They must of been doing one hell of an average mileage. My T4 2.5 Tdi can do near on 700 miles on 100 litres.
And how has the depreciation been on your diesel car lately? The cost of fuel is at the front of people's minds, but often depreciation is a bigger cost - it's made new diesel cars pretty expensive to run lately, whereas EVs have good residuals which is why the leasing deals can work pretty well. Low garage costs as well, as they're rather simpler mechanically than petrol/diesel.
I don't know all the details, but I believe it was £200/month to lease a Leaf - £200/month on petrol is a tank a week, which I'd suggest is not unusual for people with reasonable commutes, bit of work travel, school runs, family taxi duties etc. I *think* they had a petrol car before, but even at your mpg and current petrol prices it's just over 1200 miles a month, 14,000 a year - far from unusual. And yes, they were in the sweet spot of consistently doing a fair mileage but not more than a Leaf's range, most weekdays.
Whereas my patterns are particularly unsuited to current EVs - especially this year I've not been doing huge mileage day-to-day, but when I do travel it's 250 miles or more. Different strokes for different folks.
At the moment all electric cars come with a government grant up front, when they take that away most folk couldn't afford the battery.
Nonsense - it's up to a maximum of £3k, for cars <£50k - so 7-10% of the price of mainstream cars like Leaf/ID.3/Tesla3. Obviously it helps, but losing the grant would not be a killer blow, compared to eg battery prices going down ~10%/year over the last decade. It's within the range of the kind of discounts you often get from manufacturers anyway, if you shop smartly.
This covid mess will create far more chaos than anything we've seen since the war. It'll be back to the "You're lucky to have a job" days again.
I for one am not looking forward to it.
It's going to have a big effect short-term, less so long-term whereas Brexit is going to be the reverse, but the effects of Covid are going to make a wonderful disguise that will allow the Brexit apologists to lie (again) about
the effect of Brexit on the economy. Anyway, that's for another thread.