On my personal quest for a cheap commuter EV I checked autotrader for C-Zero's and Ion's last night and found 4 in total, 3 of interest.
The best one is this lovely C-Zero in Red:
http://www.autotrader.co.uk/classified/ ... 3022840252
£5850 - at the top end of what I'd be willing to pay, but only 8000 miles and a 2013 model, so only 3-4 years old.
Absolutely perfect, except for one tiny detail. It's a private sale some 355 miles from me!
I'm assuming from that its somewhere in Cornwall.
The problem with that is even if I had the money ready to go I'd have to either buy it sight unseen and have it shipped up to me - not good when I've still not seen one in the flesh to work out whether we can get our baby seat and stroller crammed into the thing and I have never driven one before... or fly/train down to who knows where, look at the car, arrange insurance on the spot, pay for it in cash (which I don't have as I'd need to finance) and then start an arduous 355 mile journey home in a car that can realistically do about 50 miles per charge at motorway speeds and is not designed for long journeys.
That means around 8-10 rapid charges on the way home each one taking about 30 minutes, (so 5 hours sitting charging ) and costing anything between free and £6 depending on the charge point, and not using the heating to squeeze the range out of it. Brr! If one rapid charger was out of operation I'd be stranded. Jonathan from ecocars makes a living out of doing this but I'm not that game with no prior experience under my belt! So the exact car I want, even the colour, but right at the top of my price range and totally infeasible for me to buy and get home due to it being a private sale and so far away. Pity!
Next up is this Peugeot Ion:
http://www.autotrader.co.uk/classified/ ... 1141298838
A bit cheaper at £5295 and much closer at 136 miles away. Also a lovely Blue that I'd be perfectly happy with. A 2011 model so 5-6 years old. One problem - for only a few hundred pounds less it has done nearly 22k miles.
Now on any normal car that would be nothing - the lowest mileage car I've ever bought in my life is 65k! And the newest car I've ever bought is 8 years old. However being electric there is always the concern of the battery life. Has the battery been well looked after or has it been abused ? Without driving the car and checking its range, who knows. It's still a long trek away to even see the car and is simply not good value compared to the first car. Oh well.
Number three is this Peugeot Ion:
http://www.autotrader.co.uk/classified/ ... 3022855033
Also a 2011 model year so 5-6 years old, and a slightly higher mileage at 23k miles. It's also Silver, which is not a favourite colour of mine. In fact after owning a Silver Xantia V6 I said I wouldn't own a Silver car again!
However it has two major things going for it. One is that it is only £4200, so massively cheaper than the blue one, and two, its in Glasgow, 12 miles from me at a dealer!!!
Seats look slightly grubby and worn to me and I can see a few marks on the back bumper, but it otherwise looks sound. My big question is, can I get over the fact that it's Silver, and am I willing to take a gamble on a 23k mileage electric car ? Early Leaf's are notorious for battery range loss with mileage but from the research I have done the i Miev / Ion / C-Zero batteries seem to be lasting unusually well with relatively little range loss at 20k. However I have to consider that I'd do about 6k a year in it, so if I took it out over 3 years the car would have done around 40k miles by the time I'd paid it off. Will the battery still be OK then ? Manufacturers battery warranty is 8 years, so it has only about 2 and a bit years left on that warranty, while the red one would still have 4 and a bit years left on the battery warranty at the moment.
Of the three its the only one I could realistically buy and get back home - its a lot cheaper, its at a dealer (so easier to arrange finance than a private sale) and its right in Glasgow, so I could both go and view/test drive the car even if I don't buy it, and if I did buy it I could catch the train in to collect it and drive it home easily on a single charge.
(And not spend the cost of catching a train/plane and driving it home from hundreds of miles away!)
So I'm thinking its definitely worth my while to try to get a test drive of it and get a chance to try to stuff my baby seat and stroller into it, possibly even Saturday week, assuming it is still there. I'm not keen on Silver but as the whole point of this car would be very utilitarian as a low cost commuter and shopping buggy I really shouldn't be quibbling over the colour.... In which case it all comes down to the condition of the car and the range of the battery and whether I'm willing to take a gamble on a 23k mile battery... I feel like I'm almost in a "put my money where my mouth is" situation here.
I don't want to rush into anything until the money situation is right either - from what I understand all C-Zero's and Ion's were leased for 4 years when new not sold outright. That means that while there are only a few hundred of each in the country, as they come off the 4 year lease and go back to the leasing company they then go onto the second hand market. So it seems like there is a small but steady trickle of second hand cars as they come off lease, so I shouldn't be worried about the supply of them drying up any time soon, especially when they are probably hard to shift to prospective buyers who are put off by the short range! Finding another one as close as Glasgow might be difficult though.
Edit: One other thing to consider with the price of these cars is that they didn't originally ship with a type 1 to type 2 cable, only with a "granny cable" which lets you plug into a 3 pin plug. That means if you are charging away from home you can only use the Chademo rapid chargers, which are a lot less common than the Type 2 connector used for most fast charging points. (Chademo chargers have their own tethered cable)
For slow and fast (not rapid) charging the C-Zero/Ion uses the US/Japan J1772 Type 1 plug not the more common Type 2 plug used in Europe/UK, so to plug into any Type 2 charging posts you need a Type 1 to Type 2 cable like this:
http://www.evcables.co.uk/247/Type-1-to ... able-Black
or this coiled one:
http://www.evcables.co.uk/194/Coiled-Ty ... ing-Cables
Jonathan of ecocars bundles such a cable on any C-Zero/Ion that he sells which doesn't already have one, however its likely that none of the three above include this Type 1 to Type 2 cable unless the previous owner bought one and left it with the car.
Buying such a cable is around £100-£150 but is highly worth it in fact almost essential if you ever plan to charge away from home anywhere like a car park, so needs to be factored into the purchase cost if the car doesn't already come with one!
; then what I wonder? Will we be allowed to use them or trailer them to "shows" or will the whole genre be consigned to the scrapyard? The rate of change is quite an eye-opener; probably unprecedented in recent times as it is not the incremental evolution of ICE powered vehicles we have become used to over the last 100 years or so. The mind boggles, my flabber is properly ghasted 
.
