Electric vans miss out on £5,000 grant

Electric vans do not benefit from the £5,000 plug-in car grant, so it is perhaps unsurprising that take-up is relatively low.

The Smith Edison panel van (a converted Ford Transit), for example, costs more than £50,000 to buy. The new Ford Transit Connect, converted by Azure Electric, is £40,000. Mercedes-Benz prefers its customers to lease the Vito E-Cell, but even so, the monthly cost of the van is several hundred pounds higher than an equivalent diesel version.

It means that van operators must make the most of other incentives available for using green vehicles.

Renault’s approach is to ensure the list price of its electric van, the Kangoo ZE, is broadly similar to a diesel equivalent, while the battery is subject to a monthly lease.

It results in a price from just under £17,000 for the Kangoo ZE (don’t expect the same level of discount that you might receive when ordering diesel versions).

So the lower recharging costs compared with a diesel van, along with lower SMR, are bundled with a monthly battery lease depending on annual mileage.

This could be as low as £60 per month (excluding VAT) for 6,000 miles a year, rising incrementally to £87 per month for 15,000 miles a year.

Although publishing fuel consumption for vans is a relatively new phenomenon, most manufacturers are now on board. The electric Kangoo has similar running costs to other electric vehicles, with a full charge taking about eight hours from a standard domestic plug.

Range anxiety is an often used phrase with electric vehicles, but manufacturer research shows that the majority of people travel well within the range of an electric vehicle within a day. So they are designed for urban work and stop and drop duties.

Therefore, it might be unfair to make a running costs comparison using the official combined cycle fuel consumption for a conventional fuel van.

Range-extended cars

Pure battery electric vehicles are not the only ones entitled to a Government subsidy. So are range extended cars, such as the Vauxhall Ampera and Chevrolet Volt.

The benefit of these cars over pure battery EVs is that when the 50 miles plug-in charge has expired, there is a small petrol engine with a 300-mile range to continue charging the battery and allow the electric motor to power the car.

This means on the few occasions a driver might have to exceed the range of the plug-in charge in one journey, he or she needn’t worry about being stranded.

It also means the cost of fuelling the car will be similar to a battery EV for most of the time. But the Ampera has a petrol engine that needs refuelling. The car has a 7.5-gallon tank with a range of up to 310 miles. This is equivalent to 41.3mpg or about 15p per mile.

Therefore it’s important that drivers using the Ampera make the most of the plug-in charge. The Ampera takes about half as long to charge as a pure battery EV, so the cost of a full charge is halved, but in mileage terms the Ampera should cost a similar amount to a Nissan Leaf when running on the plug-in charge.

Even if the fuel is rarely used, the car is programmed to alert the driver when the petrol is deteriorating in quality and advises running the engine to burn the fuel before it becomes stale. It means that no matter how good your access to a charging point might be, at some point the Ampera will need to use its fuel.

It means that the early indications of 40g/km and 175mpg based on the official cycle test for fuel consumption sound impressive – and would be reasonably close to those figures for shorter journeys – but they would not be repeated on a long journey where the petrol engine has to be used to charge the motor.

For drivers there isn’t quite the same advantage as a BIK tax holiday, but it is subject to a 50% discount in liability for having CO2 emissions below 75g/km. It means a modest £340 annual tax bill for a 20% taxpayer – similar to a Vauxhall Corsa Ecoflex diesel. Likewise for employers’ Class 1A NIC, the annual bill is £241 – around the same as for the smaller Vauxhall.

Although there are no used value predictions published yet, early indications from pricing experts suggest the Ampera (and its sister vehicle, the Volt) will have stronger residual value percentages than other EVs. Our cost comparison (above) with a 1.7-litre diesel Vauxhall Astra shows the advantage for the Ampera in many areas.

Hybrids more sophisticated than ever

Hybrid cars have been on the market for 10 years and are more sophisticated now than they were when the original Toyota Prius and Honda Insight were launched in 2000.

The latest Prius (along with the Toyota Auris Hybrid) sets the benchmark for CO2 emissions, but Peugeot got in on the act in 2011 with the world’s first diesel-electric hybrid production car.

The 3008 Hybrid4 is slightly costlier to buy than the Prius and is a few pence per mile higher overall. But it has the Prius beaten for performance with up to 200bhp available, as well as the electric motor helping to give the Peugeot all-wheel drive ability.