The £25,000 car decision, with a £100-a-month plot twist

If you want to see what £199 buys in a Compass EV buyer report, the sample report PDF is up on the site as a download. This is a walkthrough of that document: the reasoning behind it, the moments where the report stops being "five cars in a list" and starts being useful, and the section a reader pointed out should probably have been on the cover.

The buyer is fictional but the situation is composite. Real Bristol family, real budget, real intake answers we've seen across a dozen conversations. The constraints are typical of the bulk of UK first-time EV buyers in 2026.

The brief

Helen, working parent of two young children. Bristol-based. Currently in a 2018 Skoda Octavia 1.5 TSI petrol. Wants to replace it with an electric car.

Drives roughly 12,000 miles a year. Most of those are short hops (school run, occasional client visits around the South West). Three or four long days a year to visit family in Manchester or Cornwall. The longest non-stop run she ever does is about 90 miles.

She has a driveway, so home charging is straightforward. She has Octopus's Intelligent Go tariff already (off-peak at 7p/kWh overnight). Budget is £25,000–£28,000 all-in, made up of cash plus the part-exchange value of her current Octavia (around £11,000).

She came to us with three cars on her own shortlist: a Tesla Model Y, a Skoda Enyaq, and a VW ID.4.

Her biggest worry: EV depreciation. She'd read about how badly used Teslas dropped through 2023 and was nervous about buying into the same trap.

The mechanical filter

The first thing the report does is run a rule-based filter against the knowledge base of UK-market EVs. Mechanical, not editorial: the buyer's brief becomes a series of yes/no questions, and the database returns candidates that satisfy all of them.

For Helen, the filter is roughly:

budget_used_3y BETWEEN 22000 AND 28500       — £500 wiggle either side
real_world_motorway_70mph >= 113             — 90 miles + 25% buffer
boot_capacity_litres >= 500                  — buggy and dog plus child seats
seats >= 5
body_style IN ('SUV', 'estate', 'hatchback') — buyer ruled out saloons
brand_country NOT IN ('China')               — buyer flagged this loosely
heat_pump_available = TRUE                   — buyer-preferred but not strict

That returns roughly nine to eleven candidates from the current market. The report's job is to narrow them to a shortlist of five and explain why.

This is the moment the work shifts from mechanical to editorial. The filter doesn't know anything about how families actually use cars, whether a specific car's rear seats fit Isofix easily, or which platforms have known software issues. Those judgement calls come from the curated layer of the knowledge base, which grows per customer.

The shortlist

Five cars, ranked:

Rank	Car	Why this one
Top pick	Skoda Enyaq 80 (2023)	The most family-shaped of the candidates. 585 L boot, near-identical to her Octavia estate. Physical climate controls. Real-world range comfortably covers the Manchester run.
Strong second	Hyundai Ioniq 5 73 kWh (2023)	Same broad value, significantly faster DC charging. Genuinely flat floor that makes child-seat fitting easier.
Stretch option	Kia EV6 Air (2022/23)	Mechanically the Ioniq 5's twin. Smaller boot. Better resolved styling, less rear headroom.
Value play	VW ID.4 Pro (2022)	£2,000–£3,000 cheaper than the Enyaq for an equivalent car. Pre-2024 touch-slider issue is a real problem given her stated preference for physical controls. We flag it.
Worth mentioning	BMW iX1 eDrive20 (2024)	Slightly above budget. Included because the buyer's brand-avoid was loose, and BMW kept the physical buttons after VW Group dropped them.

For each car, the report covers:

• The specific used price band today (sourced from AutoTrader Retail Index and cross-checked against current Cap HPI book values)
• Why this car for her specifically — Isofix fit, boot dimensions, motorway range margin, dashboard ergonomics
• The trim variant to look for (and which to avoid)
• The honest downsides we'd flag
• Three real numbers: real-world range, DC peak charging speed, heat pump status

The report does not tell her which one to buy. It ranks them, makes the case for each, and tells her where each one falls short for her specific brief. The final call is hers.

The depreciation question

She came in worried about depreciation. The report addresses it directly because if we ignore it she'll keep worrying, and she'll buy the wrong car for the wrong reasons.

The short version: used EV depreciation took its worst hit in 2023 and 2024 when Tesla cut new-car prices and the salary-sacrifice market flooded auctions with returning leases. By 2026, the curve has flattened. A 2023 Enyaq at £25,500 today is most likely worth £18,000–£20,000 in three years, which is roughly £2,500 a year. A petrol Octavia from new at the same price point would have lost similar money over the same period.

She's buying after the dip, not into it. The Bristol family worry was real eighteen months ago. It's no longer the right thing to worry about most.

(Full background on this: EV depreciation in 2026: why this isn't 2023.)

The running cost calculation

Standard section. Real numbers, transparent assumptions.

For Helen's Octavia at 12,000 miles a year (45 mpg petrol, £1.45/L pump): annual fuel cost roughly £1,978.

For the Enyaq 80 at her actual charging mix (90% home on Intelligent Go at 7p/kWh, 10% public rapid at 75p/kWh): annual electricity cost roughly £312.

Plus or minus on servicing, tyres, insurance, the total annual cost difference is about £1,600 in her favour with the EV. Roughly £134 a month.

If you want to plug your own numbers in: the running cost calculator does this for any car, any tariff, any mileage. Same maths.

The bit she didn't ask for

This is where the report stops being a list of cars and starts being useful. Halfway through her 30-question intake form, Helen mentioned in passing that her employer offers salary sacrifice on EVs but she hadn't looked into it.

That sentence is the most important thing in the entire intake form, because for a 40% taxpayer buying a new EV at the equivalent spec to her used shortlist, salary sacrifice often ends up cheaper than buying outright.

Worked through against her actual situation:

• Scenario A (what she came to us with): used 2023 Enyaq 80 at £25,500 cash, three-year ownership cost £12,206 (£339 / month including running costs and resale)
• Scenario B: new Skoda Enyaq 85 on a 36-month salary-sacrifice lease at £740/month gross, which after tax saving and Benefit-in-Kind charge nets to roughly £488/month — but this includes insurance, servicing, tyres, breakdown, none of which are in Scenario A

When you add the items the lease bundles, the gap closes to about £40/month. For that £40/month, she gets:

• A brand-new car under full warranty
• No depreciation risk
• A guaranteed handback at the end with no resale headache
• £11,000 from her part-exchange in her bank, not tied up in a depreciating asset
• £14,500 of cash still in hand

Whether it's the right call for her depends on factors we can't see from here: her exact scheme rates, whether her tax bracket holds for the full term, whether she values the certainty of fixed monthly costs over a lower notional headline cost.

But the £100-a-month plot twist is that her £25,000 question may not have been the right question. She came to us asking which used EV to buy. The honest answer is "any of the top three in the shortlist, or possibly none of them, depending on a 30-minute conversation with your HR team."

That section, Section 9 of the report, is the one a reader of the early drafts pointed out probably belongs on the cover, not buried in the middle. The TOC now flags it explicitly: "If you only read one section, read Section 9."

If you're a 40% taxpayer who's offered salary sacrifice and haven't looked into it, the salary-sacrifice calculator does this maths for any car and any tax bracket. Worth fifteen minutes of your time before you commit to a used purchase.

The sanity-check on her own shortlist

Helen came in with three cars. The report tells her, for each, whether her instinct was right.

Skoda Enyaq: right call. Top of our shortlist.

VW ID.4: on the shortlist as a value play, but the pre-2024 touch-slider issue is a real problem given her preference for physical controls. We'd lean Enyaq.

Tesla Model Y: the most-mentioned car in the entire intake and we didn't put it on the shortlist. Two reasons: it sits above her £25k–£28k used budget for the variants currently in stock, and she'd flagged a preference against Chinese-manufactured cars (Tesla's UK supply splits between Berlin and Shanghai gigafactories, and you'd need to VIN-check each individual car). We told her how to do that check, and that if she could stretch the budget and the origin point wasn't a hard rule, the Model Y is an excellent EV by any objective measure. She has the information to make that call herself.

The checklist she takes to the dealer

The last operational page of the report is a buying checklist. Standard items (battery SOH, heat pump verification, software version, recall completion) plus the car-specific ones for her actual shortlist: ask about the 12V battery for early-2022 Enyaqs, verify the ME software version is 3.x or later, check rear-seat fit with her actual child seats.

The intent is straightforward. She walks into the dealer with a printed list. The dealer sees that she's done the work. The conversation gets more serious immediately, and the kind of soft pressure that turns a sensible visit into a regrettable purchase doesn't land the same way.

Full version is in the knowledge base.

What happened next

This is the sample, so nothing happened next. But for the version of this story that plays out for real customers, the typical outcome is:

• Helen goes back to her employer's HR team, gets a real salary-sacrifice quote on a new Enyaq 85
• It comes back a little better or a little worse than our indicative numbers (every scheme is different)
• She makes the call between Scenario A and Scenario B with the numbers her employer actually quoted
• She test-drives whichever she's gone for, with the checklist in hand
• She buys it, or she walks away and revisits in three months

The role of the report isn't to make the decision for her. It's to make sure the decision she does make is the one she'd have made with infinite time, infinite expertise, and zero pressure. That's what £199 buys.

If you want to read the full thing

The sample report is downloadable as a PDF. Eighteen pages, no email signup, no upsell.

If you'd like one of these for your own situation, the free quiz is the right first step. Five minutes, gives you a verdict, tells you whether an EV is the right call. If you already know it is, the paid intake is where the report process starts.

— Mike, Compass EV