As money is tight for a lot of people, I thought it would be nice to share some money saving tips. They may not be applicable to you, but hopefully it’s useful for some.
-
Get a bike / ebike for small distances. I’m originally from The Netherlands and we use a bike very often. NZ is so different, most people tend to take the car for every trip. I’ve seen people take the car for a trip of literally 25 meter… I’ve bought an ebike to do my daily commute to the train station and it’s awesome. No traffic stress, saves money, and good for the environment. I’ve got a $1400 ebike, The Warehouse recently had one for less than $1000.
-
Get an electric car. We replaced our Corolla with a $15k Leaf with 130km range. The prices have gone down, and a similar model can now be found for $11k or so. It saves us about $3.5k / year on petrol & maintenance. We only use it in the Wellington region, and rarely run out of range. On longer trips we use quick chargers, within 15 minutes it’s back to 80% charge. At least every 70km on state highways there’s a quick charger. While I’m against borrowing money for a car, in this case it may be worth it. With BNZ you can get a 1% loan for 3 years.
-
Switch electrical provider. We switched to Octopus Energy. $0 daily charge and cheapest. Also good solar buy back, and cheaper nightly rates to charge an EV. /edit : apparently Octopus no longer has zero daily charge on new connections.
We were in the same boat and was seriously considering the MG4 @ 40K after rebate. Ultimately we decided to save for now and put down deposit on an imported 40kw Leaf. Should end up around 21K after rebate. The range will be more than enough for around town Hamilton and we’re just planning to slow charge at home. Maybe in future reuse the battery for storage at home. We still have a hybrid for longer trips and will get rid of the old ICE car.
The plan will be to replace the hybrid with a larger EV in the next few years once more models filter down to the second hand market. Even now you can find a few second hand MG ZS EV’s for around 35k.
The only other decent second hand option in the smaller car market is the 2018 Hyundai Ioniqs around 25K. They are all ex-fleet cars here it seems so no rebate unfortunately. They are supposed to have great batteries with very little degradation even with fast charging.
21k for a 40kw leaf after rebate seems like a steal based on what I’m seeing. You get it from a dealer in Hamilton?
Couldn’t find anything at that price with decent SOH in Hamilton sadly. We ordered through DriveEV in Taupo, they do free North Island deliveries. Just waiting now on it to arrive in the country in the next couple weeks.
Ah cool, I had spied them on trademe. Thanks