Learn about cars, driving and insurance

We originally bought it because the price of fuel was going up just too drastically.

For us, we don’t do a huge amount of long-distance driving, for the range that we’ve got which is 90 miles, that is plenty to go back and forth to work a few times, drive around the city to do your bits and bobs.

One of the things we had to take into consideration when buying an electric car is that we can’t install a home charger on our property because we rent, but fortunately we’ve got a granny charger for our car.

Essentially, it’s a three pin so I can plug it into a normal socket inside the house and it allows me to be able to charge from outside my window because we’ve got a driveway outside of our house, which actually saves a huge amount on our fuel.

Secondhand buying is an interesting experience, you definitely need to do your research online.

We spent countless hours just understanding the differences between all the vehicles. You get the option with electric cars that you can lease the battery from the retailer, which basically means that if anything goes wrong with your battery, they just change it out. So we pay a monthly fee, it depends on the level of miles you’re doing. Not too much of a price to pay.

We’ve all got to make changes and everybody’s got to make a little difference.

When we bought the house we had solar panels put on to help bring the energy bills down and generate ten times more electricity than I’m using.

The next step is charge the electric car. I definitely save money. 50 kilowatts costs me 55 pence per kilowatt to charge if I want to fast charge it, but it’s definitely worthwhile charging it from home because you’re paying between 5 and 12 pence per kilowatt.

There’s two apps that I use; one is for the solar panels, the second one setting the car up to charge. Once it’s all set up, you just plug and play.

If you’re thinking of getting an electric vehicle, see if you can test drive one to see if it fits with your journey. Going back to petrol or diesel car or have an electric and a petrol or diesel. Because the electric is really nice to use for the shorter journeys, if suddenly I have to immediately get somewhere and the car isn’t charged, you just get in your other car.

The electric car that we drive is extremely easy to drive, it’s a really lovely experience.

We’ve still got a lot of family in the midlands, so we go into Birmingham a lot.

The only thing that you have to do is you have to obviously plan your route and you have to know where the charging stations are.

A lot of these stations have got lots of good facilities.

When the cars charging the children aren’t going to get bored. You can go inside and get yourself a coffee, get something to eat.

I think they see it as a benefit because we would’ve travelled without any stops and obviously lots of the time children do want to stop. So I think it’s more of a benefit because they think, ‘oh great, mum and dad are going to stop now, because we’ve got an electric car we need to charge’.

One piece of critical advice I would give is to do your research on the car, the apps, the phones, where the chargers are, get yourself sorted out with your charger in your house.

Once you’ve done that, it’s ideal. I would never go back to a conventional diesel or petrol, because it’s so easy.

Plug it in, charge and you go.