What is it like to live with an electric car?

The Renault figures weren’t quite so impressive, because it was replacing a Ford Puma 1.0 Ecoboost petrol, but still made sense in the long term.

I used PCP with the £3000 grant for both cars. In the Renault’s case, that served as the deposit, but I added an extra hefty deposit on the Kia to bring the monthly payments down, and that was my second mistake.

My third mistake was assuming there would be some equity at the end of the PCP period for the next cycle, as I had experienced in the past.

Is there such a thing as a cheap electric car?

Yes, there are a few, and a popular choice with a huge following is the old-shape Nissan Leaf – the car that started it all back in 2012. The other potential replacement for the PCP-bought Zoe was a BMW i3, which although funkier-looking is a lot more money.

The Leaf may be a bit of an ugly duckling and its air-cooled 24kWh battery and modest range might rule out long trips, but it’s well built, roomy and perfect for the average commute and local runs.

It also has a battery state of health display consisting of 12 bars on the instrument display, which is a great help when you’re looking to buy used. There’s also an on-board diagnostics gadget that Leaf aficionados recommend called Leaf Spy, which gives detailed battery information via a smartphone app.

Find a Leaf with 12 bars and you know the battery capacity is more than 85% of what it was originally.

After a fair bit of research, I decided the ideal spec was 12 bars, low miles (30,000-40,000), no indication of motorway thrashing, little or no rapid charging and as late a year as possible.

A larger (30kWh) battery became available later in 2015 but, on looking around, these cars were scarce and had fewer bars than the best 24kWh cars, possibly suggesting people bought them with an eye on longer distances, probably using rapid charging. 

This was only a theory, but I decided to stick to my guns on the range I needed and settled for the 24kWh car with the best possible battery condition.

Which one to buy?

There are three versions of the ZE0-generation Leaf, called Visia, Acenta and Tekna. 

Rationally, the best choice is the Acenta, because although it lacks creature comforts like a heated steering wheel and heated seats, it’s cheaper to buy and the tyres for its smaller wheels are less expensive.

The Tekna does have the heated things, which I wanted for Scottish winters, and although the larger alloys take more expensive tyres, they also look nicer.

I’ve had my fill of traipsing around the country looking at used cars (which these days can cost more than it saves), so I was grateful to spot a likely candidate at a local Nissan dealer. It was a fair bit more expensive than I had been looking for, at £7995, but was a 2015 Tekna with just under 30,000 miles on the clock, 12 bars of battery health and a 12-month dealer warranty.

At 100% charge, the display showed a range of 85 miles. The usable capacity of the battery was 22kWh, so that looked about right, assuming energy consumption of a little under 4mpkWh.

It had probably been used mainly for city driving and had been serviced by the dealer for the preceding several years. The interior was immaculate, with no wear and tear, and I doubted it had ever seen a rapid charger.

The deal was done using a Home Energy Scotland interest-free loan for EVs. The Leaf’s reputation for longevity goes before it, and with free road tax (while it lasts), sub-2p-per-mile fuel costs (falling to zero in the spring and summer) and negligible maintenance, I reckon that, in this case, full ownership of a used EV was a risk worth taking.

So what of my second and third mistakes? The Kia dealer from which I bought the e-Niro encouraged me to make a smaller deposit, but I didn’t listen. The car still owes me all that deposit, so is there a fix? Maybe.

It’s a great car, so I will extend the PCP for another 12 months to get the best out of the low payments that my hefty deposit bought, then maybe buy it outright with three years’ warranty still to run.

By then, more affordable EVs might have materialised and there will be many more used EVs on the market, so who knows what the future will bring?