Electric cars.

I'm all for the development of electric vehicles. But I see the current batch as nothing more than proof of concept, or as we in the software industry would say, beta releases. Let the 'early adopters' test them out in real world conditions, gather data, identify issues, refine, release the next batch until it's suitable for widespread take up. I don't think we're there yet. There are still too many unresolved issues, mostly centred around the battery tech.

I see two major issues to fix. First, the availability of lithium. And secondly, charging time.

The engineers know this. That's why there still a lot of ongoing research and development into better battery technology.

So as I see it, you have the engineers on one side, who want to come up with better, and are working towards it. On the other side there are career politicians, who specialise in one thing only, staying in their jobs. Somewhere in the middle you've got the bean counters and marketing people, who want to push the latest trend but as cheaply as possible.

If the engineers ruled the roost, I reckon there'd be much better vehicles, but they'd cost an absolute fortune.

 

I am all for innovation but not when they use mandates to force it. There is no doubt BEV has seen a surge in new registrations but which sector is driving this, it's certainly not the private sector.

2020 was a poor year for the car sector but there was still 1,631,064 new car registrations in the UK. Of those, 108,205 were BEV, which relates to 6.6 percent share of the market. But when you take out the corporate sector, there was just under 38,000 new BEV registered privately, which equates to 1.6 percent market share. Fleet & businesses account for roughly 55% of all new car registrations, without this sector plus the perks in tax etc etc the sales of new BEV would probably be well below what have been registered to date.

Sooner or later new sales will be minimal, the same is happening now with plug in's, sales are now levelling off with little to no growth. The same will happen with BEV, growth will slow down when they find there level in the market. New diesel car registrations are in decline, no surprise when you see how much per litre it is compared to unleaded. The cheapest diesel round me is 159.9 and 169.9 being the most expensive, when I picked my daughter up yesterday in Lincoln, the cheapest I seen was 156.9 yet I paid 136.8 per litre for diesel when using the fuel card. In all these years I have never seen such a discrepancy between fuel cards and forecourt prices. I tend to believe that forecourt prices are deliberately being kept on the high side.

 

That's kind of the point I was getting at, but didn't explain too well.

But I'm not 100% against mandates, entirely. I'm agree with you, when ministers are doing it just because it's the popular topic of the day. If it's backed by a consensus of based on science, engineering limitations, and economics, then I'm for it.

Another example is when the government decided first that 5% of 'standard' petrol should be biofuel, later changed to 10%. Great. Box ticked. The government has done something for the environment. Fantastic. Until you consider that farmland previously used for food is now being used for fuel, and the 'carbon neutral' biofuel is actually anything but, given the carbon footprint of sowing, managing, harvesting, and processing.

 

Learned something new the other day. I am looking at some billboard and it says Take your EV, ect,ect.ect. Could not figure out what the "EV" meant. Husband said, its means Electric Vehicle. I said, well why have we not had "GV" on different signs in the past for Gas Vehicle.

 

I think they call them ICE here, internal combustion engine.

 

Ever changing acronyms.

In the context of cars, ICE used to stand for In Car Entertainment.

Sometimes it also stood for I Hope You Brought Out A Spare Pair of Underpants.

 

The current acronyms are ICE, HEV (Hybrid Electric Vehicle), PHEV (Plug-In Hybrid Electric Vehicle) and BEV (Battery Electric Vehicle).

 

There is also MHEV (Mild Hybrid Electric Vehicle).

In March there was 287,825 new cars registered, an increase of 44,346 compared to March 2022.

The MHEV (diesel) 12,944 units, the MHEV (petrol) 42,768 and HEV 37,252. All these are seeing a small increase in market share 1.5% compared to last year.

BEV sales were 46,626 a 0.1% increase in market share and PHEV sales were 17,933 a 0.4% decrease in market share

 

So what's a mild hybrid, dare I ask?

You used to just go and buy a car, now you buy a series of letters.

 

IDK (I Don't Know)

 

ICE also used to be 'in case of emergency' - as in emergency numbers on mobile phones.

 

If we all changed to electric vehicles it would render multi storey car parks useless. They wouldn't be able to support the weight.

 

I've heard that, makes you wonder about parking too close to an EV.

 

My wife still is ICE on my phone.