Choosing the right electric car for family life

Start with your week, not the spec sheet

Most family car decisions in the West Country are made on a handful of journeys: the school run, the commute into town, the Saturday shop, a trip to the coast, and twice a year a long haul up the A30 or the M5 to see relatives. Before you look at a single electric car, write those journeys down. Note the mileage, whether you are carrying passengers, and whether you are towing a trailer or a caravan.

That list does more to narrow your choice than any brochure. A family doing 25 miles a day with a driveway and a second car for long trips has completely different needs from a household in a rural village running one car for everything. Be honest about which one you are, because the wrong answer here costs thousands over four years of ownership.

Boot space and the reality of family kit

Electric cars place their battery under the floor, which usually frees up space but does not always give you a useful boot. Some models have a high load lip you have to lift a pushchair over, and others lose depth to a raised floor. Take your actual buggy, your golf clubs or your dog crate to the viewing and load it in.

• Check the load lip height and the width of the tailgate opening, not just the quoted litres.
• Look for underfloor storage — it is ideal for charging cables, wellies and wet kit.
• Confirm the rear seats fold flat or near-flat if you carry bikes, boards or flat-pack furniture.
• Ask where the cables live day to day. A boot full of coiled cable is a boot you cannot use.

If you regularly carry five people plus luggage, be strict about it. A car that swallows a weekly shop but not a holiday suitcase will annoy you every August.

Rear seat comfort: where your family actually sits

Front seats get all the attention and rear seats get all the complaints. Sit in the back yourself for ten minutes before you buy. In many electric cars the battery pack raises the floor slightly, which pushes your knees up and can leave taller teenagers and adults perched rather than seated.

Check the door opening angle, because lifting a toddler into a seat in a tight car park is a daily battle. Look for Isofix points that are easy to reach rather than buried under flaps of fabric. If you carry three across the back, verify the middle seat is a real seat with a proper belt and reasonable width — plenty of cars claim five seats and deliver four and a half.

Be wary of a panoramic glass roof if your taller family members will sit behind it. Glass roofs look wonderful and eat headroom. A fabric blind helps with heat, but it does not give you back the centimetres.

Real world range, hills and cold mornings

The official range figure is produced under laboratory conditions in mild temperatures. In practice, treat it as a starting point and apply your own reality check. On a mixed West Country route expect roughly 80 to 85 per cent of the quoted figure in summer, and as little as 60 to 70 per cent on a cold January morning with the heater on and the lights running.

Two local factors matter more than most buyers expect. First, hills. Climbing out of a Devon valley or up onto Dartmoor uses considerably more energy than flat motorway cruising, though you do recover some on the way down through regenerative braking. Second, motorway speed. Pushing 70mph into a headwind on the M5 drains the battery noticeably faster than 60mph.

If your car offers a heat pump, it is worth having in this climate; it heats the cabin far more efficiently than a resistive heater. Preconditioning while still plugged in at home means you start your journey warm without spending range on it.

Charging where you actually live

Home charging is the backbone of cheap electric motoring, and off-street parking is the single biggest factor in whether an EV suits your household. A dedicated home charger at 7kW adds roughly 25 to 30 miles of range per hour, which comfortably covers overnight top-ups. A standard three-pin socket manages around 8 to 10 miles per hour — workable for low mileage, but slow and not ideal as a permanent solution.

• Measure your parking space. If the cable will not reach, the whole plan falls apart.
• Check what public charging exists in the villages and towns you visit regularly, not just on the main routes.
• Think about summer. Rapid chargers on holiday routes can queue badly in peak season, so plan where you would stop on a Cornwall run in August.
• If you live in a terrace or flat without a driveway, weigh up how often you would genuinely rely on public points.

The test drive that tells you the truth

A twenty-minute loop around a dealership tells you almost nothing. Ask to keep the car for a day, or at least a few hours, and do the real journeys on your list. Load the family in. Do the school run route. Park it in your own driveway and plug it in to see whether the cable reaches and whether the app works with your signal.

Also factor in the costs people forget: insurance on electric cars can be higher, tyres wear faster because of the extra weight, and road tax now applies to electric vehicles, with a supplement for more expensive models. Servicing is generally cheaper, with fewer fluids and no oil changes, but budget for those tyres.

Buy the electric car that fits your ordinary Tuesday, and the extraordinary trips will look after themselves.