[member=74627]Walter Cronkat[/member] Since you asked - here goes. No prejudice, no hysteria, no hidden agenda - just observations and facts presented to me by three owners who are close friends and long-term work colleagues;
My van's a Transit Custom - it's a midsize not available in North America. It's the biggest-selling van in the UK with annual sales of around 45,000 = almost four times that of its closest competitor. It was the UK's biggest-selling vehicle in 2022. (Not the biggest-selling van = the biggest-selling vehicle). My local Ford Transit dealer right now currently has 28 brand-new electric ones on his forecourt which he can't sell - because nobody wants them. By comparison, the delivery time on new diesels is 3 months. This is making him uncomfortable because the UK Government has set crazy and unreachable targets for manufacturers to sell a certain percentage of EV's, with IC engines shortly to be burdened with equally crazy tax disincentives.
The three trade buddies I mentioned all have virtually identical stories to tell, and all three were sucked in by a combination of the marketing hype, along with the subliminal pressure applied by dealers desperate to meet EV sales targets. So bearing in mind my initial comment about everyone's situation being different and in the spirit of complete honesty, let me also qualify this by saying that I'm from a region in the UK which has lots of hills, lakes, forests - and a lot of rural, isolated towns and villages which is where a large proportion of our work comes from. So let me first tell you about Martin, a friend who I've worked alongside for 30 years. He's a plasterer who bought the new e-version six months ago;
Range of up to 250 miles*
In tiny print at the bottom of the brochure - *Estimated. Actual range will vary according to driving conditions (It's the get-out-of-jail card which you'll see on literally every EV advertisement).
But moving on ...... it became immediately obvious to Martin that what he thought he was buying was nothing close. The quoted (or suggested possible) range was based on a best-case, ideal scenario which bore ZERO comparison to actual reality;
Ideal = It's a nice, temperate day (70 degrees F) - so the battery's at optimum temperature. The van's lights are off, the heater's off, the A/C's off, the wipers are off, and the radio's off. The van's unladen, and there's a 170-pound guy at the wheel, wearing a delicate, fluffy pink slipper shoe on his right foot. The road is dead flat and dead straight with no gradients and no headwind. 250 miles? Sure, I'll buy that.
Actual = It's 6am and Martin's on the way to today's job. There are three burly guys in the front weighing a combined 630 pounds. It's December, it's dark, it's 25 degrees F, and sleet is falling. So the lights are on, the heater's on, the wipers are on, and the radio's on. There's a quarter-ton of plasterboard in the back, plus half a ton of bonding, plasterboard adhesive and multiple 25kg sacks of plaster, along with trestles, sheeting, mixing buckets, power mixers, and all the other stuff these guys use.
The job's in a small town only 30 miles from home, but which involves multiple long hill climbs which are like scaling the north face of the Eiger.
Martin gets to the job and realises that despite starting out with a full battery - he possibly doesn't have enough charge left to get home, even though the van will now be way lighter and some of the return journey will be downhill. 'Range anxiety' kicks in. He tries to Google 'nearest charger' but he can't, because there's no cellphone signal up in these hills. So he leaves his two buddies to start without him, whilst he drives around trying to get a signal and some 3G. He eventually does. The nearest charger's 12 miles away from where he now is. So he drives there to charge, thinking that he can leave the van and get a taxi back to the jobsite. He hooks up - but he can't charge because it's a machine with a credit card slot, and unless you've created an account with the charger company, your card won't work. But he can't go online to create an account - because there's no cellphone signal. So he drives around again until 3G kicks in, and he creates an account. He drives back to the charger - which now has a car plugged into it. The charger display reads 'charging at 19%' - so that car could be there for hours. Martin gives up and drives back to the jobsite, two hours after he left it. The guys finally finish up and leave at 4pm. The job's taken way longer because a 2-man crew have struggled on a 3-man job for some of the morning. They get to within 5 miles from home and are down at 2% charge, so they have to stop at a garage to recharge. They wait for an hour and a half for a charger to become free and available, but Martin firstly has to go online an create another account because this charger's operated by a different company. He now has six different accounts.
My second buddy Lee is a roofer. His 9-month-old van has so far spent 2 months in the dealership's service department. Doors won't lock, heater won't work, tailgate keeps auto-locking, brake warning light is constantly on - a whole list of minor faults which take forever to fix because all the parts come from China and Ford can't seem to keep pace. The AA, RAC and Green Flag (the UK's roadside assistance companies) don't flip the hood and fix your EV - they just tow you to the nearest main delaership. None of the thousands of independent back-street skilled mechanics can fix EV's either - so once your warranty expires, every time you have a problem you're at the mercy of a main dealer who will pull down your pants every time. Lee hopes his battery doesn't give out, because it's 19,000 bucks for a new one.
I'm not going to tell you about Chris the stonemason, because his story is way worse.
I think you can see why I like my 185-horsepower diesel Transit Custom. It does 700 miles on a tank, it's Euro-6 compliant meaning that it emits zero NOx and particulates. I've put 100,000 miles on the clock since new, and it's been 100% reliable = not a single, solitary fault.
Edit = the UK list price for the basic, poverty-spec version is $63,000. Add a few options or take a better trim level, and add $15,000 easy. Depreciation is off the scale.
Nope.