Demand for Electric Cars has Dried Up
Demand for electric cars has dried up and it’s time for a rethink, says billionaire founder and Chairman of chemicals giant INEOS, Sir Jim Ratcliffe. Writing in the Telegraph, he says the “notion of a quick transition away from petrol was always barmy”. Here’s an excerpt.
The electric car is not popular today. The early adopters have all bought theirs so now the car giants are having to persuade ‘normal punters’ of the merits of going electric. And they are having none of it.
There is a rather fundamental drawback with the electric car. It simply doesn’t do what you want a car to do. It doesn’t get you from A to B reliably if you are on a long journey. And you have no idea whether you will be able to fill it up. Put it together and it’s referred to as ‘range anxiety’. And it’s very real.
Electric is fine and dandy for the short local journey, but should you decide to head off for the hills, forget it. And hence demand has dried up. Tesla is making 14,000 workers redundant. In March, German sales of electric cars collapsed by 30%. You can’t give a second-hand electric car away in the U.K.
Politicians have been dreaming of vote-winning green agendas and utopian engineering and energy switches. Dreams of course, don’t need to be real. They don’t need to accommodate the needs of the consumer, the practicalities of installing colossal new infrastructure and the small matter of where all this electricity is coming from. Coal?
Flipping transportation from fossil fuels directly to electric is not like flipping a light switch. The very notion is barmy, which is why the USA predicts electric car take up by 2050 in the USA will only be 20%. In Europe, our idealists are heading towards 100%.
Ratcliffe outlines his preferred transitional design of an electric vehicle with range extender (REX): “You can charge it in the normal manner. However, tucked away under the bonnet is a small engine and a generator. The engine powers the generator, when requested, which in turn charges the battery. The engine is not connected to the pedal, so is simple, efficient and reliable.”
“Why would you ever buy a fully electric car when you have this option of an electric vehicle with a range extender and complete absence of range anxiety?” he asks.
Worth reading in full.
In the same newspaper, Matthew Lynn says “the electric car carnage has only just begun”: “Ford has just confirmed what has long been feared: that the latest quotas are punitive for U.K. consumers and a gift to China.”
To join in with the discussion please make a donation to The Daily Sceptic.
Profanity and abuse will be removed and may lead to a permanent ban.
When Renault first started with EVs you used to buy the car and lease the battery, it was an unusual concept but from what we now know it was actually logical. Fundamentally, in my view, EVs are not suitable for private ownership, or to be more precise EV car batteries are not suitable for private ownership, in terms of cost, safety and overall liability, an EV battery is not something I wish to own outright. Modern EVs seem to have the battery built in as an integral part of the car, if the battery is scrap, the car is scrap. I cannot afford that sort of battery risk and liability, certainly not with a secondhand EV. EV’s are increasingly being seen as throw-away commodity items for operation on a lease basis by corporate fleets. I cannot afford to lease an EV, I cannot withstand the liability of owning an EV; if EVs become the only option then I will need to look to borrow an EV from a car club when I need one. Scrapping EVs is expensive and difficult and yet it looks like their life on the road will be shorter than with petrol/diesel cars. The backlog of… Read more »
And the second hand value of ICE cars will go through the roof. Before long we will have a similar look to Cuba, with old vehicles carefully nursed along.
That seems to be the way it is going, industry analysis says;
”The number of cars aged 13 years old or older in Great Britain has increased fivefold since 1994, a dramatic rise with more than 7.6 million cars older than 13 years of age on the road today.”
My Citroen C3 is going on for nearly 13 years. She’s still a great car reliable, speedy and has kerb appeal. They don’t make them anymore and there is no way I want to change it.
The range extender idea is just barmy. A generator to re-charge the battery? Why not just have the engine (which presumably runs off fossil fuels) run the car? Generators produce exhaust fumes, so there is no ‘green’ benefit. I mean, is it just me, or are people really getting more and more stupid? I have re-read this several times wondering if it is, in fact, a joke.
The one industry showing massive signs of growth is STUPID. Not a day goes by that I do not come across additional consumers of STUPID.
Fairy dust, snake oil and pixie wishes are all rapidly evolving commodities too,
along with the boom in stupid, you just can’t invest better!
https://images.app.goo.gl/BG4gUG2hgFgtyNfC8
👍 😀 😀
I already drive a car with a range extender. It’s a good old fashioned, tried and tested petrol engine vehicle.
Radcliffe is stuck in the ideological cul-de-sac that assumes there life threatening man-made climate change. The only way to liberate himself and stop sounding like an idiot is to acknowledge that there is no man-made climate change and certainly none that poses any sort of risk for humanity or “life on the planet”.
Potentially more energy efficient than a plug-in hybrid with the same weight of batteries given the engine won’t be as heavy. Not as though Sir Jim appears to be putting his sums out there for scrutiny though.
There are two main factors in energy efficiency with hybrids, other than the gross weight, body shape, and type of tyres used. They are the thermal efficiency of the engine itself when it runs, and the use of regenerative braking, via the traction battery in lieu of friction brakes.
I’ve been running Toyota hybrids for a few years, and happy with both of them. Plug-in versions are a gamble, depending on the pattern of use and the unit pricing of the supply used for charging. The main feature of the T engine is that it implements the Atkinson cycle, with an efficiency of up to 40% – not as good as a diesel engines peak efficiency, but it never idles at all, so no waste that way.
He owns Manchester United, what do you expect? 🙄
Just to be clear, the people who have legislated the transition away from fossil fuels, with EV targets and all the rest of it, are the same people who decided to implement lockdowns, print money to pay people to stay at home and not work, forced everyone to wear masks without the any shred of evidence that it would do any good, bought dodgy untested jabs from pharmas by the millions and then tried to push them on the population in a criminal violation of human rights. All of that they did with no consideration and complete disregard for the harm any of those things might do. There was a time when one might have assumed that elected officials and bureaucrats could be relied on to some degree to make reasonable decisions and not be completely self destructive. The covid experience showed us that assumption can no longer be made. In fact the opposite is true. It is now far more reasonable to assume that our officials and bureaucrats will make harmful, destructive decisions. Why exactly that is is something that can be discussed and debated. Perhaps it has something to do with them being ideologically driven to the point… Read more »
“and we should not be at all surprised when their decisions have disastrous consequences.”
Therefore it is our responsibility to ignore or indeed sabotage the decisions of our elected officials as and when we see fit.
Which is why the best government is the one that governs the least. ——-All over the western world we have governments that govern the most. They have become the omnipotent busy bodies that cannot stop themselves interfering in every single aspect of our lives.
These days, the only people that talk about range anxiety are those that drive ICE vehicles, EV owners never mention it because it is not a concern.
Well, if it’s not a concern, and they drive further than their local environs then they clearly aren’t very bright!
That’s like saying in 2021 that the only people that talk about the dangers of the Covid vaccines are those that refused the vaccines. Naturally, the people with most concerns were the least likely to get vaccinated
Similarly, naturally the people who are the least concerned about EV range are EV owners, because if they were as concerned as people who haven’t bought an EV, they wouldn’t have bought an EV either!
Effectively, in terms of percentage of population, they are the two ponces sat in the corner of a trendy wine bar. They are the ones who bought Betamax and are still pontificating about how much better it was.
This is not true. If you want to see an EV owner suffering from severe range anxiety, look at the Macmaster vids on YouTube.
You sound vaccinated to me 😁
An opportunity for the eco zealot is to buy up second hand EVs, charge them from the grid at cheap rates and use them as a power storage battery. No need for insurance, MOTs or even tyres. They are completey weather proof and I expect you could make a bit out of selling the traction motor(s), seats, wheels etc.
Used in this mode I believe the battery will remain usable for many more years. I would recommend growing honeysuckle over it as camouflage.
Range extender: in effect this will connect an internal combustion engine to the drive shaft via a battery and electric motor. The energy loss must be magnificent. Why not just cut out the middle man?
There already are plug in hybrids and self-charging hybrids which work more efficiently than range extender vehicles which are so good people want them even less than a BEV.
I have a light hybrid… a 48V battery connected to an electric motor which charges when the vehicle slows and brakes. The electric motor operates to start the car in motion and as a helper during acceleration.
It significantly increases mpg.
The solution is already there. If the motor companies had devoted resources to developing hybrid alternatives, getting costs down, these would be readily acceptable to consumers. They would make a substantial reduction in tail-pipe emissions – if that’s the aim.
I am surprised it ever took off. Even if you were motivated by environmental concerns it was clear from the outset that these vehicles have terrible environmental consequences on many levels. And then of course the minor matter of sitting on top of a giant battery which if it were to catch fire you would have to be fleet of foot to escape the situaton alive. The fire from a lithium battery is very difficult to put out. You can’t smother it because it will just re-ignite. And just look at the damage a small battery can do. It is completely insane. I would like to attribute it to faddishness but this fad is worse than that. It suggests a wilful blindness which doesn’t bode well.
Always when you do something based on ideology you will come unstuck. We see all the fight back against gender ideology that tries to go against the wishes and morals of ordinary people. The same is true regarding everything to do with climate change and the policies associated with it. The science in the first place is not science as we have come to know it. It is a manufactured post modern science that tries to convince people that models put together by government funded data adjusters represent scientific truth and policies must be out in place (Net Zero) to deal with the crisis that the manufactured science projects will occur. ——This is POLITICS, not science. It is a pseudo-scientific fraud, and despite mainstream media bludgeoning the public with scary climate stories on a daily basis the people are not falling for the scam. They may well fall for the idea that the climate is all changing, even though that is really evidence free nonsense, but they are not falling for the solutions to this manufactured crisis. People know best how to spend their own money and they do not want electric cars, heat pumps and all the other pretend… Read more »
We have found ourselves in this trap or conundrum and it is up to us to find a way out of it. We know the spiel and the mind control tactics. We can move beyond this with the right understanding and approach. Because the corporate approach is pure destruction and evil and the removal of evrything human.
“[the] notion of a quick transition away from petrol was always barmy”.
Quick or slow, it doesn’t matter. Barmy either way.
I’m going to get my 100 year old Chrysler out the garage.