‘getting stranded’.
Average Travel Distance for £5.00 from London city centre:
Electric Car: 102.2 miles (from city centre to Sutton Coldfield)
Diesel Car: 56.1 miles (from city centre to Silverstone)
Petrol Car: 48.8 miles (from city centre to Worthing)
Bus: 24.9 miles (from city centre to Chesham)
Train: 20.4 miles (from city centre to Slough)
With the revelations of the research helping to ease this ‘range anxiety’, carwow has also launched an interactive map of all of the electric car charging points in the UK.
With over 20,000 charging points across the UK and cheap running costs, carwow hopes its new research will help prospective buyers to adopt the new technology rather than write it off in favour of more ‘traditional’ choices.
Mat Watson, Car Expert at carwow said: “Some people might be surprised to see that you can travel pretty much double the distance in an electric car than you can with diesel or petrol, but you can’t argue with the data.
“That said, ‘range anxiety’ is understandable, particularly as the main battery operated tech the average person will be familiar with is the mobile phone.
“The good news is there are already more charging stations than petrol stations in the UK, a fact almost half of the country (49%) are unaware of.
“Undoubtedly more needs to be done when it comes to educating people about electric cars, their benefits and their feasibility; ultimately the choice to move to an alternative fuelled vehicle will be a personal one, depending on where you live and how much local investment there has been to infrastructure as the roll-out has not been even, but progress is being made rapidly.
“We hope our findings will help, because it really does seem that in years to come, we could be together in electric dreams”.
To calculate the distances, carwow used the popular Volkswagen Golf across each of its electric, petrol and diesel versions and calculated cost based on current regional electricity and fuel prices in London.
Local public transport prices were also researched to discover how far five pounds would take you on the bus or train.
