Hello Spider and welcome to the forums 🙂

I deliberately didn’t pre-order so I could negotiate. The best I’ve managed so far is a £500 increase on the part-ex price of my old car. We didn’t talk ‘extras’ such as paint colour, GAP or other add-ons because I want to know the delivery date first. However, I’d say the only things you are going to be able to haggle on are finance, your part-ex price and dealer accessories. There appears to be very little if any movement on either the battery lease or the OTR price for the new car and my dealer were completely unable to match the APR I was after for finance.

I’d expect you to be able to get GAP for about £150 rather than the £400 asking price (if not, get it from a third-party) and you might even be able to get the paint protection thrown in ‘free’ (as it only costs them about £60) with other negotiations. I’m going to attempt to get it free with the Arctic white paint. If not, I’ll not bother with it and may not bother with the Arctic White – flat white is much cheaper to repair/polish etc.

Dealer accessories include the TomTom Live services so you might be able to get a better price on that. £150 is rather a lot to ask for HD Traffic and the charge point POIs. HD Traffic is £22/year on the iPhone and iPad. I’m going to try for £90 and see what they say 🙂

Hi, I’ve been haunting the forum for the past month as a visitor; and also the Leaf Talk forum. Today I was offered a test drive from Looker’s at Chester, that will take place on Monday afternoon. I’ve learned much from the forum posts but still have questions and reservations. Being a suspicious soul I do wonder how long charging will be ‘free’ or at low cost before those who levy the road fund licence stick a huge tax on electricity used for road use.

In Sweden we have http://www.uppladdning.nu where we can select the Type-2 Mode 3 charging stations, we got a good community that add stations as we source information from the charger companies (they give us unofficial lists of their customers and we go there to check…).
In the OECR rally I drove straight from Copenhagen to Helsingor (since I was an official at the rally), about 45km, the other ZOEs drove the course at 85km. I ended up with 78km left and they with 112km left. And I tried to drive no more than 90 and drove as well as I could. I drove the highway and they the country roads. So 85km can be a lot ‘shorter’ than 45km in an EV.

TomTom on ZOE can select do drive via a certain location. You key in the end destination, then add a few ‘via’ locations and it could take you the right way, but you need a lot of time to prepare a trip. But you can save the trips of course.

TomTom can do fastest, shortest or ‘economical’ – which is supposed to be a sensible balance of the two. I noticed my test-drive car had no full postcode support or POIs installed (including EV POIs) but I believe that’s just because they’d not set it up 🙂 My CoPilot app (iPhone) gives you a choice of 3 routes and allows you to edit the route to your needs by dragging the route markers. You can also try setting your vehicle to ‘caravan’ or ‘truck’ which should take into account slower driving speeds. I believe the TomTom, like CoPilot, can also specify to avoid motorways and toll roads.

As for charging for use of public chargers there appears to be a split in the UK. Many companies and networks are going for an annual membership while a few are going for PAYG. Annual memberships seem to vary between free and £30/year while PAYG varies from free to over £3/charge.

While a lot of public charging networks are supported through government grants and initiatives it must be recognised that setting up and running public networks takes time and money so they will be more expensive to use than home or work charging.

I think Ecotricity has a good idea with motorway chargers – but expect them to be costly in future just like motorway petrol and expect the chargers to be 22kw and 43kw. Polar / Chargemaster, ZeroCarbonWorld and PodPoint are all targeting public businesses such as supermarkets, hotels and car parks where you will leave your car for a couple of hours. These networks don’t need 22kw and 43kw chargers and are often installed by businesses who then join the network (and could be part of multiple networks). Here I’d expect things like free charging if you spend money with the business or a loyalty card offering free or very reduced cost charging. Finally there’s local councils and their partners. I’d expect to see chargers at train stations and park&ride bus stations as well as council run facilities like swimming centres and carparks and I think these are likely to stay free for some time due to government funding. You might have to sign up to a free rfid card to prove you live in an area before you can access the chargers, though, with ‘outsiders’ being charged PAYG fees.

Watch out for companies being charged for offering free charging to employees, though. It’s technically a benefit and so is likely to be taxed sooner rather than later! Same with carparks.

Just my thoughts 🙂