Family of five: 30,000 miles in a Quantum SUV

When we replaced the minivan, the objection was always framed as a question about road trips. A family of five, all that luggage, all those miles — good luck with that. Thirty thousand miles later I want to answer it properly, because the honest answer is more interesting than either side of the argument usually allows.

What actually changed

Ninety-one per cent of our charging happens at home, overnight, at the cheapest tariff we have ever paid for anything. We have not visited a petrol station in two years. Our annual fuel cost fell from roughly £2,400 to £480, and that number is the single biggest thing nobody told us about in advance.

The second change is quieter. Three children in a car with no engine noise talk to each other more. I have no data for this and I am certain it is true.

What we gave up

Spontaneity, a little. A 300-mile unplanned drive needs five minutes of thought that it did not need before. On the two occasions we have arrived somewhere with under ten per cent, both were my fault and both were avoidable.

Boot space is genuinely worse than the minivan it replaced — 640 litres against 780. With three car seats and a week of luggage we use a roof box, which costs about nine per cent of range at motorway speed. That is the real trade and I would make it again.

The question was never whether the car could do it. It was whether we would resent the ten minutes it asks for. We do not.

Two years of maintenance

One set of tyres at 22,000 miles, cabin filters twice, and a software recall handled overnight in the driveway. Brake pads are original and the service centre expects them to stay that way past 80,000 miles, because regenerative braking does almost all the work.

The skeptics were asking the wrong question. It was never about whether an electric car can take a family of five across the country — it plainly can. It is about whether the small daily conveniences add up to more than the occasional inconvenience. For us, comfortably, they do.