“You’d Have to Pay Me to Buy an Electric Car”
With news that private sales of electric vehicles fell in the U.K. last year and with the Prime Minister set to delay the looming ban on petrol vehicles, Patrick O’Flynn writes in the Telegraph that you’d have to pay him to buy an electric car.
Who remembers those simpler, happier days when the consumer was king? Retail outlets used to offer goods for sale and customers would just choose the stuff they liked.
Magically, the popular things would be restocked while items that failed to shift were not reordered, keeping the selection of goods for sale relevant to consumer trends. In those few areas where a state intermediary would order items on behalf of consumers – that shiny toilet paper that featured in school lavatories come to mind – one couldn’t help but notice that they tended to get it wrong. This is how Western capitalism used to work, without often badgering or ‘nudging’ consumers in particular, state-approved directions.
Not any more. These days the panjandrum intermediaries are usually in the driving seat, almost literally when it comes to sales of electric vehicles (EVs). Battery-powered vehicles have been flying out of showrooms thanks in large part to the fleet and company car sectors; parts of the market where the end users are not the folk who do the buying. Generous tax breaks have led to middle managers and delivery men up and down the land being presented with EVs when the time has come for them to get new wheels.
But recent sales figures show that it is a different story when it comes to private buyers. In the first half of this year just 37,000 battery-powered vehicles were sold to them, compared to 41,800 in the first half of last year. An astonishing 75% of new registrations is now made up by fleets and business owners. Electric cars are in danger of becoming the school loo paper of the modern age: better than nothing if you are given them for free or with discounts, but not what you would go for if the choice was yours.
This comes as no surprise to me. Down our street, where there is no off-road parking, two eco-friendly households have had electric vehicles which have involved them having to drape a power cable across the pavement under one of those three-sided anti-trip guards. They have both recently traded them in for petrol cars. Meanwhile, a close relative of mine drives a swanky EV but it is a company car. He pines for his old petrol BMW and bemoans the amount of aggravation involved in seeking-out recharging opportunities if he finds himself far from home.
Worth reading in full.
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Can be summed up as ‘the customer is always right.’ Always use Andrex. Our sop to the 21st century is always having hygiene wipes to hand. (A sign of old age).
Not particularly safe, not net-zero, not zero emissions, expensive, uses rare earth metals, but no doubt easy to monitor and control/reprogramme by somebody else.
But still it should be your choice to buy it…….Greens don’t like you having a choice because you might not choose what they have in mind for you.
If “private buyers” are not responding with correct choices, their alternatives will just have to be removed – that’s how this works now, isn’t it?
“The people has failed us – we shall elect a new people.”
ULEZ, 20mph, 15 minute ghettos, legislation banning use, increased fuel prices, etc.
That is never how it worked. People had to buy cars, because the state nationalised then dismantled perfectly decent, privately run local rail and bus operators and used vast sums of taxpayers money to bulldoze historic town centres and the natural landscape to construct new roads. Whilst actually serving the interests of the oil cartels and motor manufacturers, the same people who had supported the Nazi regime and its pioneering road building programme, this was presented to the British public as being for their freedom with the ever obliging Imperial College coming-up with the ‘scientific’ justification from Dr Beeching. As the British people are yet again being imposed on to buy new cars, scrapping perfectly decent old ones in favour of new electric models at the behest of the same people who spent over a century lobbying against electric cars, maybe it’s time to start questioning what’s really influencing government policy rather than following the pantomime narratives of the Guardian & Telegraph.
“maybe it’s time to start questioning what’s really influencing government policy rather than following the pantomime narratives of the Guardian & Telegraph.”
Those who fall in to this category deserve all the misery they are going to face.
The car won out because it offered convenience and flexibility – plus a modicum of glamour and interest. This did negatively affect rail and bus transport, but only in the sense that they were less appealing alternatives.
“That is never how it worked. People had to buy cars, because the state nationalised then…”
Drivel. Railways were invented to move freight not people, and without freight they are not viable. They were not nationalised until post-WWII. Cars initially were the province of the rich who stopped using trains, thus losing railways premium fare revenue. After WWI more freight moved to road, the railways became unviable. Had they not been nationalised all but a few would have shut down through lack of customers.
People don’t want public transport, they want the convenience of private transport. Public transport became less popular as people became more affluent, car prices lowered, more people could afford them.
Some years ago, there was one BEV on the street I live in (36 addresses). One of the previous house owners had one for a while, thus it has a charger unit that came with a Renault Zoe. Knowing the rating of the buried cable in this street, I think there would be problems if everyone wanted one.
Quite recently, my neighbour had a Corsa e on loan from a dealer, while they were doing some repair work on their normal car. I looked up the details of it, and it was a heavy machine – just shy of 2 tonnes, or about 700 Kg more than my car of the same size (a Toyota hybrid). I think the dealer was trying to flog it, but they didn’t actually want it, and are carrying on with their old car.
They are incredibly heavy. When and if they are the main type of car on the roads, any accidents will surely be horrific. Imagine what a pile up of 2 tonne cars would look like..
Is this one of the things behind these wretched 20mph zones? Two tonnes at 20 equals one tonne at 30?
Interesting thought except that would be beyond the intellectual capacity of the nitwits in charge who have no concept of physics – see Net Zero, climate ‘crisis’.
Actually you can write an EV off with a hard curb bump. The casing around the battery cracks and that’s that. It’s the reason car insurance premiums for EVERYONE have been going up. Curb bump a petrol or diesel car, £50 to realign the wheels. Curb bump an £80,000 EV and it’s potentially a write off.
All the more so if second hand prices collapse. It’s an automatic write off if repair costs are more than it’s worth.
On average the batteries add 500kg to the weight. This increases wear and tear on tyres and brake pads and road surfaces. It also increases inertia so that collisions, particularly with pedestrians and cyclists) are more energetic leading to greater damage and injury to all involved.
I work in Việt Nam for a company that manufactures electric cars and get special discounts on rides in the company’s fleet of electric taxis here in Saigon. Since the service launched a few months ago I have seen one after another broken down or, in one hilarious instance, being pushed along the road by commuters on petrol bikes using their feet, just to get the damn thing out of the way.
EVs have some advantages, many disadvantages, and market forces should determine whether they are a realistic way of replacing combustion engines (I suspect not) , However, the way they are offered by shysters as a way of solving a crisis I don’t believe in is enough to make me completely committed to the petrol engine. A week of communing here costs me the equivalent of £2.50 in petrol. Long live the combustion engine I say (but don’t tell my employer 😉)
https://off-guardian.org/2023/09/20/uk-quietly-passes-online-safety-bill-into-law/
Kit Knightly at Off-G with a quick appraisal of the On-line Safety Bill which was passed today.
Things are going to become very nasty and very soon.
https://www.upday.com/uk/dog-disease-crosses-to-humans-for-first-time-in-uk-heres-what-you-need-to-know?utm_source=upday&utm_medium=referral
Oh look, fancy that.
“Stand by your beds!”
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-12536723/Researchers-China-discover-new-virus-lurking-bottom-worlds-deepest-ocean-trench.html
And if that one doesn’t get you, this one will
For what earthly reason does somebody go to the bottom of the world’s deepest ocean trench looking for a new virus?
‘Sorry officer it just jumped in to my knapsack.’
Cripes, they really are willing to plumb the depths in their quest to uncover the next bogeyman aren’t they? I wonder what life forms one might expect ( aside from a megaladon, that is ) when one sinks that low. He’s viral but he’s not a virus, lol!
https://twitter.com/_aussie17/status/1704339093013025215
I feel ruff
😀😀😀
In my town of Rye, pretty and visited by thousands of tourists every year (resident population about 8000 including hinterland) there is one public charging point. The centre of town is a pedestrian zone so you cannot park to charge up from your house. Quarts into pint pots?
Sunak, Starmer and whoever’s leading the Lib Dems are all communists.
Communism all about controlling people for the greater
goodbad.People know best how to spend their own money. That is until along came Green ideology and now the government, politicians and bureaucrats think they know best how to spend it for you. One good thing that Sunak seems to have done is kick this can down the road a bit which helps middle age people who will likely not have to ditch their gas central heating and be coerced into an electric car. But eventually the younger people will be coerced. This can kicking gives us longer and spreads out the cost of pretending to save the planet a bit rather than rushing to save it 5 years before the eco fanatical Germans even. I also will not have an electric car heat pump or smart meter till I threatened with being dragged off to the climate change gulag.
For a consumer to move from one technology to a new one, it must offer benefits greater, such as convenience, economy, utility. The perceived value of these additional or new benefits must exceed the perceived value to the consumer of the money (the opportunity cost… using the money to buy something else) needed to pay the asking price.
BEVs are less convenient, less economical, offer less utility than ICE vehicles. This is apparent in the need for subsidies otherwise consumers will not buy.
BEVs are a niche market, which is now saturated.
BEVs are a retrograde technology. At the start of the automobile age there were three options: battery, steam, internal combustion engine. Internal combustion won. There is always a good reason why one tech wins out over another, if there is a free market.