Guide

Electric or petrol — which suits a prestige lease?

Updated September 2026 7 min read Performance & Prestige

Answer one question first: can you charge where the car sleeps? With off-street charging, an electric prestige car is the easier lease — quieter, simpler, and cheapest to run overnight. Without it, petrol is the honest choice over a term of months. Driver criteria and deposits are broadly similar, and every agreement carries the same 1,000 miles a month either way.

What decides this, if not the car?

Where the car sleeps. Everything else in this comparison is downstream of that.

A prestige electric car parked overnight on a drive or in a garage with a charger is a genuinely easier thing to live with than its petrol equivalent. It is full every morning, it never needs a forecourt, and it is silent at six o'clock when you are leaving before the house is awake.

The same car parked on a street, or in an underground bay with no supply, is a car you will plan journeys around for the whole term. Public charging works, and it works better every year, but building it into a routine you did not choose is the thing people regret. That is worth being blunt about before a term starts rather than after.

Do we need to know about your charging before delivering one?

Yes, and we ask. A car is delivered to you and there are no depots, so the first thing that happens after handover is that the car sits where you live for the night.

Tell us at the enquiry stage whether there is a charger fitted, whether there is an outside socket, and whether the parking is yours or shared. It is not a test. It changes which cars we suggest, and occasionally it changes the answer from electric to petrol before anybody has committed to anything.

If a charger is being fitted but is not in yet, say that too, along with when. A term that starts three weeks before the electrician does is a solvable problem if we know about it, and a bad six weeks if we do not.

Does electric change the driver criteria?

Less than people assume, and mostly in the direction you would want.

Several of the electric cars we list are leasable from 25 with three years of full licence held — the BMW i5 M60 xDrive, the Porsche Taycan Turbo S, the Macan Turbo Electric, the Mercedes-Benz EQE SUV and the Volvo EX90 among them. Deposits across that group sit at the gentler end of the catalogue, from £2,500.

The exceptions are the ones you would expect from their performance rather than their fuel: the Audi RS e-tron GT asks 30 and five years with a £5,000 deposit, and the Rolls-Royce Spectre asks 30 with £7,500. Petrol cars of comparable pace ask the same sort of thing. The criteria follow the car, not the drivetrain.

What changes on a long run?

The rhythm of the journey, more than its length.

A petrol car does four hundred miles in whatever pattern you like and stops for five minutes when it has to. An electric one does the same distance with a planned stop of a different shape — long enough to eat properly, short enough to be irritating if you only wanted a coffee. Whether that is better or worse depends entirely on how you travel.

Cold weather shortens electric range, and motorway speed shortens it further. Both are real and neither is a scandal; they are the reason we will not print a range figure on this page and will talk about a specific car instead.

If most of your miles are long and unplanned, that is a genuine argument for petrol over a term of months. If they are short, repeated and local, it is a strong argument the other way.

What do you lose in character?

Noise, and on some cars it matters more than anything on a spec sheet.

A Mercedes-AMG G 63 is partly a noise. So is a Lamborghini Urus S. If the reason you are leasing the car is the theatre of it, an electric equivalent will be faster in most situations and will not give you the thing you came for.

Against that, a Rolls-Royce Spectre or a Mercedes-Benz EQS SUV is using silence as the luxury, which is a coherent idea rather than an absence. Quiet is the older prestige tradition, and electric serves it better than any petrol engine ever did.

Decide which of those two things you actually want. It is a cleaner test than any comparison of the cars.

Which electric cars can we arrange?

Across saloons, SUVs and a grand tourer: the Taycan Turbo S and the Taycan Cross Turismo 4S, the Audi RS e-tron GT and Q8 e-tron, the BMW i4 M50 and i5 M60, the Porsche Macan Turbo Electric, the Lotus Eletre, the EQE SUV and EQS SUV, the Volvo EX90 and the Rolls-Royce Spectre.

Every one of those is arranged through a vetted partner rather than owned by us, so the specific car is confirmed before we commit to a date on it. Every car on the site is quoted on request. Our own fleet is petrol, with one diesel and one plug-in hybrid.

That is worth knowing before you plan around a date. A sourced car is confirmed with the partner before anything is agreed, which is a slower answer than the one we can give you on a car sitting in our own yard.

So which should you take?

Electric if you can charge where the car sleeps, your miles are mostly local and repeated, and quiet is the luxury you are buying.

Petrol if you cannot charge at home, your driving is long and spontaneous, or the noise is a substantial part of why you want the car at all.

There is a third answer that suits a lot of people and gets skipped, which is a plug-in hybrid — but it only works if you actually plug it in. What changes day to day with a plug-in hybrid is the honest version of that.

Common questions

Is an electric lease cheaper than a petrol one?

The monthly figure is set per car and quoted on request on every car we list, so a comparison cannot be made from a page. Running cost depends almost entirely on where you charge: overnight at home is the cheapest way to run any prestige car, and charging exclusively in public is not.

Does the car arrive charged?

It arrives ready to drive. Beyond that we confirm the state of charge for your specific delivery rather than promising a percentage from a web page, because the car may have been driven or transported to reach you. Ask at the enquiry stage if you have a journey planned for the first evening.

Can you fit a home charger as part of the lease?

No. We lease the car, deliver it and collect it; the charge point at your address is separate and arranged by you. If a charger is being installed around the start date, tell us, because it can be worth moving the start date rather than starting without it.

Do you have any electric cars in your own fleet?

Not at the moment. The electric cars we list are arranged through vetted partners, so they are priced on request and carry the partner’s criteria, which we confirm with you in writing before anything is agreed.

Does the mileage allowance differ on an electric car?

No. Every agreement carries 1,000 miles a month whatever the car burns. What varies is the charge beyond the allowance, which is set per car — most of the electric cars we list sit at the gentler end of that range rather than the top.