Electric cars.

Hi,

Our diesel Skoda Yeti will be 7 years old in April and the best car we've ever owned; normally we'd trade in for another new car every two or three years but even if we wanted another diesel car they all seem to be clones of each other with ever more electronic gizmos to eventually fail.

31,000 on its clock and main dealer serviced; it's a beauty with street presence and turns into a good sized van when needed. No EV for us the Yeti is a keeper.

Kind regards, Colin.

 

Looks like Tesla's idea of meeting year ending sales is causing controversy. Its estimated that 16k Tesla cars were registered in the UK in December as buyers took advantage of the 6000+ miles free supercharging. Now Tesla has slashed the price's on their range in the UK from £7000 to £8100 discount on their models. Some new owners actually were not expecting to receive their new cars until early this year, when they found out by taking delivery before the end of 2022 they would receive free charging, many customers took up the offer, they rightly so feel cheated now. There is also very angry customers in China, where one of Tesla's show rooms was damaged.

Over the past few years, new cars have shot up in price, lack of semi conductors etc etc, or was that a scam. How come as soon as the UK government and Chinese ended subsidies for EV cars prices for Tesla cars has plummeted. Makes you wonder if these manufacturers have took advantage of government subsidies and have kept EV cars with a premium price tag.

Tesla slashes prices of its cars by thousands - leaving new owners fuming

Angry Tesla Owners In China Blow A Fuse About Discounts They Missed | Carscoops

 

Only to be expected by big business. The joys of Capitalism.

 

Tesla charged lots originally and then new owners who then got a discount from the government to slash their purchase cost. Was this to encourage mass production?

Now the latest ones can be got about the same price. Was this because of mass production?

 

Semi conductors have shot up in price lately, largely due to lockdowns in China significantly reducing output, so the principles of supply and demand kick in.

That said the semiconductors in cars should be cheap. Your average car has the computing power of something like a raspberry pi, which costs about 50 quid. But I don't think that's the issue. Regardless of how small as a percentage of total cost the car's electronics are, the fact is you need those electronics to make the car, so limited availability of semiconductors equates to limited ability to make cars.

Now someone might pick up on my comment that car electronics should be cheap. They should be, but aren't. Take as an example the last time I needed a MAF sensor (mass air flow - measures the volume of air that the engine is breathing). It's nothing more than a pipe with a small heater in it and a thermistor and regulator. A few pence worth of electronics, but over 200 quid for the unit, because it can be, because your car is just a brick without it.

 

Maybe we should just go back to carburettors and points, distributors and leaky exhausts, (didn't they sound good).
No engine management light that even the main dealer cant put out.
Now that kind of car might be the way of the future.

 

Looks like it, people who had placed orders for new cars where not expecting delivery until the 1st Quarter of 2023, mainly March for the 2023 plate. Many have received emails, texts from late November that if they take delivery between the 14th and 31st December they would get a discount and free 6000 miles worth of charging, which many have. Now the new prices have come into effect those who took delivery would of been better off waiting as Tesla said all outstanding orders will now be charged at the new discounted price. In the whole of 2022, there was 54,621 new Tesla cars registered in the UK, of which 16,368 were in December. The carrot of a discount and free supercharging has worked a treat for December registrations.

Its a bit like purchasing a discounted laptop for £500 on Black Friday only to find out it is being sold for £400 on Cyber Monday at the same store.

 

8.30 tonight on ITV, programme about changing to electric.

 

Only caught the tail end, the part about restoring classic cars with an electric drive.

According to SMMT, there was 1,614.063 new car registrations last year in the UK, of which 82,981 were diesel and 682,473 were petrol, that means 848,609 must be an EV or hybrids, anyone believe those figures.

Apparently sales of BEV increased last year by 40% to 267,203 units, Tesla Y selling 35,551 units, was ranked 1st with the Audi Q4 being 10th with 6594.
The top 10 selling BEV cars sold just under 120,000 units, what were the other 140k then, 11th to 30th must need to have sold 4800 units, or have the figures been manipulated.

Off topic but, the BBC ran an article a few days ago saying one of the bosses of Equinor, a Norwegian energy firm had said higher gas prices were here to stay. The BBC also went on to say the company made $24.3 billion profit in the third quarter of 2021, yet the company announced earnings of $24.3 billion in October for the third quarter.

 

Well it appears that the cost of charging a has trebled at least recently, they are putting in more chargers but you can never be sure if they work.
I still think that the time it takes to charge is a big problem, if you are on the road a lot, however many chargers they install.
I can see the car industry wanting to push back the 2030 deadline if things don't change much in the next 7 yrs.

They won't be selling many cars if its it's not and the second hand market will boom.

 

That was Stagecoach running its first driverless test, carrying passengers, over the Forth Road Bridge today. The test was successful and they plan to have the driverless bus service running in the spring.

Driverless bus takes passengers across Forth Road Bridge in UK first

 

The railways are in dispute over driver only trains and safety issues.
What happens if something goes wrong, at least the driver is a kind of "responsible person" in charge of the vehicle.
This is stupidity.

 

I'm going to come right out and say it. Train drivers really annoy me. Sure they have great responsibility, but they already get paid well for taking on that responsibility.

Train driver's days are numbered. The technology has been here for a long time for self driving trains. The only reason trains are not already fully automated is because the public feel safer knowing a human being who might be tired, unmotivated, distracted by personal issues, unwell, or otherwise impeded is at the helm than they'd feel if a cold, calculating machine doing many thousands of calculations per second, reliably, with no concern about anything at all other than what it's programmed to do was at the helm.

It's not like self driving cars, where there are many unknowns to consider. Unlike the roads, the railways have been strictly controlled for decades. A guy in a signal box can easily tell a computer program that some idiot has parked his lorry on the level crossing, whereas cars have to deal with people randomly bolting into the road. A train driver doesn't have to worry about someone pulling out from another track, because all that had been controlled for decades.

Advocates of self driving cars say the most unreliable bit of a modern car is the soft squishy component between drivers seat and controls. That's probably even more true where trains are concerned.

 

Most planes fly them self over seen by human