Pulled the trigger on an EV last week and the timing news made me feel even better about it

I made the same switch about three years back with a used Hyundai Kona, and the winter question is the one I get from everyone at work. Real answer for me is that cold mornings cost me maybe a fifth of the range, mostly becasue the cabin heater is working hard and the battery is stiff until it warms up. If the car is plugged in overnight, preheating it while still connected means you leave with a warm cabin and a full battery instead of eating into the charge. That one habit made winter a non issue for me. My other tip is to stop treating the range figure on the dash as gospel. I learned to think in percentages against my own typical week, and after a month or two I stopped checking it constantly. The one time it actually bit me was a late December drive to my mum's with the heater blasting, and even then a twenty minute coffee stop while charging sorted it.

On the money side, I stuck with the standard overnight tariff and my monthly running cost dropped to less than half of what the old petrol Golf was drinking, and that was before fuel prices spiked. The EV specific tariffs look tempting but do the sums for your actual mileage first. Mine was nowhere near worth the switch.

Enjoy the wait, the first month of quiet driving is genuinely a treat.

I went electric two years ago but my situation is the mirror image of yours. No driveway, so no home charge point. I live in a block of flats and I was convinced that made EV ownership a non starter, wich is honestly why I sat on the fence so long.

What acutally works for me is a mix of a lamppost charger round the corner and slow charging at the supermarket while I do the weekly shop. It takes more planning than plugging in at home, I will not pretend otherwise. Some months I end up paying more per mile than a friend with a driveway, especally when I have to use the rapid chargers on the ring road at peak rates.

The thing that surprised me is that the car itself barely costs anything to keep on the road. My Skoda needed a brake job at the last service but the pads were barely worn because the regenerative braking does most of the stopping. No oil, no cambelt, no exhaust to rust out.

So if you are reading these sales figures and thinking the charging network will keep growing, spare a thought for those of us without a wall to plug into. That is where the real gap is now, at least in older cities with terraced housing. Enjoy the quiet, though. Mine has been faultless and I would not go back.

Small pedantic point on that headline: those sales figures ussually lump full hybrids and plug-in hybrids in with pure battery cars, and it is one month of registrations rather than a full year, so the milestone is real but a bit softer than it sounds. My own street tells the same story though. Three years ago mine was the only EV parked on it, now there are four of us, and the chargers by the retail park are genuinely busy at Saturday lunchtime, which I never used to see. On the wait, use the time. Mine gave me room to get the driveway cabling run and the install booked before the car turned up, so I was charging from night one.

Update: got the charge point in before the car even turned up, electrician said that was the right order too. Reading the replies, two things stuck with me. The winter hit being mostly about cabin heating is something I'd never have guessed, so I'll be preheating while it's still plugged in. Also that post about lamppost charging cut off mid-sentence, now I need to know how that actually works.