Electric Car Selector

Use our Electric Car Selector to find your perfect EV

CAR SELECTOR TOOL

Electric Car Selector – what to look out for when choosing an electric car

ELECTRIC CAR TERMINOLOGY EXPLAINED

Electric cars represent new technology. We’re not used to being ferried around by an electric motor and battery. Pure EVs are different to international combustion (ICE) cars in important ways. Here we set out in simple terms how to evaluate electric vehicles and select the right one for you.

Efficiency

This is often overlooked entirely when considering which EV to get. Would you ignore an ICE vehicle’s miles per gallon figure? Happy to have 20 MPG when you could have 50 MPG for the same money and body shape. Of course not!

Efficiency in the electric world is measured not in MPG, but rather ‘miles per kWh’. In other words, how far will your electric car go on one unit of electricity? The higher the miles per kWh number the better. So 4 miles per kWh is quite high at the moment and 2 miles per kWh is very low.

You can rank all of the vehicles in our electric car selector above by efficiency, either high to low, or low to high. Picking a car with high miles per kWh efficiency will save you a lot of money on electricity, just as a high miles per gallon ICE car will save you money on petrol or diesel.

We also show you an equivalent MPG figure for each car. Even the least efficient all-electric car is far more efficient than a pure petrol or diesel!

Rapid Charge Speed

Another factor often ignored is the speed at which your EV can charge when you are on a trip. Driving from Southampton to Edinburgh? Want to spend ages waiting for your car to charge at a motorway service station, or prefer to be on your way again quickly?

Your car’s maximum DC charging speed is the feature to focus on. This is measured in kilowatts or ‘kW’. What’s a good charging speed? 50 kW is not particularly fast nowadays. Much better is 100 kW+. Several cars now offer over 200 kW, such as the Tesla Model 3 / S / X, Hyundai Ioniq 5, Kia EV6, Porsche Taycan, Audi e-tron GT, and BMW i4 / iX.

To achieve these maximum charging speeds, you need to be plugged into a public rapid charger that is rated at least as high as your car’s kW rating. So to get 220 kW of power into the Ioniq 5, you have to be plugged into e.g. a 350 kW charging station. If you are on a 150 kW charger, you will only receive 150 kW, despite your car being capable of 220 kW.

Range

This is a perplexing area. Manufacturers advertise official, ‘WLTP’ range. But in the real world, you can generally only achieve the WLTP range in ideal conditions, for example on a warm summer’s day at moderate speeds.

More often than not, real-world range is lower than WLTP, and in winter at zero degrees C, a lot lower. For this reason, we display both the official range and a more likely ‘average’ range. Better to underpromise and overdeliver than vice versa.

Battery Size

Our electric car selector also shows the battery capacity of every 100% electric car (BEV) available in the UK today. A battery size of say 50 kWh means the car can store 50 ‘units’ of electricity. These are the same units that your home’s electricity meter shows.

Car manufacturers will sometimes display battery size on their websites as ‘gross’ rather than ‘net’ or ‘useable’. A gross battery size in kWh is fairly meaningless, as your car cannot store electricity in all of the battery cells. Some of these cells can’t be accessed and are reserved to protect the battery. Our car selector shows net or useable battery capacity only (we call it ‘real’).

Home Charging Speed

We also tell you each car’s maximum ‘AC’ charging speed. AC electricity is what you have at home. However, a word of caution. If a vehicle shows an AC maximum charging speed of 11 kW, you won’t get that at home on a normal electricity supply. You will be restricted to 7.4 kW, the maximum achievable on a standard single-phase connection.

If you are lucky enough to have a 3-phase supply at home, or perhaps at work, then the full 11 kW can be obtained, as long as you have a correctly specified charging point installed (3-phase, 32 amp).

‘Display base models only’

You’ll see a little tick box for this in the selector. It’s very useful. Some models have so many trims, you can’t see the wood for the trees. If you’ve moved the sliders around to where you want them, and made relevant selections from the dropdown menus, you can then tick the ‘Display base models only’ box and higher trims will magically disappear.

Performance Statistics

We show basic performance figures for all the electric cars on the main page. There is top speed, acceleration and drive-train. For the full picture, just click on the ‘View data for this car’ link and a new tab will pop up containing lots of additional facts.

Comparing Electric Cars

You can select up to three cars – click the ‘Compare all statistics’ box – and you will get side-by-side comparisons of all the car’s features, plus charging speeds and costs both at home and in public, range data, boot space and dimensions, etc.

Price

Finally, the price of each vehicle is shown as the RRP. Few people buy cars outright nowadays, so you may be paying a monthly amount instead, as part of a PCH leasing agreement or a PCP.

You can get surprising results. Imagine you have two EVs on your short list: Car 1 with a higher RRP than Car 2. If you get a lease quote, you may find that Car 2 works out less per month than Car 1. This is because leasing brokers negotiate deals based on volume and some manufacturers are more flexible on price than others.

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