A new car ...

 We've leapt forward in about fifteen years in automotive terms and bought ourselves a new car.

Following our problem a month or so back with our old Subaru Impreza we decided that it really was time we bought ourselves a new car - after all our 'good' car was twelve years old and had done over 200,000km.

Our other car, a 24 year old Impreza has done over 300,000km, and is only really good for rattling round town or down to either the National Trust or up the hill to the Athenaeum.

So, we decided we had to bite the bullet and get ourselves a new car. Living in the country as we do, you need a reliable car, and ideally a second older vehicle as backup given longer distances and not a lot of public transport.

We of course had the dilemma of petrol or electric - hybrid didn't enter the equation as living rurally where nipping down to Coles is an 80km round trip, hybrids lose their advantage over conventional petrol cars. Hybrids shine in stop start city driving, but not on long drives at 100 or 110km/h.

Rural charging infrastructure is poor - while there's plenty of places to recharge a car along the Hume freeway corridor, drive away on a cross country trip and suddenly chargers are few an far between - even in our sprawling local shire there are only four non Tesla chargers - and the situation is not much better elsewhere.

Now if it was a second runabout, we'd be fine with that, as most of our trips are within the distance limit of an electric car, and we could happily charge the car at home.

However we're talking about our main vehicle, and we do make trips down to Melbourne every so often, as well as longer cross country trips.

There's also the question of who can maintain and service an electric car in rural Victoria, because while electrics need much less in the way of servicing they do need some, and if there's a problem you need a local specialist.

Both the local Hyundai and MG dealers can service their own electric cars. Teslas require an annual trip to either Melbourne or Canberra, and for newer brands like BYD it's a case of rattling the bones.

And there's the cost factor - we're retired and while we're not at the stage of living off discounted baked beans we do need to watch our finances, so basically it came down to a choice between a base level electric MG or a petrol Hyundai Kona.

Despite my antipathy to SUVs we chose the Kona simply because it was a little cheaper and was comfortable to drive, while fitting our lifestyle, with enough space for J's painting gear, as well as space for luggage for a few days away. That and we could actually get one.

Supply chain disruption is still a thing and some manufacturers still quote silly wait times - like four for five months for a new car, but we were able to buy our Kona while it was still in transit between Korea and Australia, meaning we only had to wait four weeks for our car.

So we have a new car, and a whole lot to technological gizmos to get used to ...