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My Leaf will probably start needing the usual suspension stuff at 8 years old so I'm thinking that it may be optimal to make that somebody else's problem. My thoughts are to lease a golf sized electric hatchback with sufficient range to handle all family duties and to look for something more exciting as a second car than the current Giulia (lease runs out next year).
However who knows if there will be competitive lease deals next year with Brexit and general COVID gloom. Also with current WFH, do I really need two cars?I think the car industry is wholely unprepared for the end of ICE. Their entire business model is predicated on shiny palaces, overpriced servicing and small print finance packages. The German big three certainly haven't introduced anything recently electric that one would actually want to buy. BMW seem to have abandoned the I3/I8 concept in favour of ugly bloated electric SUVs. The SUV general nightmare doesn't seem about to end soon!
Whether the electric skateboard chassis happens where you choose a bodyshell over a generic powertrain/platform, who knows?
hurricane_run-
However who knows if there will be competitive lease deals next year
with Brexit and general COVID gloom.Competitive leases have been almost non-existent this year, I really wouldn't bank on it. I follow the lease deals thread on Pistonheads quite closely and picked up my last two cars thanks to intel there, it has been slim pickings this year.
However, we may see a flurry of deals from VAG on recently released MQB Evo platform cars (Golf, Leon, Octavia, etc) as they try to flood the market. Even if that's the case I doubt we'll see the kind of stonking deals there were a few years ago on the likes of Golf Rs and Cupras.
ElGonzo
Google says the batteries are £4k (~£5k with £1k cashback).
If everything else is aok that might be an option. Initially that sort of number seems big when set against say, a 2nd hand Octavia, but given there should be little wear on the other items you'd expect modern electrics to do 250k easily with much lower serving costs. At that point it seems better value replacing the battery every 100k.
Long term I wonder if that is what the car market will look like. I also wondered if manufacturers would start offering facelifts on existing cars and building them to facilitate that - sort of like the way the OG Smart Cars were meant to be able to swap coloured panels. Idk if it would solve the savage environmental cost of consumers buying cars every 2yrs, but you do need something to help alter that behaviour as it's hard to see the economics changing any time soon