If you are thinking of switching to an electric car, then one non-negotiable factor in your decision should be whether you have a driveway, garage, or some other form of off-street parking at home where you can charge up.

Charging up an EV from public chargers – assuming you can find one handy, as the network is still far too patchy in places – is way too expensive, and can make your electric car more expensive to run than sticking with a conventional petrol or diesel model.

So charging at home is the critical factor, from a cost point of view. Charging on cheaper night-rate electricity is also a great idea, as not only does that further reduce your motoring costs, it also soaks up a lot of renewable wind-derived energy that would otherwise go to waste, making your EV even more saintly in the process.

To help with that, SSE Airtricity has just introduced a tariff which offers EV drivers more overnight hours at a cheap rate. Until now, the cheapest rate electricity – sometimes as low as 7c per kWh – has been available only for a couple of hours per night, usually between 3am and 5am.

SSE’s new Smart EV Max tariff doesn’t quite dip as low as 7c, but it offers six hours of overnight charging, from 11pm to 5am, at 12.1c per kWh, compared to the daytime rate of 33.7c per kWh.

Those prices include an introductory 30 per cent discount