A mass market in affordable electric cars will not happen soon because of the difficulty of producing them on a commercially viable basis, one of the largest makers of ‘zero-emission’ vehicles for British drivers has warned. The Times has the story.
Paul Philpott, U.K. Chief Executive of Kia, the fast-growing South Korean car company, said it had no immediate plans for a mass-market electric product.
Some fear there is a prospect of a society of haves and have-nots in the electric car revolution because of the sheer cost of buying or financing a zero-emission vehicle.
Philpott’s prediction also threatens to undermine the Government’s ban on selling petrol and diesel vehicles by 2030.
With price inflation roaring ahead in the past couple of years, there are only a handful of electric cars available below £30,000, compared with the less than £20,000 that motorists would expect to pay for mass market or entry-level petrol cars. Even the smallest electric car, the zero-emission version of the Fiat 500, starts at about £30,000.
This month the Advanced Propulsion Centre, the Government’s automotive electrification agency, significantly cut electric car forecasts for 2025 because “buyers are expected to stick with cheaper options for longer”.
While European and Asian manufacturers have been stepping up production of electric vehicles, they have been concentrating on more expensive models to make healthy profit margins on the cost of installing electrified systems. The battery pack is the costliest component of an electric car. The smaller the car, the larger the proportion the battery in its production cost.
Unveiling Kia’s product launches, Philpott outlined plans to increase the 16,000 electric cars it sold in the U.K. last year to more than 20,000 in 2023. But he conceded: “The electrification of the small car is really difficult, economically speaking.”
Worth reading in full.
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Please refer to Steve Devon’s comment, and my comment to it, under the “News Round-up” section on this topic. In simple terms, the long term plan is not straightforward, and money says no, for the time being.
I ditched my Times subscription 5 years ago when it “came out” as The Guardian-lite so I can’t read the article.
The Eco Nutters aren’t interested in facts like this. The aim is to force large numbers of lower-income people to give up on car ownership; make them routinely use public transport and hire a car if they occasionally need one. The fact that that objective is completely impractical if you (a) have a family or (b) live anywhere outside a city/large town is irrelevant to them.
I have a Hyundai i10 (I’m at the stage in life where I don’t need a large car). It’s 6 years old and has 35,000 miles on the clock. I love it; it’s cheap to run, serves my needs, is reliable and pleasant to drive ….. and I will be buying a new one in 2028. I expect it will cost half the price of the cheapest EV …. which I can’t charge where I live even IF I wanted one …. which I don’t.
Totally agree, I cannot afford an EV and don’t want one, our village has not the domestic electricity supply to install a charger, the nearest public one is 11 miles away. We have one bus a week no local shop, no mains gas supply. the only logical solution is the internal combustion engine as an affordable and reliable vehicle. EV not me.
There is an open source version of this article here;
https://www.thisismoney.co.uk/money/electriccars/article-11665917/Kia-boss-Cheap-small-electric-cars-not-viable-high-battery-costs.html
Thanks. Just found where you posted it on the Round-Up.
I’m still struggling to understand how something so expensive is regarded as ‘green’ or even ‘sustainable’. The price is a decent indicator of how resource-intensive a product is to manufacture. Made apparent with the lack of any “affordable” alternatives – and that’s with them being subsidised too.
A lot depends on the duration of a car’s service life & distance run. It appears that the manufacture of battery electric ones uses a fair bit more energy than other products, not least on account of manufacturing the traction batteries. They are quite heavy vehicles as well. Probably worthwhile for high mileage owners, especially with artificial benefits with extra charges for using conventional cars in certain areas, from which they are exempt, but of little use for low mileage people out in the sticks.
Almost every ‘alternative’ to save the planet is turning out to be expensive and downright impractical. Why does this whole UN/WEF plan look increasingly like a 4th Form group project that is going to get no better than a ‘C+’ when its marked…?
C+? That’s generous. A great big F for fail will be more appropriate when all is said and done. But I guess it’s irrelevant since they’re marking their own homework.
It seems we need to keep relearning the lesson that a group of clever technocrats can’t outsmart the cumulative wisdom of millions over generations.
That’s because the ‘alternative’ is we will have nothing… which won’t cost anything.
Kia has become one of my preferred car brands.
One of the reasons there is even a small market in EVs is the tax advantage for company owners. If you own a business that generates enough profit to pay £100k in tax, instead of handing over the cash to HMRC you can buy a £100k EV and write the whole cost off against tax in year 1. In effect the government is giving you a free car – or more to the point, PAYE workers are giving you a free car. It’s a no brainer for the Company owner, but is it morally correct to expect, say, shopworkers to pay for it, just so a bunch of dimwitted politicians can feel good?
I don’t know if it’s part of the same scheme or a different one but my firm is offering some kind of deal where you get a company EV at subsidised cost. You need to pay the tax as it’s a benefit in kind but you still get use of a car at way below market rates. Again, is it right for shopworkers to subsidise this (would be willing to bet Tesco won’t be offering this to all their employees).
And what would be the cost to the environment to produce enough small cars for the worlds needs? Rare earth metals and minerals aren’t called rare earth because they are rare, they are common, but they do not occur in seams or veins or in small minable areas you need tons of earth to get small amounts of the materials you require!
Turn the world into an opencast and you might just manage it
The plan is on target, where they destroy the whole of the agricultural industry, so that the land can be turned into one big opencast mine. The amount needed to be dug out of the earth will be reduced as the lower and middle class people will starve to death in their millions. It is all worked out, apart from the fact the the very people who will do the digging and make all the renewables and support their virtuous life style will be dead or dying. What could possibly go wrong with this plan? Answers on a postage stamp, a postcard has too much room on it.
What no one in government has explained is how the average income family would pay for their EV, and also the cost of changing their house over to a heat pump, and how the electricity to run all this is going to be generated. These are simple and practical questions, surely? Personally, I can’t see any of this happening and it will remain a stupid green pipe dream with the dates of banning this and that being moved 5 years into the future, then another 5 years and so on. The whole plan is totally unworkable.
“I can’t see any of this happening”
Let’s assume that a government passes a law legislating that every house in the country must take out their gas boiler and replace it with a heat pump and associated internal upgrades.
“Can’t afford the work. It’s twenty five grand.”
The government CPO’s the property as it is no longer fit to live in and kindly puts you up in a city hutch.
If their ideas were genuine we all know they are unworkable but that is not the point. The point is control. You will be worked until no longer required.
“It’s not always about what they say it’s about.”
Still not getting it are they? Or is it they are just not saying it?
Even if they were free there would be no market for them because they need electricity, and:-
1) Unreliables cannot produce output sufficient to meet continuous demand and maintain a stable grid.
2) The grid infrastructure to carry and distribute the extra load to replace motor fuels does not exist, nor are there any plans to build it.
Re 2), the big infrastructure snag is local distribution, by the District Network Operators – say from the major 132 kV substations down, via all the buried cable under the streets, and overhead ones in more rural areas. Where I live, the local DNO replaced a lot of underground cable for other reasons, and they did not upgrade it to cope with an increase in EV charging demand. A major upgrade project wouldn’t be cheap, and you can guess who would pay for it.
Don’t forget that we pay 5% VAT on domestic power at present, but given that we would need “smart” meters for charge points, you can imagine what they might do in the future, such as different tax rates for different purposes, auctioning the supply at different times of day, etc.
Ironically, an increase in charging demand at the right time of day could have the effect of stabilising the generation end of the chain – e.g. if it’s done mostly overnight. A bit like the historic encouragement of overnight use (such as “economy 7”) to stabilise the load for (in those days) brand new power stations that needed stable loads. In particular, the old nuclear ones were best operated at a steady load.
250,000 euros for a solar assisted electric car here in the NL. Stark raving bonkers;
https://nltimes.nl/2023/01/24/solar-electric-automaker-lightyear-cancels-production-its-first-expensive-model
They aren’t electric cars. They are built using fossil fuels and powered with fossil fuel
A big part of why the hoax got off the ground exposed as fraud: the elusive 97% consensus calculation revisited. https://www.2ndsmartestguyintheworld.com/p/97-consensus-what-consensus
Now, a zero-emission vehicle, that would be expensive…
Please name an electric car advert from any manufacturer that shows a family getting in, travelling and happily jumping out at the seaside,or where ever! Never more than two people ever use these 4/5 seater electric cars? Why?…. is it because the weight of a whole family and shopping/cases would negate their company vehicle distance claims?
I remember a time when showing how many people could be carried in comfort in your family car was the 101 of a car sales pitch!
Or does it just mean they are not up to the job and they don’t want to highlight the fact!
Eventually the mass of people will catch on to what the eco-loons in government are trying to do to their way of life.
Green absurdity is all around. This group think madness is a virus spreading throughout the western world and a doctor would recommend a sharp dose of reality and to come back and see him in a fortnight.