Buying your first electric car: the questions worth asking

New members almost always open with the same question — which car should I buy — and it is very nearly the wrong place to start. The cars are mostly good now. What decides whether you enjoy the next four years is a handful of things about your life, not about the vehicle.

Start with where it will sleep. If you can charge where you park overnight, at home or at work, almost any modern electric car will suit you and range matters far less than the brochure implies. If you cannot, you are going to be using public charging regularly, and that changes the shortlist: you want a car that charges quickly, and you want to check what the charging is actually like within a few streets of home before you commit to anything.

Then the week you actually have, not the week you occasionally have. Most people buy for the twice-a-year long drive and then spend three hundred days doing twenty kilometres. Buy for the twenty kilometres. Hire something bigger for the fortnight in France — it will cost less than the extra range you paid for and never used.

Then the boot, the back seats and the parking space, in that order, because those are the things people actually complain about later. Take the pram, the dog crate or the double bass with you on the test drive. Nobody has ever regretted doing this.

On new versus used, the community is fairly relaxed. Used electric cars have become a genuinely good buy, and a battery health report is now a normal thing to ask a seller for — a reputable dealer will produce one without fuss, and hesitation is itself an answer. Ask about how the car was usually charged, too: a life of gentle overnight charging is a kinder history than constant rapid charging.

Two more worth asking. What does the warranty cover on the battery, and does it transfer to you? And is there anything about the charging port position that will annoy you where you park — a small thing that becomes a daily thing.

Finally, and we say this to every member who asks: drive at least two cars from different makers before you decide, on the same day if you can. They feel far more different from each other than the specification suggests, and ninety minutes of test drives will teach you more than a month of reading. Including reading us.