Most leasing websites will tell you the same thing about electric cars. The range is incredible, the savings are massive, charging is effortless, what are you waiting for.
That’s not quite the full picture, and if you’re putting one or two of your team into an EV as a company car, you deserve the proper version.
Here’s what actually happens. The range on the brochure is not the range you’ll see. Cold mornings will cost you more than you’d expect. Charging is genuinely easy for most people and a real planning job for others, and the difference between those two camps comes down to one question that almost no one asks upfront.
This is the conversation we’d rather have with you now than have you find out the hard way six months in.
Why we’d rather have the awkward conversation
We work with a deliberately small number of business clients, so when one of them asks about going electric, the worst thing we could do is gloss over the tricky bits to win the deal. You’d find out the truth the first cold Tuesday in January, and we’d have lost your trust for good.
So we’ll be straight with you. If electric suits the way your team actually drives, you’ll know exactly what you’re signing up for. If it doesn’t, we’ll say so, and we’ll look at other leasing options that fit your business better today.
WLTP range versus what you’ll actually see
Every electric car gets sold with a WLTP figure on the brochure. WLTP is the standardised lab test, the Worldwide Harmonised Light Vehicles Test Procedure, which exists so you can compare one car against another on equal terms. It is useful for that. It is not a promise of what your dashboard will show.
A sensible rule of thumb from what we see in practice: expect roughly 70 to 85 percent of the WLTP figure in mild conditions with a relaxed driving style. So a car quoted at 300 miles will typically deliver somewhere between 210 and 255 miles in real life.
The reasons the real number sits below the lab number are not complicated.
- Motorway speeds eat range. EVs are most efficient around town, which is the opposite of how a petrol car behaves. A long 70 mph cruise is harder work for the battery than the same distance in stop-start traffic.
- Driving style matters more than it does in a petrol car. Heavy acceleration and braking will visibly drop the predicted miles. Smooth, anticipatory driving genuinely makes a noticeable difference.
- Load counts. A van full of tools, or a car with four adults and a weekend’s luggage, costs you range.
- Climate control draws from the same battery that moves the car. There’s no engine making waste heat to warm the cabin for free.
None of this is a reason to dismiss EVs. It’s a reason to size the car correctly for the journeys your team actually does. We’d rather put you in a car with a comfortable buffer than one where your sales rep is sweating the percentage on the M25 every Thursday afternoon.
Cold weather: the bit most brokers won’t mention
Cold weather is the single biggest surprise for new EV drivers, and it’s the part that other leasing brokers tend to quietly skip past.
Lithium-ion batteries don’t like the cold. When the temperature drops, the battery itself gets less efficient, and at the same time you start running the heater, which is a meaningful additional draw from the same pack.
The honest number: on a properly cold winter day, expect to lose somewhere between 15 and 30 percent of your usable range compared to a mild day. On the worst days of the year, with a long motorway run and the heater on full, occasionally a bit more.
The good news is that the workarounds are simple, and your drivers will pick them up within a fortnight.
- Pre-condition while the car is plugged in. Almost every modern EV lets you warm the cabin and the battery from the grid before you set off. You leave the house with a warm car and a full battery, instead of using the battery to warm the car.
- Use the heated seats and steering wheel instead of cranking the cabin heater. They use a fraction of the energy and keep the driver just as comfortable on shorter trips.
- Build a slightly bigger margin into winter long-distance journeys. Plan the charging stops earlier than you would in July.
For a business whose vehicles do predictable local routes inside, say, a 60 mile radius of base, winter range loss is largely a non-issue. For a sales rep doing genuine 300 mile days in January with no certainty about where they’ll be at lunchtime, it’s a real conversation. If the maths doesn’t stack up for the way you actually use the car, we’ll tell you. We’d rather lose the deal than land you in a car that doesn’t work.
The detail behind the numbers sits on our charging and range page, and the cost side is broken down in our guide to what an EV will actually save you.
What charging actually looks like in a working week
This is where the marketing and the reality drift furthest apart. Charging is rarely a problem in absolute terms, but it is a habit change, and it’s worth being honest about what that means.
The one question that matters most
Where will each driver actually plug in?
It sounds basic. It is the single biggest predictor of whether the switch will feel easy or annoying, and it’s the first thing we ask when a client mentions going electric.
If your team can charge at home overnight, or at your premises during the day, EVs become genuinely easy. You plug in when you arrive, you unplug when you leave, you almost never think about it. A typical day’s driving replenishes in a few hours of cheap overnight electricity, and you’ll go weeks without visiting a public charger.
If a driver can’t charge at home, no driveway, terraced street, flat without allocated parking, the picture changes. They’ll lean on public charging, which works, but it’s a planning job rather than an invisible background task. That’s not a deal-breaker. It is something to know before you sign, not after.
Public rapid charging in 2026
The UK public network has improved enormously in the last few years. Reliability is better, payment is much more straightforward than it used to be, and high-speed chargers on motorway routes have multiplied. It is no longer 2019, and the war stories from that era are mostly out of date.
A few things still worth being honest about, though.
A rapid charge typically takes 20 to 45 minutes from around 10 to 80 percent, depending on the car and the charger. That’s a coffee and a sandwich, not a three-minute splash and dash. Pretending otherwise just sets people up for frustration.
Charging slows down sharply above 80 percent, which is by design and protects the battery. On longer trips, the smart move is two shorter stops at 10 to 80 rather than one long stop all the way to full.
Per mile, public rapid charging now costs almost as much as petrol. The big EV savings story really only holds up if most of your charging is happening at home or at the office on cheap electricity. If it’s mostly happening at motorway services, the financial case gets thinner.
A realistic week, two ways
Owner-director, 150 miles a day, drives home to a house with a driveway. Plugs in Monday evening, ignores it all week, maybe tops up Friday for the weekend. Hasn’t been to a public charger in a month. That’s the genuine experience for the majority of EV drivers who can charge at base.
Field sales rep, 280 miles a day across the South East, no home charger. Plans one rapid stop most days around lunch or a meeting, has the main charging apps on their phone, knows which service stations to rely on. Workable, no drama, but it’s a real behaviour change and it needs the driver to be on board.
Both can work. They are not the same job.
Which EV worries are real, and which are overblown
There’s a lot of noise about electric vehicles. Some of it is well-founded, some of it isn’t. Here’s our honest sort.
Worth taking seriously
Public charging when you can’t charge at base. The single biggest practical issue, and the one most worth thinking hard about before committing. If a driver has no realistic option to charge at home or at work, EV life is harder.
Long-distance towing. Range drops sharply when you’re towing, and not every EV is rated for significant weights. If you regularly haul a trailer or horsebox down to the West Country, an EV is probably not the right answer today.
Resale uncertainty. This affects you far less when you lease, because the residual value risk sits with the finance company, not you. It’s actually one of the strong arguments for leasing rather than buying an EV.
Battery degradation over very long ownership. Real, but largely irrelevant on a three or four year lease where you hand the car back long before it matters.
Overblown
“The battery will die after a few years.” Modern EV batteries are typically warrantied for 8 years or around 100,000 miles, and real-world data shows most hold the vast majority of their capacity well beyond that. On a lease term, you’ll never see the problem.
“There’s nowhere to charge.” Five years ago, a fair point. Today, the network is genuinely good across most of the country, with the gaps shrinking quickly. Rural Scotland and the deep South West are still patchier than the South East, but the direction of travel is clear.
“They catch fire all the time.” They don’t. Statistically, petrol and diesel cars catch fire considerably more often per mile driven than EVs do. The story sticks because EV fires are unusual and harder for the fire service to put out, but the underlying frequency is lower.
“The grid won’t cope.” Off-peak overnight charging actually helps grid balancing rather than straining it, because most home charging happens precisely when demand is lowest. There are legitimate longer-term infrastructure questions, but the “lights will go out” framing isn’t supported by the evidence.
A note on company car tax
Benefit in Kind on electric company cars remains very favourable compared to petrol and diesel equivalents, which is one of the biggest reasons our business clients look at EVs as a staff perk. The exact BIK percentage changes each tax year, so confirm the current rate with your accountant before you commit. We can walk you through the latest figures when you’re ready, but always check the tax position with your own accountant.
So is an EV right for your business?
Honestly, it depends, and the depends-on-what is genuinely simple.
| If this is you | An EV is probably… |
|---|---|
| Office-based business, drivers under 200 miles most days, home or workplace charging available | A genuinely good fit. Lower running costs, strong BIK benefits, drivers usually love them. |
| Mixed team, some can charge at home, others can’t, sensible daily mileages | Worth doing driver by driver, not as a blanket fleet decision. |
| Field reps doing 250 miles plus most days, no home charging, mostly motorway | Possible but it needs planning. A plug-in hybrid is often the better stepping stone. |
| Regular long-distance towing, remote rural operating area | Not yet. We’d say so, and look at other options with you. |
This is the conversation we’d much rather have with you upfront than have you discover the hard way.
How we’d actually approach this with you
We work with a small number of business clients, usually one to twenty staff, who lease a handful of cars or vans as a company perk. That model only works if our clients trust us, which is why we’d rather talk you out of an EV that won’t suit your team than push you into one that won’t.
When you come to us about going electric, we’ll ask the unglamorous questions first. Where do your drivers live. What do their actual daily mileages look like, not the rounded number. Is home charging realistic. What does a typical month of journeys look like. Then we’ll tell you, straight, whether it’s a good fit, a partial fit, or something worth revisiting in a year when the cars and the network have moved on again.
If it’s the right move, we’ll find you the right car from suppliers we know and trust, with no surprises buried in the paperwork. If it isn’t quite right yet, we’ll look at the petrol, diesel and hybrid options that fit your team better today, and we’ll keep the EV picture under review for next time. There’s a bit more about how our clients find working with us on our feedback page if you want a sense of how this plays out in practice.
A straightforward next step
If you’ve got a vehicle or two coming up for renewal and you’re weighing up whether electric is the right move, we’re happy to talk it through. No quote chase, no pressure, just an honest conversation about how your team actually uses its cars and what would genuinely work.
We’re easy to reach, and we’d rather get to know your business properly than fire across a price you didn’t ask for. That’s how we work, and it’s the reason our clients tend to stay with us for the long haul.
