The development and demand for electric cars has been growing, but there's still an ongoing debate about just how worthwhile the more environmentally-friendly vehicles are.
In an effort to find out how easy they are to drive and how the cost compares to petrol or diesel cars, Steven Smith set out on a real-world experiment to put one of the vehicles to the test.
He decided to drive a Volvo C40 Recharge Twin Pro on a 350-mile round trip between his home in Cornwall to Bristol — a journey he regularly completes in his 16-year-old BMW 318 diesel.
Steven said the trip usually costs him "around £50 at today's diesel prices, assuming 55mpg and 173.9p a litre, which is the price at my nearest supermarket".
While he usually leaves at around 8am and arrives in Bristol before 11am, only requiring stops if he feels he needs a comfort break, he knew that his trip was likely to be different.
Writing for Wales Online, he said: "I spent a fair bit of time in those few days mulling over strategy and cost. One thing I knew was that the round trip was impossible without charging.
"So I had to factor in a stop on the outward journey for a quick fast charge at a motorway services, then top up (slowly) as much as possible at a relative's house in Bristol, before stopping again for a boost on the motorway on the way home to avoid the prospect of finding myself stranded somewhere on Bodmin Moor late on a cold, dark, January night."
Steven set off for his journey with the Volvo 100% charged, which cost approximately £20 to charge at his home — although it's not actually recommended to charge the car to 100% in order to prolong its battery life.
The Volvo has an on-paper range of 273 miles, but Steven quickly discovered that this didn't seem to be the case as he only had 180 miles showing for the actual range when he set off with a full battery.
After driving for an hour and 40 minutes, Steven made his first charging stop at Taunton Dean services on the M5, where he arrived with 25% battery and 45 miles remaining.
He waited for 40 minutes for the battery to charge to 60%, costing £19.62 for another 55 miles.
Already, the price was struggling to beat his trusty BMW, which he said would use about a gallon for 55 miles, costing less than £8.
He arrived in Bristol just 30 minutes later than usual at just after 11am, with the car's charge back down to 35% and at a 60-mile range.
He then charged it "very slowly" using a standard three-pin plug at a relative's house, which was able to get him another 30 miles for around £5 by 6:30pm.
At 6:45pm he began heading back to Cornwall on 52% charge and a 90-mile range.
Aiming to stop at Exeter services, which was 75 miles away, to use their super-fast chargers Steven began to stress about the car's range.
He said: "This was going to be tight, but I was determined to make it, rather than potentially having to stop twice on the way home - I knew the super-fast charger would sort me out, if I could get there.
"And, man, the next hour or so was stressful. I arrived - just - at Exeter with 7% charge, 14 miles range showing. I have to admit that the 20 minutes or so before arriving there were not a pleasant feeling, as the range seemingly got tighter and tighter."
Upon arriving he charged the car for 45 minutes, which brought it up to 84% charge and 140-mile range, but the quick charging came with an eye-watering cost of £43.45.
Finally, he arrived back home at 10:20pm - 50 minutes later than usual, with 25 miles remaining.
Overall, the journey proved to be pretty stressful and costly.
Steven said: "The whole day had been a bit of a brain melt in all honesty, constantly working out how far I could travel and where the best places to stop were on both legs of the journey.
All in all I felt relieved to get home, but also like someone had emptied my wallet while I wasn’t looking."
With a full charge at home, a fast top-up at services, a slow top-up in Bristol and a super-fast top-up on the way back, the entire journey cost Steven £88.07.
Meanwhile, he calculated that the diesel cost for the same journey would have come to £50.24, "assuming 55mpg and 173.9p per litre", while the petrol cost would have been £53.28, "assuming 45mpg and 150.9p per litre".
Concluding his experiment, Steven said: "I wanted this to work, I really did. But after what I hope you will agree was a pretty comprehensive real-world test, I couldn't make the numbers add up.
"Whichever way I looked at it, the return trip had taken me 90 minutes longer than usual and cost me nearly £40 more. I certainly didn't expect that.
"Helping to save the planet with zero-emission vehicles comes at a personal cost, it would seem, certainly given the spiralling cost of energy in the past year or so."
He added: "The criticism lies with the cost of on-the-road charging, not with the car, which is excellent. My only beef with the car was not getting anywhere near its claimed on-paper range, which ultimately added to the cost because I wasn’t getting as much bang for my buck as I would have hoped for.
"Getting more like 220 or 250 miles for a full charge would have felt much better. Until such a time as on-the-road chargers return to costing closer to what charging at home currently does, long journeys are a difficult equation. Had all of my charging been possible at the same rate as at home, the day would have cost me roughly the same as, or probably a little less than, the diesel. But it wasn't possible, because on a long journey you are beholden to public chargers and what they cost - and that cost has rocketed.
"That leads me to conclude that the arguments for and against electric cars as it currently stands are complex - even more so with the cost of electricity having risen substantially. If, like most people I suspect, you do mostly local driving (to work, the shops, out for dinner, etc) with the occasional long journey mixed in every few weeks, it makes a lot of sense when you can do most of your charging at home, especially if you've got a proper 7kw home charger installed and aren't running an extension lead out of a window like I was.
"If you do mostly long journeys, the current expense of using service station chargers starts to make this a lot more difficult. If I had done all of my charging on the 79p charger, for example, my total cost would have been even more - £130 - nearly three times the diesel price.
"And none of this takes into account two other crucial factors - the cost of the car itself and the environmental aspect. With electric cars obviously emitting no carbon into the atmosphere, you may well be willing to pay a premium to be green.
"So, we've made a heck of a lot of progress over the past decade, but we're not there yet. And the current energy crisis has knocked us sideways. The technology of the cars has come on massively and the infrastructure is rapidly expanding. But on-the-road chargers need to be even faster and they need to be much cheaper.
"There's still a fair way to go to make it as convenient as internal combustion, even if it is cleaner. That said, electric power overtook diesel last year as the second-most-popular fuel after petrol, which if nothing else shows my dirty old(ish) BMW's days are numbered.
"We will all be driving electric cars one day, but I suspect that moment is still several decades away. For now, the decision of whether to go electric or not is absolutely one you should consider if you're planning to buy a new car anyway. But don't just wake up one day and say 'I must buy an electric car'. There's a lot to weigh up, and whether it makes sense or not will differ from one person to another."
