.jpeg?width=1200&auto=webp&trim=333%2C0%2C264%2C0)
For many people thinking about buying an electric car, the first question is a simple one: where am I going to charge it?
For Lauren, who lives in Haringey, North London, the answer was not on a driveway or from a home charger – she doesn’t have either. Instead, she parks on the street, plugs into a char.gy on-street charging point near her home every couple of weeks and wakes up with enough charge for the next round of journeys.
After a year with her Hyundai Kona Electric, her advice to anyone in the same position is equally simple: “Don’t overthink it.”
Lauren’s story is a useful one because it tackles one of the biggest worries around electric cars: that you need off-street parking to make one work. She has no driveway, no home charger and, like many Londoners, no guaranteed space outside her front door. What she did have was access to nearby public charging and a growing feeling that petrol was becoming more trouble than it was worth.
A year later, she says she has no regrets. “It doesn’t actually feel that different to a normal petrol car,” she says. “It’s just smoother and quieter.”
Lauren chose the Kona Electric after hiring a similar car on holiday. “I just fell in love with it,” she says. The reasons for switching were a mix of environmental and financial, with business rates helping to make the numbers stack up, but it was the driving experience that really won her over.
Her weekly routine is fairly typical for plenty of city drivers. During the week, she uses public transport to commute into the city. At weekends, the car is used for supermarket trips, garden centre runs, seeing friends and family, and regular journeys to her father’s house in the Cotswolds (where she can also top up from a home charger).
The bit she expected to be stressful was charging, but she says it has become part of the routine. She parks near home in the evening, plugs in, walks back to the house and comes back to a charged car. She usually charges to around 80 per cent, which is enough for her normal use, and tops up before longer trips. Overnight charging, she says, is “the cheapest option I’ve found.”
For Lauren, that has also made electric car life easier than petrol car life. “I don’t miss the smell, the planning, any of it.” Range anxiety, too, has not been the issue she expected. Like many first-time EV drivers, she had heard plenty of warnings before making the switch. Her experience has been rather different.
“The battery lasts a long time,” she says. “You can travel further than you expect, and there are loads of charge points dotted around. You just don’t notice them until you need them.”
That’s not to say there have not been learning curves. Lauren says the hardest part has not been driving the car, or even finding somewhere to charge it, but working out how much charge a journey will actually need. “There’s still no real understanding about how much charging I need to do,” she explains. “Everything is measured differently, and it’s not easy to translate.”
That will sound familiar to plenty of new EV drivers. Petrol and diesel drivers are used to thinking in tanks, miles and fuel gauges. Electric cars introduce percentages, battery sizes and charging speeds, which can make a simple journey feel more complicated than it really is.
Lauren also says she had assumed bigger electric cars meant better range, but has since realised that smaller cars can have big batteries too. If she were choosing again, she says she might go for something smaller, not because the Kona lacks range, but because a large car can feel like more car than she needs for city driving.
Even so, the overall message from her first year is clear. Public charging is more available than many drivers realise, and the day-to-day switch is less dramatic than it looks from the outside.
For drivers without driveways, the big question is still local charging access. But where on-street chargers are available, Lauren’s experience suggests electric car ownership can be a lot simpler than many people imagine.
After a year of waking up with a charged car and skipping petrol stations altogether, she describes it as “a completely different, and better, way of driving.”
Read MoreBest electric cars 2026: The top 13 EVs on the market
