Bang! Out of nowhere the other car hit our car. That was 2.15pm last Sunday. Our old petrol car written off. Insurance payout has already come through. Today we paid the deposit on an electric car. This time next week we should have the car at home and the EV charger installed.

Some years ago, Ben Clark, Kiron Chatterjee and I undertook research at UWE into household car ownership decisions. These arise from a process of change through our life course but enacting the decision is often prompted by another external stimulus – a trigger.

Now I’m living the research, and lucky enough – as I’m well aware – to be in a position to make some of the choices we did.

This time last year our busy family household had two cars (one petrol and one diesel). We probably only needed 1.2 cars but you can only own them in integer amounts (there’s no car club near us in rural Wiltshire). Then one of the cars was ‘put on notice’ and would not be making it through the next MOT. That was the first trigger – with much lower household car mileage than in years past we decided it was time to try and live with our remaining car (acquired from one of our elderly neighbours who had given up driving).

We’ve spent the last four months feeling a bit of a squeeze about that missing 0.2 of a car – some adjustments to activity schedules and timing and patterns of trips. All workable though. Much of the 0.2 was catered for by taxis to/from the local train station.

Meanwhile, we knew the old car wouldn’t last forever. I was also keen to move to an electric vehicle when the time came. Last October we started doing our homework and put out a LinkedIn post seeking help (https://lnkd.in/dsJXnd75). People were very generous with advice. We settled upon an MG5 being the car for us. We started saving ready for an unknown time when we’d decide to make the switch.

Then last Sunday I was driving back from the weekly grocery shop and was hit by another car. No injuries but our car was written off. It has been an intense week. Juggling our weekly family schedule with no car initially, insurance claim, car hire, scouting for a second hand MG5, drawing money from the mortgage, booking in an electrician to fit an electric charger, test driving an MG5 and making the purchase decision.

I’ll report back in due course but its amazing how a week ago none of this was real and now we’ve been forced to make it happen.

I’m hoping we make a success of sticking with one car and it now being electric. The planned next step later this year is to use this change as the impetus for getting solar panels installed.

I wonder what else 2024 has in store at a personal level?

I know lots of you have already switched to EVs but I wonder how many others have plans to this year or are waiting for a trigger event (which they may not know is coming)?

#electricvehicles#carownership