One year of driving fully electric - a look back

History Time

It’s three years now, since we bought our first electric vehicle (EV) - a Renault Zoe. We’re a family of five, so while my wife used it for 99% of her drives, we still needed a bigger car for the trips we did as a whole family - a Citröen SpaceTourer (Diesel). It was a nice car but we disliked the environmental aspect of it and thus only used it when we had to. We’d never have exchanged it just because of that though (it’s quite some money we’re talking here), but fate happened and a year ago, we just started our summer vacation trip, our SpaceTourer alarmed us with a motor error and basically was done. So instead of going to the beach, we had to stay at home and look for a new car instead.

A quick disclaimer here: I’m totally not a car person. Like, absolutely not. So looking for cars, scanning spec sheets, comparing them - all of that was REALLY annoying for me.

The one good thing this situation brought - at least I thought so - was, that we now had the chance (or were forced) to switch away from a fuel-driven vehicle to an electric one. In fact though, the market for our use case - an electric minibus - was pretty small. There was an electric version of our SpaceTourer (with a couple sister-models from Toyota, Opel and so on), the Mercedes EQV and the Volkswagen ID.Buzz - and that’s it. The SpaceTourer was out due battery capacity and reach. Our experience with the Zoe was that specially in the cold months, reach usually drops to around 2/3 of what the spec sheet says. Later more to that, but with the 250km stated for the SpaceTourer, that simply was not an option. The Mercedes was on the edge for us in terms of reach, but very expensive and - sorry - ugly.

So the ID.Buzz was the only choice that was left - while still being on the pricy side. But the look and feel of it attracted us a lot. It’s hard to describe, but the form of it, the happy “face” and the bright colors trigger happiness. And it’s not just us - we had a lot of people approaching us in the past because of it.

So, how does it work in real life?

Okay, enough of our history let’s check how daily life and vacations work with only EVs in 2025. Of course, this review is biased by our family and living situation.

Charging

The first thought that usually comes to mind when thinking about EVs is charging. Talking to people around me before the purchase, the overall feeling seemed to be the fear of running out of power. And I acknowledge that - to a certain degree. Yes, comparing the reach of a Diesel to an EV, the impression could be that you’d need to charge the EV quite a lot. But as always - that’s a clear “it depends”.

We did quite a few longer trips already with the ID.Buzz. When using the internal navigation system, it automatically plans charging stops and also updates those during the ride, depending on the current battery usage. In the summer months, using the AC to cool down the cabin, I usually reach about 350km with one charge. In winter, with the heating running, reach drops to about 250km. The system usually plans a charging stop when reaching 10% of capacity (which still is enough to get to the next charging station, in case the one planned in is in use or out of order).

When doing a charging stop, charging speed is key. The ID.Buzz can charge with about 180kW which means I get from 10% to 80% in about 40min. That’s quite a break, yes, and definitely longer than re-fueling would take. In reality though, those charging breaks never really mattered for us so far. With three children, we need to take breaks - for lunch, toilets or simply to allow them to play for a while. In fact, on vacation drips we usually spend at least one hour for breaks - plenty of time to re-charge the car.

Driving around in Germany, we never had issues finding a high speed charger so far (when going on the Autobahn). There are plenty of chargers offering 400kW and more by now. Also in cities, there were a few, but the majority is slower (150kW to 22kW). The number of public chargers is increasing though, and it can easily be combined with grocery shopping, for example (Lidl, Kaufland and many more offer charging points, sometimes even for free).

Location is key, though. We luckily have a house with a PV system and private charging point, so we can easily charge over night (slow but time doesn’t really matter in this case). If you depend on public chargers though, I feel this can become frustrating. As an example - our ID.Buzz would take around 8hrs to fully charge at a public 11kW charger - too long to sit and wait for it. So if there’s no charger in close distance to where you live, this could become a hassle. Second problem - blocking fees. More and more public chargers not only have fees for the power consumption itself, but also take fees for blocking the charge point after a few hours, so you’re eventually forced to pick up your car again once it’s fully charged at night. My parents live outside the city. The next public charger is in the neighbor village - too far away to walk home. Without a private charger, an EV would be problematic for them.

Let’s talk about costs. This war a huge question mark for me, when we were looking for a new car and I did a few calculations. At the time of writing this, common prices at public chargers are about 59ct/kWh for slow chargers and 79ct/kWh for fast ones. We do the same autumn vacation trip for a few years now, so it’s a nice comparison example. The trip is around 400km for one way plus a few km driving around there. With the SpaceTourer, I used to do one full fueling before and at the end of the vacation, plus about a half one in between, summing up to ~300€ for fuel. With the Buzz now, we did one full charge before each trip, one one the way and a couple of partial charges in between. Using only hyper chargers, the cost would be nearly the same (a little less). However, while we used hyper chargers to re-charge during the travel, we did the full charges before the long rides at home and at our vacation home and the smaller in-between charges in the city, bringing down the cost massively. In the end, I noted down about 120€ of energy cost - that’s quite a decrease. And, with our PV system and charging at home, we can bring down that cost even more. Looking back at 2024, about 70% of charging was “for free”, only powered by the sun. Compared to the cost of buying Diesel, that’s a massive saving! For the time where not enough sun energy is available, using the right energy provider can save a lot of money too. I can recommend Tibber a lot.

Of course, this calculation is not fully correct - the cost of the PV system also needs to be taken into account. Still, even when using only the public high speed chargers, costs for “fuel” are just the same.

Driving

As stated before, I’m not a car person. I don’t like roaring motor sounds and I hate the small most cars produce. Driving electric cars was quite an improvement for me. Specially when using one for the first time, these vehicles are SO silent, compared to fuel-based ones. We all got to love this a lot, specially on longer trips. You still hear the sounds of spinning wheels and the like, but it’s way more quiet.

Driving also feels way smoother to me. Our SpaceTourer was an automatic too, so I didn’t have to fiddle with gears for a while, but the fact that there is no gear switching at all with the EV is just nice. Acceleration is completely linear, no gear switch jumps or the like. And acceleration is very direct and immediate. With the SpaceTourer, there always was some initial momentum you had to overcome when starting to drive. It always felt very exhausting and heavy, to get this behemoth to move. The ID.Buzz now is pretty heavy too, but movement starts immediately.

Driving speed is an important factor though. I can’t provide stable statistics here, but energy consumption increases a lot, the faster you go. Going on the Autobahn, the sweet spot for our ID.Buzz seems to be about 120-130km/h. Going faster than that drains the battery a lot. Yes, that’s slower than we used to go before and probably way slower a lot of people go on an Autobahn. But - do you really need to go that fast? Again, no statistics here, but going “just” 120km/h on our vacation trips vs. about 160km/h before did not increase our travel time too much, reduced the stress level and exhaustion afterwards a lot though. And (and there are statistics for that), an idle driving speed of 130km/h reduces accidents tremendously.

All in all, switching to an EV made driving a lot calmer - I love it.

Maintenance

With a car, you usually have your service appointments every few thousand kilometers. They change a filter here, oil there… With the EVs now, this has become a bit funny. We still have service appointments with the ID.Buzz, but they’re way “smaller” and, honestly, it feels like they don’t really know what to do their themselves. So far, we had one of the air filters and window cleaning liquid changed, that’s it. Electric motors are way less maintenance heavy compared to fuel-based ones.

One big argument against EVs I got from peers is the battery - “The EV becomes worthless if the battery capacity is down!”. And yes, that’s true. My Diesel became basically worthless when the motor broke, too.

To put that into perspective - we bought both of our EVs in used condition. Our Zoe was a leasing vehicle for three years, drove around 30.000 km during that time and was really not treated too well. When we bought it, we had the battery checked and it had a leftover capacity of 95%. The ID.Buzz was used by some of the trader employees for two years, had 20.000km and the battery is at 98%. Both manufacturers guarantee for the battery to have at least 80% capacity left after 15 (?) years, otherwise they will exchange it for free. Honestly, I do not believe the battery capacity will become a problem during the time we own these cars. IF they need to exchange the battery though, these don’t go to trash but are re-used as local storage by energy providers.

Besides the battery, it’s no different to any other car. Some parts tear over time, need to be exchanged and cost money.

Wrapping up

Wow, this post got longer than I expected - thanks for staying with me! I’m not sure if it’s useful for anyone out there.

Looking back at the last year, using EVs made our driving calmer, more comfortable and cheaper than before. We did not experience all of those bad obstacles people are concerned about. But: location is key and the use case is important.

I would not suggest it for people doing a lot of business travel with long distances and tight schedules - yet. Charging infrastructure is growing, charging speeds are increasing tremendously and so do battery capacities. There already are EVs available with a reach of 600km and more (no busses though) and this will improve over the next years.

I’d very much suggest it for families or people with a similar lifestyle. And my kids love the fact, that we’re driving a power bank 😃