Smart meters

Surprise Surprise! You have won the lottery All you need to do to gain your prize is send me £100 administration fee and your bank details so that I can send your winnings.

 

Unfortunately, that's a typical Catch 22 situation.

 

I thought that was in the terms and conditions of every government, Quango and big organisation!

 

It is economies of scale @pete - think of it in the same way that you would car production; for each part that is non-standard (so not resistors, capacitors etc), machines would have to be 'tooled up' and set off to do a production run - if that production run is 5,000 units and the tooling cost £1m, then the tooling cost per unit would be £200. If that was 500,000 units then the tooling cost drops to £2 per unit.

 

I sort of agree @pete, but then he had the balls to go out and do something really different that was actually viewed as 'cool' - something that people aspired to own, rather than owning one just because they can afford it.

Whether we like it or not, our whole consumer society is driven by people wanting something that they have seen someone else have - once Tesla cars were seen as being cool and desirable, it suddenly made owning a Nissan Leaf or VW e-Golf a good idea. And lets not forget, when he started, electric cars looked like this assault on the eyes

 

For a number of reasons really - £9k would barely cover the batteries, let alone the car, although in fairness there are very few conventional cars that you can buy brand new for £9k.

The other thing you need to factor in is that making the leap from relatively small numbers to mass market means that you are also making the leap to having many more customers to find faults and problems. And yes, to some degree it is because they are not good enough - short distance work seems to be without issue, so using them in a city and commuting to a job within 20 miles or so is absolutely fine. The problem comes when it relates to distances - sure, there are fast chargers now, but the likes of the Nissan Leaf can only be fast charged once, and then needs a trickle charge thereafter before it will accept another fast charge -- kinda knackers a journey over a few hundred miles.

As for speculating to accumulate - again, yes I agree in part; but, those mass market manufacturers all have ranges of cars with combustion engines, and many of them are also affiliated with oil companies (Renault = Elf for example), so they will not want to pee off their oil company partners by selling products that do not need oil products. And then there is servicing - they don't need nearly as many filters and fluids changed as a conventional car, so the manufacturer and dealer network lose out on money there. For a modern manufacturer to take a potential £10-£15k loss per unit sold, is suicide - particularly so if the technology they are selling is not likely to make them the lost money back through parts/sundries/servicing.

 

There's a difference between loss leader and bankruptcy! Electric cars are hugely different beasts to traditional so whereas they've had decades to embed and understand the relatively bog basic components of a combustion engine (and therefore make it cost efficient), the same is not true of electric or hybrid cars. They're simply very costly at the moment but reducing every year

 

Why would you want your meter checked? If you're sure it's not working properly then it won't cost you anything.

I called them out about eight years ago and they said that it may cost me. I asked them if I get compensation, on top of a refund, for them having charged me the wrong amount. He said he can't answer that. So I put him through a bit of a grilling saying it can't be difficult to answer such a simple question. I got passed on to the senior level and they said that they may be able to make an ex gratia payment. I think he had taken a sneaky look at my last two readings and then decided that I might kick up a bit of a stink when it showed that I had used 30,000 kWh in three months. They replaced my old analogue meter with another analogue meter . I didn't complain (would I do a thing like that? ).

 

Unfortunately that's the same with almost anything. If people were constantly getting the electricity to check things that are not faulty then they would be paying their people for not doing anything.

Although not quite the same, you take your car for a service, they change the oil and check everything else and find it OK. You still have to pay them for their time.