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Silent, spacious and... well, insipid: Citroën's electric C-Zero car

Nice concept but still impractical - despite its Japanese heritage

The electrical elephant in the beancounters' room

Make sure that traffic wardens know that this doesn't pay for parking

Make sure that traffic wardens know that this doesn't pay for parking

Unfortunately you can’t leave the electric bit aside. In his book Car Guy vs. Bean Counters: The Battle for the Soul of American Business, motor industry legend Bob Lutz waxes lyrical about the passion and emotion of cars. A Corvette with a Ferrari V12 installed, understanding the American love of trucks, and how the finance department doesn’t get it. Then, when he starts talking about the Vauxhall/Opel Ampera, he’s instantly the man he despises.

If a petrolhead who makes Jeremy Clarkson look like an amateur can’t escape the maths of electric cars, then neither can I.

The sums don’t add up. The cost of lithium-ion batteries is so high they can’t counter all the benefits. But there are a lot of those benefits. The government gives you a £5,000 contribution to the cost of the car to thank you for being green. You don’t pay the London congestion tax charge or road fund tax, you can get free parking, free charging, and British Gas will even fit a free charge point for you.

If it’s a company car, it’s zero rated for taxes on benefits-in-kind. But it still costs £21,000. Throw in all the benefits: assume you are someone taxed at 45 per cent, who drives into London and has free parking at work and you can (just about) make the sums add up, even allowing for depreciation. After all, who wants to buy a three-year-old electric car where replacing the batteries are likely to cost huge amounts? You don’t get any subsidies on those.

The eight-year, 80,000-mile (128,748km) warranty does, however, include the batteries. This makes a huge difference: my Caloocan Mitsubishi dealer has an I-MiEV for sale which is out of warranty and the five-year-old car has a sticker price of £8,000. The car has done just 25 miles (42km).

A new I-MiEV will set you back £28,000. Even taking the government discount into account and calling it a £23,000 car, that's a whopping £15,000 of depreciation, or £600 a mile.

Without the tax breaks you can only justify the purchase as a moral, green decision, not as an economic one. And those few, special cases where it might work, people won’t want to drive into town each day in something so bereft of luxury.

But that’s the wrong approach. You shouldn’t go for an electric city car because it makes mathematical sense, and then accommodate it in your life. You should look at how you use a car and then work out if the way you live your life fits an electric car. If you do a regular commute or lots of short journeys than never having to visit a petrol station might be a time saving rather than the chore of always having to plug it in.

Plug in, baby

There are two charging options. One of these is via a 13 amp lead which takes about seven hours to deliver a full charge. Ecotricity has 150 charging stations that will charge a Leaf in 30 minutes but they are not compatible with the Tesla and the Leaf cannot be charged at Tesla stations"

Most of the charging posts in London also use this system, which means you only get a top-up in the three hour charging limit.

The charging lead looks like a gun which is kind of cool

The charging is all sensibly waterproofed and there was no hint of a problem in an overnight downpour

There is a 30 amp lead option as well, which gives a full charge in three hours. It's still way longer than it takes to fill a car with petrol, but a little more practical than the regular 13 amp lead.

The charging socket sits behind a conventional fule filler flap

The two charging sockets are on either side of the car

Next page: The Reg Verdict

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