Electric cars.

There is also another factor that nobody has mentioned, safety.

The Dacia Spring e should be on sale in the UK this year, but will it be right hand drive, this has yet to be announced. However, they are expecting the Dacia to have an entry price of £18,000 and a 140 mile range, but there is a downside, it has a poor crash/safety score of 1/5 stars.

Dacia Spring EV on sale from 2024 - and could cost just £18k | This is Money

The all electric Renault Zoe got a score rating of 0/5 from the Euro NCAP test results.

One of Europe's top-selling EVs just got a 0/5 star safety rating. Is it game over for the Renault Zoe?

I am not saying all EV's have poor crash/safety scores, but it does like some of the cheaper EV's produced were more likely to have a poor safety score, you could also say the same for ICE though.

You can checkout the safety score of all current cars here.

The European New Car Assessment Programme | Euro NCAP

 

For those that could afford a Tesla back then it was a huge saving. As long as you purchased new Tesla cars in the future, then the free charging is transferable.

UK car dealers are supposed to sell 22% zero emission new cars in 2024, the market share was 16.5% in 2023 only .4% up from 2022, I can't see them meeting that target or coming close.

The drive to go to zero emissions also can't see the market share of zero emissions being 22% by the end of 2024. They have been proposing all fleet dealers to be banned from leasing ICE vehicles and there to be a 10% cut in vat to the private sector.

There are proposals and think tanks now saying that EV owners should be paying per mile to offset the lost revenue in fuel duty. Some have been saying that this should come into force as soon as 2027 and be set at 6p per mile excluding vat, and could increase as more EV'S are sold.

Where the rubber hits the road - The Inquiry

 

I think they just need to come up with more imagination regarding design.
Not seen any that look exciting.
They seem to have taken the common house brick and put a wheel in each corner, then jacked it up so its the same height as a truck, bulky or what.

 

I don't think this is going to work in America either. A quote from my son who lives there...

"Our amazing president has signed a $640million bill to increase the EV charging infrastructure. 70% of that will be going to low income areas. Because low income people can afford $60,000 for an electric car. This administration is embarrassing."

 

Someone on the FB Tesla owners group was saying exactly the same but I can't find the post now. From getting his new Tesla car from new he has kept a record of how many kWh he has paid for as the app in the car only tells you how much you have used for driving. I can't remember the exact figures, but he paid for 20% more kWh than what the Tesla app was stating. Most people were saying the same as above but also pre heating the car, pre conditioning, sentry mode and also his driving would account for the extra juice.

On the same group page, I have copied and pasted someone's comment.

I think referring to "EV Haters" as clowns is rude and arrogant by EV lovers. This is some of the feedback I've had from people.
For many EV haters owning an EV does not suit their lifestyle as they do not have a driveway and are unable to charge at night. It takes up alot of your life to charge and own an EV if you don't have a means of charging at home. It can take two days to charge a Tesla Model S 85 on a 240v charger (personal experience).
The cost of the EV in the first place. For example the Tesla Model S is Mercedes S Class money. The Tesla Model S is no S Class in build quality and luxury. If you've been in an equivalently priced S-Class you'll know what I mean by this.
EVs add additional time to a long journey. For example between Bristol to Kent it would take up to 4 hours in good traffic as there was no charging at my destination, I would have to stop at Heathrow and Maidstone. In an Deisel 65mpg that same journey would take 3 hours. It then becomes an inconvenience to use an EV and annoys the whole family.
The cost of repair of a Tesla. This is a big one, a replacement drive unit on a Model S 85 is over £6.5k outside of warranty. I had a drive unit fail on my S (within warranty) for an ICE would be conisdered minor (a failed temperature sensor, a comparable repair on an ICE would be £200 to £500) Tesla does not have a repair philosophy for this and hits the customer with a £6500 bill for a new drive unit for a £50 sensor. 90% of all items on an ICE are serviceable and replaceable.
Some people like the sound of an ICE, in a performance ICE it can be a very visceral experience.
Cost for many people the new EV is out of their financial means and owning a used out of warranty EV is also beyond their financial means and risky. Many people on this group have the financial means to own and run one, however the vast majority of people do not, and spending more than £5000 for a car is a stretch for those people.
They are not happy about their choice between ICE and EV being taken away be legislative means.
The last feedback I have recieved is the smug environmentalist stance is so annoying. Let's face reality here were not saving the planet by having a shiny brand new car built in China, shipped across the planet, to stroke our own environmentalist egos.
I agree the exploding batteries is a whole lot of nonsense.

 

Looking at that NAF test, of the ten cars that came top, only one was a European car that came close to the manufacturers range. But where there is a positive, there is a negative, five of those cars are made in China and even though they do come close to the manufacturer's range, the MG models tend all take longer to charge.

When you look at the other link, there can be a huge difference in how long it takes to charge an EV. The Opel Ampera at one charging station took 57 minutes to charge the battery from 41% to 80%, considerably more than the other makes, but it does only have a maximum charging speed of 27kWh. Affordability is a key issue regarding speeding the uptake in EV's, but the cheaper cars are likely going to take far longer to charge, not an issue though if you can and only charge from home. So, it doesn't really matter how many ultra fast chargers they install, cars like the mini e, MG. Renault Zoe, Nissan Leaf etc etc will only have an average charging speed of under 30kWh regardless of how powerful the charger is.

Compare that to filing up with petrol or derv at a fuel station. My son, going by the digital read out when he got back in the yard today, stopped for derv at 6.41am, with the wagon moving again at 6.49am. In that time he put 132.54 litres of derv in the tank, as we use key cards, no money changes hands but it does take about a minute longer at the kiosk as registration number and mileage is recorded. Granted he did fuel up at the HGV area only, HGV fuel pumps will tend to have a flow rate of between 70-120L per minute, where there is high volumes of HGV's the higher the flow rate. In general, petrol stations will probably be around the 25-40L per mark.

 

My brother got his tesla in 2015 and I think has that, but he's only used the superchargers a few times as he never does much more than a couple of hundred miles in one trip and has a driveway so always charges at home. Funnily enough when he did use them twice in a day when he went down to Cornwall the batteries got ruined for some reason and had to be replaced, at least that was under warranty. Back then there was also a subsidy I think of £5k. So when he priced it up it was about the same cost over 5 years as a top of the range mondeo or similar. He still has it and has done 90k miles in it, mainly shool runs and his short commute I think.

He must have saved well over a day of his life not going to petrol stations though, so there's also that

 

Rental giant Hertz dumps EVs, including Teslas, for gas cars | Reuters