A plumber tested an electric van for two weeks. Overnight charging decided the verdict

Mark has been a plumber for more than thirty years and has driven diesel vans for all of them. Late in August, Mercedes handed him an electric van and two weeks to work out of it. He was clear from the first minute that this was not a van review — his channel is called Real World Plumbing, not Real World Motoring — and that the only question he cared about was whether an EV could replace the Vauxhall Vivaro he actually earns a living in.

He answered it, and the answer turned entirely on one thing that has nothing to do with the van.

Before charging came into it, Mark did what tradespeople do: he threw a three-metre length of copper pipe at the problem. It did not fit. His own van has a removable panel in the bulkhead that opens up 3.7 metres of load length, and he could not fathom why every manufacturer does not fit one, since three metres is the going length for copper, timber and trunking alike.

The rest of the audit was similarly unsentimental. Twin sliding doors that swing fully open without a detent, so a gust catches them. Cubby holes too small. No storage under the middle seat, where his Vivaro has plenty. “It's little things,” he said, “it's little things like that that us trades people like.” He was complimentary about how it drove and how it was built, but none of that puts a length of pipe in the back.

Range anxiety was not his problem, and he was slightly surprised by that. He drove a route he knew to be 36 miles and the van's estimate came within a mile of the reality, with air conditioning running and a phone and a GoPro charging. He does maybe 60 miles on a busy day, and over two weeks he never once had to stop and charge mid-shift.

What did not work was paying for it. Mark has no home charger, so he ran the whole fortnight on public rapid units. The charger placed a £45 authorisation hold on his card before energy started flowing. A full charge cost roughly £35 for 160 to 175 miles, which he worked out at 20 to 22p per mile against 26 to 29p for the diesel. A saving, technically. Filling the Vivaro costs him about £130 and returns 400 to 500 miles.

His verdict on that arithmetic was flat: if you are going to permanently charge on public rapids, no. Those are for a five-minute top-up on the way home to where your real charger lives.

Then he ran the home numbers. At a cheap overnight tariff, a full charge comes to about £5 or £6 — roughly 3 to 4p a mile — and a typical 20-to-80 per cent working top-up is three or four quid. Same van, same miles, same fortnight. The gap between £35 and £6 is the entire business case, and it is decided by whether you have a driveway.

Mark's fortnight lines up closely with people running electric vans as their actual fleet. Mark The Sparky Allison posted a year-and-20,000-mile report on an all-electric Peugeot Partner in 2024, and his numbers rhyme. Rated 171 miles, his showed 182 in eco mode in spring and about 166 in normal. Fine, he said, right up until motorway speeds in winter: fully laden at 70 mph in the cold, he was lucky to see 100 miles before needing a rapid charger. He was blunt about the software, too — fire it up in February at minus ten and it will cheerfully promise 166 miles it has no chance of delivering, then watch the figure collapse as the car recalculates.

His conclusion was almost identical to Mark's: a contractor working within a 30-mile radius of home, charging overnight at 7 to 12p per kWh, will do very well. He is putting in 20 to 25 miles per hour of charge on a 7 kW box, so a four-hour overnight window covers 100 miles.

Across the Atlantic, Tyler at Out Motorsports reported 4,000 miles on a Ford E-Transit in a Washington DC ice cream catering fleet in 2023. Ford advertised 126 to 130 miles; on a 40-degree January day, at 100 per cent, his showed 93 to 96. Loaded and cold, it dropped further. The fleet's site charger was slow enough that drivers had to end shifts at a public charger ten minutes away, and even there they only saw 27 kW — 63 to 80 per cent took 20 minutes, so realistically an hour to fill. He also flagged something spec sheets never do: the load floor sits higher than a diesel Transit because the batteries need somewhere to live, which matters when your business rolls equipment up ramps.

What his drivers actually liked was the shift itself. Nobody went home smelling of diesel, nothing vibrated all day, and he had noticed the same thing managing electric tractor units at a previous job — the people driving them finished less tired.

Mark closed with a figure he had picked up from other trades rather than from the van he was lent: a couple of lads he knows run Kia PV5s with roof racks and racking, rated 260 miles, and see a genuine 230 to 240 fully loaded. That is a different conversation from 175. But the sorting rule stays the same across all three accounts, in two countries and across four years of hardware. Can you plug it in where it sleeps? If yes, an electric van is dramatically cheaper to run than a diesel one. If no, you are buying a quieter van with a worse working radius and saving roughly four to nine pence a mile for the trouble.