Why I built Compass EV

A few months ago, a close friend asked me what EV she should buy. She'd done the work: the spreadsheets, the YouTube reviews, the dealer test drives, the salary-sacrifice quotes from her employer. She still didn't know.

It wasn't because she lacked information. It was because every source of information she'd consulted had a reason to want her to choose a particular car. Dealers earned commission. Manufacturers wanted their brand. Reviewers were chasing the affiliate click. The salary-sacrifice broker had a panel of providers and a commercial preference inside it.

She paid me for an evening of advice, off-piste, friend-to-friend. I told her what I'd tell my own family. Within a week, she'd bought a car and was happy. The thing that surprised me wasn't that I'd given her useful advice. It was that nowhere in the entire UK EV buying journey is there a paid role for someone whose only job is to be honest with the buyer.

The structural gap

Every other player in the funnel is paid by someone other than the buyer.

• Dealers are paid by the manufacturer (and themselves, on commission and aftercare).
• Independent finance brokers are paid by the lenders.
• Salary sacrifice schemes are paid by the employer and the leasing provider.
• Comparison sites are paid by affiliate links.
• Reviewers are paid by ad revenue, which correlates with traffic, which correlates with covering the cars manufacturers are pushing.

A buyer can read a hundred reviews and still have no clear answer, because every review they read was written for a different reason than to answer their question.

A buyer can talk to three dealers and end up with three recommendations that have more to do with each dealer's stock pressure than the buyer's actual needs.

What an independent buyer report is

Compass EV exists because the only honest answer to "what EV should I buy?" is one that nobody is paying anyone to give. So the buyer pays for it directly.

One price. One tier. £199.

For that fee, you get a 30-to-40 page report personalised to your situation: a shortlist of five EVs ranked for your specific brief, real listings live now, a full running-cost model, a financial-options section (often including options you didn't ask about, like salary sacrifice), a buying checklist, and an honest sanity-check on whatever cars you came in already considering.

If the answer is "wait," the report says wait. If the answer is "the cheaper trim of the car you already had in mind," the report says that. If the answer is a car you'd never have thought of, the report tells you why and shows the specific listings to look at.

The promise

The reason this works is that I have no commercial relationship with any dealer, manufacturer, broker, scheme, or aggregator. I don't earn affiliate revenue from listings I include. I don't get paid by salary-sacrifice schemes if I mention them. I am not authorised by the FCA and I do not give regulated financial advice. The only money I have ever received in connection with your search is your £199.

If I get a factual error in the report (wrong battery size, wrong charging speed, wrong price band), you get a full refund. If the shortlist isn't right for your brief, I redo it once at no extra cost.

The honest economics

A buyer report takes me three to four hours to produce. At £199, the unit economics work even at low volume; I don't need to scale to a thousand customers a month to keep the lights on.

That matters because it means I can keep saying wait when the honest answer is wait. A business that needs volume can't afford to tell people not to buy.

Who this is for

People who can absorb the £199 but care about what comes after the £30,000–£60,000 they're about to spend on the car itself. Typically:

• Anyone caught between a salary-sacrifice quote and a used-purchase decision and unsure which is actually cheaper.
• Anyone hovering between two cars on a 5-car shortlist they've made themselves and unable to call it.
• Anyone whose partner is sceptical about the whole EV idea and wants the maths and the trade-offs laid out plainly.
• Anyone who's been told three different things by three different dealers and needs a fourth voice that isn't selling them anything.

If that's you, the buyer report exists for you. If you're looking for a free 'comparison' that's actually a directory of dealer listings, this isn't that. There are plenty of those already.

What's next

I'm writing here every two weeks. Long-form pieces on what's actually moving in the UK EV market, what to ignore, and anonymised stories from real customer reports. There's also a knowledge base that covers the things every buyer should know before signing anything, and calculators coming shortly for the maths buyers most often get wrong.

If you've found this useful, the free quiz will tell you in five minutes whether an EV is right for your situation. If you already know it is, the buyer report is what comes next.

— Mike, Compass EV