STOCKTON borough councillor Rob Cook said in Echo Business (Jan 12) that electric cars are “a very exciting prospect which the manufacturers are backing with hard cash. These battery-driven cars require no road tax and on a recent test, without the heater on, a Mitsubishi iMiEV covered 2,750 miles at an electricity cost of £63.”

However, there is another side to the story.

A new electric car will cost about £24,000 after a Government grant of £5,000 has been taken into account.

And the range is only 100 miles, which reduces to 55 miles if the heater is in operation.

A new Ford Fiesta with a 1.4- litre diesel engine will do 80.7mpg out of town.

The capital cost is half that of the electric car and 2,750 miles covered out of town will require 34 gallons of diesel at a cost of £200.

But, in order to benefit from the lower running cost of an electric vehicle, it is necessary to pay the extra capital cost of £12,000.

An electric car that covers 11,000 miles a year will use electricity costing £252, if the heater is off, while the diesel for a Fiesta will cost about £800 to cover the same distance. That’s a saving of £548 per year in favour of the electric car, but it will take 21 years to recover the extra capital cost of £12,000.

If the heater is used in the electric car, the pay back period will be between 21 and 40 years.

The nine UK manufacturers of electric cars expect to sell a mere 3,200 examples in 2011.

Total sales of petrol and diesel cars will be about two million.

I don’t intend to buy an electric car.

Jim Allan, Hartlepool.