In this week’s Spectator Toby has written about how relieved he is that he decided against buying an electric car a couple of years ago. Here’s an excerpt.
A couple of years ago I thought seriously about buying an electric car. Not a hybrid, but the full monty. There was one in particular I liked the look of and I even contacted a dealership to ask whether they’d accept my diesel-powered VW Touran in part-exchange. The answer was yes, but it was still eye-wateringly expensive. Was it worth it? I tried to persuade myself it would be, given the savings on fuel costs, the waiving of the congestion charge, etc.
Boy, am I glad I dodged that bullet. Scarcely a day passes without a new horror story about electric vehicles in the press. Over the past week alone, we’ve learnt that some popular models are depreciating at twice the rate of petrol cars, that the number of free electric chargers on Britain’s roads has dropped by 40% in the past 12 months, and that the sheer weight of their batteries means these cars could be banned from bridges and multi-storey car parks. It’s carmageddon!
The model I was eyeing up supposedly had a range of 275 miles, which meant I could drive to any QPR away game on a single charge. The northernmost club in the Championship is Sunderland, which is exactly 275 miles from my house in Acton. But we now know that the manufacturers’ range estimates are wildly optimistic. For instance, Giles Coren was told his Jaguar I-Pace, which he bought in 2020, had a range of up to 292 miles, when the reality was 220. Being a Hoops fan like me, that’s one of the reasons he’s ditched it. I cannot imagine the frustration of desperately searching for a rapid charging point as a succession of warning lights comes up on the dash, with 70 miles to go and kick-off less than two hours away.
But what would have really annoyed me is the feeling I’d been sold a pup by a Government keen to burnish its green credentials. Okay, I might have got in under the wire for the plug-in grant of £1,500 – the Government scrapped that on June 15th last year – but what about the exemption from road tax I’d been promised? Jeremy Hunt announced in the Autumn Statement that electric car owners will have to start paying vehicle excise duty from 2025.
Then there’s the fact that electricity costs have increased by 66.7% in the past 12 months, wiping out most of the savings I would have been banking on. That may not be entirely the Government’s fault, but failing to invest in nuclear, banning fracking and inflating energy bills with green subsidies hasn’t helped.
He notes that a recent report by the Global Warming Policy Foundation estimates that the cost of replacing natural gas back-up in Germany with large battery storage facilities – necessary because wind and solar power are so intermittent – “is a multi-trillion dollar project, likely costing a multiple of the country’s GDP, and thus completely infeasible”.
He concludes: “The truth is that virtue-signalling politicians have pledged to wean us off oil and gas without any serious plan for what to replace them with.”
Worth reading in full.
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“Elon Musk’s visionary work with Tesla…”
Oh, puh-lease..
Elon Reeve Musk is nothing but a crook. He noticed the huge amounts of OPM piling up on offer from idiotic politicians to “save the planet” and thought,
“I’ll have some of that!”
He didn’t even found the company. Instead, he destroyed the founder.
If that is “visionary”, then STOP THE BUS – I WANT TO GET OFF.
Aside from this, there is absolutely nothing visionary about electric cars. That happened over 130 years ago. And it was destroyed the moment Gottlieb Daimler and Karl Benz entered the scene.
Everything Mr Musk touches turns to sh*t sooner or later. Yet there he stands. I can’t help but admire him for using the system. Which is so screwed up.
All he has done is played to the rules available to him to maximise his companies revenue streams and his own net worth (the vast majority of which is tied up in stock in those same companies). That doesn’t make him a crook in the same way that choosing your company car to take advantage of subsidies and BiK rules makes any of us crooks.
You do make good points.
But he participates in and enables the whole fraud, very actively. And he doesn’t put his money where his mouth is. Quite the contrary. Check his stock sale history.
All while pushing the man made climate change scam. He is, in the book according to Marcus Aurelius knew, most definitely a crook.
And he sells cars while knowing they’re dangerous, and terrorises/bribes anyone and everyone (including employees and legislators) who tries to blow the whistle.
He’s a huge part of the problems we have today.
But there are worse offenders, obviously. And he got my respect for (initially) declaring that COVID-19 was just the flu. And then he gets in bed with ModeRNA. That should tell you all you need to know.
The guy is a NASTY CROOK.
But don’t believe me. I am gonna leave Time to tell.
And if you’re wrong?
About… what, exactly?
But in the meantime, if I am wrong, I’ll be… wrong.
It’s not as if I’ll be dead or something.
Right, need to go, got work to do!
I was very much a doubter on Musk and could not see how Tesla would ramp up their manufacturing enough to be profitable. I was wrong and I have to respect EM for driving the company to profitability. I do think there are extremely rocky days ahead for all EV manufacturers ahead, the price wars going on in China are brutal and many start-ups won’t survive. I think Tesla will probably be one of the lucky ones though, but it looks grim for most European brands.
Profits paid for by taxpayer subsidy.
Indeed. On both sides. Direct subsidies to the mftrs and direct subsidies to the loons that go and buy one of these non-green, Gaia unfriendly technologies.
Tesla is not profitable in the normal sense of the word, TheGreenAcres. It loses money on every car it sells.
No, he is a crook. What short memories we have. To stop the early collapse of TSLA back when we were smart and knew it should die (without brainwashing by American Legacy Media) he falsified the possible sale of his company, a violation of SEC rules. He settled by paying the largest fine on record for illegal price manipulation/fixing. That’s spells crook in my book, esp. since I had put options on the stock at the time. Alas, we have short memories in a world of information that is near;y impossible to keep track.
If you chuck chips out on the promenade the gulls will wolf it down. Just like the Subsidy farmers wolf all the subsidies down their neck. I know global warming is a crock of manufactured junk science but if government want to pay me big sums of money I will take it and can pretend to save the planet as much as the next guy.
I actually have the same view. That’s why I invest in the whole shitshow. By buying as much of the UK equivalent of VTSAX as I can afford, every month.
The world is not black and white.
Doesn’t mean I have to think Musk is a “visionary”, and I can’t promise not to vomit whenever people faun over him.
Faun, or fawn? I forget.
Fawn is good…………
Billions in US Gov subsidies.
How many ‘entrepreneurs’ get lavish and unlimited state support?
Tesla is a joke and the entire EV market a fraud.
I’m on the fence with a lot of the rantings of the electric Jesus, but, I use his starlink internet connection out here in the middle of nowhere and its darn good, 300mbs for €50 a month and hardly ever drops out!
Wont be getting on the hyperloop, going to Mars, fitting a neuralink brain implant or buying a tesla anytime soon though!
Hmmm. This yank never knew the UK had a “middle of nowhere”. Try southern Idaho. Proof that all things, esp poverty, is relative. Thanks for that Albert.
Things will only get worse for EV owners as the subsidies are withdrawn and replaced with additional revenue streams – that £25bn the Government steals from us in from fuel duty has to be replaced, they sure as hell won’t forgo that cash!
Road pricing – via spy-in-the-car technology.
This is astonishing news— how quickly and unexpectedly that particular arm of the Globalist Octopus has withered.
Looks like the bold Finns were far ahead of everyone else when they did this to a Tesla, starting at 4:55 to 6:56 minutes. You can even see the slow-motion percussion wave distorting the quarry background:
Insane Tesla Model S EXPLOSION!! 30kg of dynamite! (youtube.com)
Excellent watch. Thank you.
I’m glad you watched it— even the music was perfect!
BEV = UXB.
Ha-ha! Wonderful! I didn’t understand your meaning at first, then I looked it up.
Save the planet governments just don’t get the Free Market. People know best how to spend their own money. If they want a Mars Bar instead of lettuce then they will buy the chocolate. You cannot stuff lettuce down their throat no matter how much you bribe them or tell them there is a climate cataclysm coming in a months’ time and we will all be dead from global scorching by September. When there is no evidence then we are going to keep enjoying the chocolate, and it is the same with the green scam. No matter how often they tell us we need EV’s and heat pumps we are going to keep buying the petrol car and the gas boiler instead, because we like them. The petrol car is cheaper and gets us to where we are going and the gas boiler keeps us warm. So flooding the market with lettuce is going to be a bad idea because we just don’t want the bloody stuff. Take your Ev’s and stuff them where the sun don’t shine.
As Milton Friedman said, Socialists don’t understand economics, if they did they wouldn’t be Socialists.
The whole climate change/net zero scam is Socialism with new branding and livery. New bucket same old merde.
Worse still their cocamamy schemes aren’t just unpopular, they actually make things worse.
The revolution is going strong I’m afraid.
They have laws in place that make any change of course extremely difficult if not virtually impossible.
All we are seeing now is the gnashing of teeth, the economic pain, the dislocation of industry, the anxiety and cost of having to change how we live our lives.
They don’t give a shit. They’re not stepping back. We can kock and scream all we like.
I’m afraid that’s how it is.
True… but that course leads onto the rocks.
It does, but our ruling class is in self destructive mode.
The whole covid saga was an exercise in self harm on so many different levels.
The dismantling of our history, our values in favour of bizarre new norms is an act of self mutilation.
The wild over spending and racking up of debt is reckless.
It’s as if they exercise power for it’s own sake, just because they can, with no real regard or understanding of where value resides or comes from.
This is where we are, in a spiral of self destruction.
Exactly, to alter the zero emissions mandate or the ban on the sale of ICE cars would require a significant changer to the climate change act. The new post July 4th UK Government is most unlikely to consider doing this and so we are stuck between a rock and a hard place, if EVs fail to sell and ICE cars are phased out by the climate change act then basically we will all be grounded.
As a sop we may see a large influx of cheap low range Chinese EVs that will be OK for some local utility travel otherwise it will be the end of leisure car travel, the end of motoring as we have known it for the last 50 years.
And if we think we will just hang on to our ageing ICE cars, I think we are kidding ourselves. The UK Gov and local councils will increasingly force ICE cars off the road.
That is exactly what is coming.
It’s not that they just don’t care if you don’t get a car. They actually prefer it. It’s a big part of their vision.
Yup. They will just stop importing petrol/diesel. No fuel …. no point having the vehicle.
And there is no wiggle room because the insane political class have forced us in law to do Net Zero. ——-Total traitors using the junk science climate excuse to impose their eco socialism on us, and the trouble is most people still believe there is a climate emergency, no matter how much evidence you provide them that there is NONE. Such is the power of propaganda.
If you look at the energy density data its obvious that battery powered cars are an absolute waste of time. Mr Toyota us correct. If you want ICE free motoring then you need easily fuel able hydrogen system with a cheap efficient hydrogen fuel cell (sadly this does not exist yet and isn’t looking imminent)
Hydrogen isn’t even a fuel. It has to be manufacture and that is very expensive.
Like everything else that is Green. The days of cheap abundant energy are over. Not because we don’t have cheap abundant energy but because the Politicians have decided we cannot have it anymore. To understand the real reason you need to understand what Sustainable Development really is and who is imposing it on us. Our spineless politicians are fully onboard with all of this eco socialism and they are a total disgrace.
Thanks to a commenter on TCW…..advises that basically a new EV on your driveway arrives with a 70% higher upfront ‘carbon footprint’ which will take 50,000 – 80,000 miles to eliminate.
And battery powered by slave labour.
Indeed!
About half the distance required to break even on the cost of the vehicle plus battery charging vs petrol if you can do cheapest home charging. That’s assuming electricity and fossil fuel prices remain in step over however long it takes you to do 100,000 miles.
As Blessed Margaret Hilda was fond of saying, ‘You can’t buck the market.’
Government intervention can distort the market, but like a spring it will bounce back and correct – often brutally. That’s why we have financial crises and recessions every so often, the inevitable result of political interference in the market process.
Another little snag with the EV revolution; it appears that increasingly unattended EV charging stations are being targeted by thieves who are stealing the copper and leaving the charging point unusable.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0B_WUPQwzEQ
If I was forced to have an EV I suspect I would only feel confident to use if for local utility travel and charge it on a home charger. I suspect that many would feel like me, not so much an EV revolution as travel immiseration.
Tesla has a fleet of support vehicles, they run on diesel. Nuff said