• Electric vehicles are cheap to run
• Free road tax, free entry to London’s congestion zone
• Charging costs are minimal compared to petrol or diesel

What are the running costs?

Running costs for any electric vehicle are a bit of a mixed bag. If you’re in possession of a wallbox at home and have access to cheap rates, they make all manner of sense, but start using public chargers and the picture changes considerably.

While the ZS EV’s petrol sibling lags behind the pack for fuel economy, the electric model should be much more competitive to fuel and maintain, with excellent motor efficiency and a long-range battery pack.

With CO2 emissions being a big fat zero, there’s no vehicle excise duty to pay, and the ZS EV stays on the right side of emissions regulations such as London’s congestion charge or Ultra-Low Emission Zone. With several other cities considering adopting similar schemes, this could prove to be an even bigger benefit in the future.

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Range and charging

It’s available with two battery packs. MG calls them Standard and Long-range models come in 51kWh and 72kWh sizes. Kilowatt hour is the standard measure of electric vehicle battery capacity – the equivalent of a fuel tank for petrol and diesel cars.

The Standard range model makes an claimed 198 miles, while the Long range extends that to 273. On a 70-mile mixed driving route on the former, including motorways, we lost 80 miles of range. This is really good. By our calculations most people should easily be able to get 250 miles on a single charge.

Using a more expensive 100kW rapid charger, like the ones found at service stations, the ZS EV can top up 80% in 42 minutes. From a typical 7kW home charger it’ll take 10 and a half hours.

Servicing and warranty

The brand is obviously confident in its longevity as it warrants its cars for an impressive seven years – matching Kia and SsangYong for the longest car warranty in the business, even if the 80,000 miles it covers isn’t so generous.

The battery is also covered for the duration of the warranty, and will be repaired or replaced if it falls below 70% of its as-new performance in that time.

Reliability

• MG reliability still unproven
• Seven-year warranty suggests confidence
• Little to go wrong on an electric car

MG’s reliability record is patchy at best right now, and although the company says it’s making great strides in this direction, its dealer network is still growing and there have been some supply issues in the past.

On the positive side, electric vehicles are very simple to maintain. With very few moving parts and reduced brake and tyre wear thanks to that regenerative braking, you should pay less in servicing and consumables.