Around two years ago, my wife and I were looking at replacing our family car, a Seat Arona. It was at the height of the semiconductor shortage, and our initial plan of replacing like for like didn’t seem great value for money. The “Infotainment” system had been downgraded due to the shortage, but the car as a whole was almost £100 a month more expensive than our previous one.

It’s probably worth saying at this point, our past few cars have been on PCP, for better or worse I’m honestly not sure. Part of me regrets ever taking out finance for a car instead of just buying it one outright but there’s not changing that now. At this point we had pretty much ruled out electric vehicles due to cost. So we shopped around, visited pretty much every manufacturer I can think of that was within our budget, and eventually settled on a Renault Arkana. Then before we’d put our order in, my company started offering salary sacrificed EVs.

We looked at all the cars on the scheme, found one at a suitable price point, did a lot of maths to figure out if it was worth the extra cost (it was close), and we ordered ourselves an MG4 EV. Now here we are, two years and 20,000 miles later and I thought I’d share a bit about our experience.

Why not start with the good points? I wasn’t sure how it would go, but the MG itself is a solid car. So far it has been reliable (touch wood). It’s comfortable and well equipped, with heated seats, steering wheel, parking cameras, nav, and more. The MG app that is linked to the car lets me turn on the heating and pre-warm the battery, which on cold days means no scraping ice off the window and getting into a warm car. You’re paying more for an EV, but from my research they are well equipped, with features that are either from top of the range petrol models or optional extras coming as standard.

Range has been pretty much as expected. On a full battery, the car thinks it would get around 240 miles, I’ve never run it to empty but I’d guess it’s closer to 200-210. For our day to day school run and commute, it does everything we want. We can set it away charging overnight once or twice a week (more on this later), making the most of a cheaper overnight electricity tariff, and it’s good to go every morning for us.

We’ve done some longer trips too, with our longest journey being a 260 mile trip to Gatwick airport. We charged the car a couple of times on the way, just for our own sanity more than anything, and with a toddler we were going to stop a few times anyway. Charging on the way was straight forward (more on this later too). We’ve done other long trips as well, all without any major issues.

It’s quick off the line too, a family car that didn’t break the bank, will do 0-60 in around 7 seconds. Straight line speed in EVs is well known, but pulling out of junctions and roundabouts with that instant response is great, and you can take gaps you might have thought twice about in a petrol or diesel car. One foot driving is great too, lift off regenerative braking makes the car easy to drive and encourages you to be a bit more economical, planning ahead and looking further down the road. At this point it’s sounding not all that bad right?

So onto some of the cons - and I’m not going to lie they’re mostly related to charging and infrastructure, but I’m going to try not to be overly negative. It feels like I’ve glossed over some of the pros and as I write this I know I’m going to elaborate more on the coming content, I don’t want it to seem imbalanced so I’m going to say upfront, a lot of what I’m going to say can and will be rectified over time.

I said there would be more on overnight charging, and it’s fairly simple, sometimes it hasn’t worked. For no obvious reason either, from time to time we’ve gone to get into the car on a morning and it hasn’t charged overnight. Most of this time this hasn’t mattered, but sometimes it has been a bit inconvenient - having an uncharged car before having to drive to an interview wasn’t ideal, and regardless of fast charging it’s just not as convenient as going to a petrol station.

Likewise, motorway charging on long journeys for the most part has been fine, but you sometimes don’t know what you’re going to find at a service station. The relevant app might tell you the chargers say they’re online, but when you get there you find they are out of order, or sometimes just don’t exist, and a lot of them require different apps. The electroverse has decent coverage and is always onboarding new suppliers, but I currently have 5 different apps on my phone just to charge my car - most of which I’ve had to download in a car park, and in the UK you can guarantee you’ll be somewhere with limited mobile coverage when you need to download one. For these reasons, low battery anxiety becomes a thing. You charge more often and sooner than necessary because you never know what you’re going to find when you arrive where you planned to charge.

Once you’re off the motorway, there are also far too many “slow” chargers around in my view. You can be looking for a charger and the only ones nearby are 7kwh. If you’re low on juice and driving a decent distance, that could be several hours of charging. Fine if you live local, less fine if you’re just visiting and expecting a longer journey. These aren’t necessarily EV problems, but UK infrastructure problems.

Less generally, the MG itself isn’t perfect, and I expect this to be similar in a lot of modern cars. The car tries to be too clever, with so many assists and driver aids - but they’re not intelligent enough to be useful, and in some cases have been outright dangerous. Lane Keeping Assist, is meant to keep you in lane if it senses you drifting, but will try and murder you by swerving if you happen to drive between some cones in some roadworks for example. Often times it has tried to steer me into cones, grass verges, oncoming traffic. This setting lives in the “off” mode in our car - but turns itself on every time you we get in, so we have to turn it off at the start of every journey. Front assist does similar things for forwards collisions, braking for you if it suspects you’re going to crash. I’ve had this happen to me in scenarios where I have been nowhere near a collision, leaving people behind me wondering what I’m doing when I basically brake check them.

Driving wise, as I said earlier EVs are quick off the mark, and one foot driving is lovely but the battery weight definitely affects the handling. The MG isn’t a huge car, but it feels it. I’m also ready to admit this might just be the MG, maybe all EVs don’t feel this way to drive but I’ve noticed I have to be a lot more cautious on roads I’ve driven on for 15 years as I just don’t have the confidence in the car. Weirdly though, despite the car feeling heavy, the steering is exceptionally light, which I think exacerbates the issue.

I did say I wanted to avoid this sounding too negative, because overall the experience has been pretty good. We’re fairly happy with the MG, and we’ve had no major issues with charging or battery life. The UKs infrastructure isn’t perfect, the driver aids aren’t great, and the handling of this particular car could be improved, but none of these are too major. Some are specific MG problems, and others will be solved over time with improved technology. If the UK government does press ahead with forcing the sale of EVs, more investment in infrastructure is critical, with more fast charging and improvements to the national grid to handle the demand. We don’t regret getting the car, and if it’s a financially sensible option for you to use an EV for your commute, they’re worth considering.

There is one problem though, that I’m not sure how manufacturers will fix. But this post is already getting long, so check out part two if you want to hear about my biggest issue with EVs.