BY SALLUST
The BBC is confronting the possibility that the once promising surge in sales of EVs is going flat. Naturally, this is starting to cause a panic because all those pesky climate targets enshrined in law aren’t going to be met. Range anxiety and costs are the two most serious obstacles.
Only cheap EVs will plug the gap but the tidal wave of lower-cost Chinese imports will wreck domestic manufacturers, and the only solution to that on the table is tariffs. Here’s the story:
Buoyant electric car sales are a must if we’re to hit our climate targets. But EV sales in the West are down and if governments want them to recover it may have to be at the expense of their own economies.
By 2035, the International Energy Agency (IEA) says there will need to be 790 million EVs if we’re to hit Net Zero by the middle of the century.
That implies growth in sales of 27% every single year.
China’s largest EV manufacturer BYD has been vying with Tesla for the number-one spot. BYD also saw a slowdown between January and March.
And EV sales in Europe fell more than 10% year-on-year in the final quarter of last year – although in the U.K. total sales are running up on last year.
That’s why the fact that global sales of the world’s largest EV maker, Tesla, were actually lower in the first quarter of 2024 than in the same period in 2023 has raised eyebrows.
In the U.K., analysts say strong EV sales in recent years were fuelled by company car purchases, thanks to generous tax breaks.
But the household market is proving a tougher nut to crack, with people saying they are mostly put off by the high cost. The average price of a new EV in the US is over $60,000 (£47,433). Prices are similarly high in Europe and the U.K.
Large state subsidies and greater production efficiencies mean the average cost to a Chinese consumer is just $30,000. And BYD’s Seagull hatchback sells for less than $10,000.
China is also making massively more EVs than its domestic market needs – it could easily flood the U.S. and European markets with cheap cars if they weren’t held back by tariffs.
Here is the dilemma for European and U.S. politicians. They want cheaper EVs to facilitate the climate transition, but not at the cost of undermining their own car manufacturers – the likes of Ford and Volkswagen – and local jobs.
In fact, the talk is actually of raising tariffs and other trade barriers on imports to keep out ultra-competitive Chinese EVs.
That’s precisely what U.S. President Joe Biden did this week with a new 100% tariff on Chinese EV imports.
Apparently, the hope is that second hand sales will expand the use of EVs. But as any reader of this website knows, the unlikely prospect of there being any secondhand market in EVs at all is a whole other story. EVs are set to be one-owner commodities, like a washing machine or vacuum cleaner.
If prices of new EVs stay where they are then there is a rocky road ahead:
If that happens, expect that tension between the desire of Western governments to decarbonise transport and their desire to protect domestic manufacturing champions to grow even more acute.
At some stage they might be forced to choose.
Well, who could possibly have anticipated that? Worth reading in full.
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The BBC has problems all its own…
BBC boss claims impartial news is ‘increasingly becoming an affront’ to audiences who feel balanced coverage is ‘an attack on their values’. https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13427743/BBC-boss-impartial-news-affront-audiences-balanced-coverage.html
They aren’t reporting…
Electric car disaster as EU ports fill up with 100,000s of Chinese models no one wantshttps://www.express.co.uk/news/world/1900555/eu-news-china-electric-cars-antwerp-zeebrugge
BBC. Buggered Beyond Credibility
I cannot watch the BBC news any longer. I have been told to keep my blood pressure down and I cannot do that if I watch the alternate reality that the BBC portrays on its news programs.
Losing your sanity shortens life more than high blood pressure, but not by much.
Go for it.
Buy an EV and park it, just to get off dealers’ lots
Consider it an act of patriotism and impoverishment!!
Just park it…
“If you own a vehicle that you no longer want to drive on a public road, you can avoid paying tax – but only if you complete a SORN.”
SORN stands for Statutory Off Road Notification. It is used to inform the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency (DVLA) that you are registering a vehicle as off the road.
This means the vehicle cannot be driven on a public road when it has been registered with a SORN.
https://www.rac.co.uk/drive/advice/legal/what-does-sorn-mean/
There are forms to fill in for everything!
I expect the space to park a second vehicle will get taken up with one that will be used to source spares for the one in use. It would be interesting to research exactly what the Cubans do.
If you want to avoid permanently damaging an EV’s battery due to allowing its battery to run down to 0% charge, you will have to have that parked EV connected to the grid for continuous “trickle” charging.
Methinks you will be paying taxes on the cost of that electrical power.
Remember the old adage about the two things that are unavoidable in life . . .
I wouldn’t touch an EV with a barge pole.
When we were in the EU Brits took a vehicle to France, and possibly other countries, declared it SORN and drove uninsured, no CT or anything else.
How the French deal with British registered cars these days I don’t know.But I’d be interested to find out.
How the French deal with anything?
They can’t even deal with their own people never mind a country that never ever signed access to their database….
The opposite is true.
The British never allowed access for EU countries to their vehicle database it was always MUTUAL.
You wouldn’t be interested to find out anything.
There’s nothing here to find.
A British car can’t be fined by a French/German (fill in blanks) speed camera and vice versa.
Not many people know that.
The EU and UK was always full of bollox!
In Ontario Canada, in the past, if you had a car that weren’t driving anymore, you just didn’t pay to renew the ‘tags’, a sticker for the plates. No forms required.
But since covid, the government gave us a break and removed the fee. One still has to fill out a form to renew ( and provide proof of insurance) but no fee.
I took 1 car off the road, just cancelled the insurance and didn’t renew. No forms required.
You should only have to fill out a form to register/renew a vehicle, not to state that you don’t want to renew – wouldn’t they get the hint when you didn’t pay the tax?
Don’t watch ITV News as an alternative, especially when Tom Bradby is on. He’d give ‘Ethical Man’ Rowlatt a run for his money on Climate Change which gets into every item he reads.
“BBC boss claims impartial news is ‘increasingly becoming an affront’ to audiences who feel balanced coverage is ‘an attack on their values’.”
The BBC wouldn’t know “impartial news” if it came up and bit them.
Now they openly argue for [their] bias…
Do you genuinely believe that Tom or are you just guessing? Here is how the BBC rates in terms of bias v Fox news…
https://www.allsides.com/news-source/bbc-news-media-bias
https://www.allsides.com/news-source/fox-news-editorial-media-bias
And the simpleton gets sucked in by another far-left propaganda site.
So funny. ! Not a working neurone in its little cranium.
Will never get a single thing right.
Note that they have “low confidence” in their rating of Fox News.
ie that haven’t got a clue.
“v Faux news?”… I seem to recall that FN fired all of those ‘casters’ that were attempting some balance.
Fox News still has a few leftwing propagandists employed.
I wish they would fire them all. Who wants to listen to leftwing distorions and lies? Not me.
According to the left, there are only two sides to any position, their side, and then the wrong, evil side. That’s why there is no need to ever report anything the left disagrees with, since nobody wants to support evil.
And you don’t think the left is wrong? Come on man, you are forever moaning about the left. I am constantly amazed at how unreflective you are about what you write.
Yes, Simon, I genuinely believe the BBC is biased towards the left. They look at the world from a leftist viewpoint and report it that way.
And do you think Fox is biased to the right?
What does Fox have anything to do with BBC bias? A straw man, perhaps? Fox news is as left as any of the news outlets.
So you think fox is left? OK…. Maybe you should get out more.
“Buggered Beyond Credibility” That ‘might’ be a very accurate description.
The left has always considered any fact that goes against their wishes to be offensive.
The longer they are in power, their desire to live in a world where they never have to hear anything they disagree with becomes stronger.
“EVs are set to be one-owner commodities, like a washing machine or vacuum cleaner.”
And the EVs won’t last as long ….
😉
I have a 40 year old Hoover vacuum cleaner. Better than anything available at Walmart at any price.
Would you believe Hillary Clinton has a 332 year old broom?
I would
It is an heirloom, only makes left turns
Witch one?
Has she ever had Bill service it?
At least once.
(Unless it was Janet Reno that did the duty.)
Has it got a comfortable seat?
I am in full agreement with you on the older appliances. I use a seventy+ year old toaster everyday. It is a Sunbeam Radiant toaster made in 1952. Best toaster ever made, fully automatic. It was my grandmothers toaster and still works today. There is nothing made today that even comes close to the quality or ease of operation of this machine.It’s only slight is it doesn’t accommodate thick slices or bagels.
I have a similar Sunbeam toaster, a T-20B. (Date stamp Nov. 3, 1955.)
Somebody was throwing it away.
I did small appliance repair for about 3 years in the early ’80’s. I put a new (grounded) cord on it and made some adjustments.
One of the nichrome wire elements burnt through around 2010 or so and I couldn’t find a replacement element.
I still kept the toaster even though it doesn’t work.
It was a “Mom & Pop” store I worked in back then. He told me about an article he’d read in an appliance magazine. It was an interview with the head of one of appliance manufacturers regarding a change in manufacturing standards. He’d said something to the effect that, “If people can buy a new car every 5 years, they figured that people could also buy a new toaster every 5 years.”
There’s a reason “They don’t make them like they used too.”
“Good Day Gunga Din”,
“One of the nichrome wire elements burnt through…”
The repair in ‘ye olde days’ was a length of metal ink-tube from a ball-point pen. Crimp it to the wire ends.
Of course, even those are plastic today. Fossil fuels, and their derivatives, rule.
When we replaced a heating element on, say, GE “toast and broil” Toaster-R-Oven, we had small stainless steel “barrels” that we’d crimp on to make the connection. But it wasn’t to the element itself. Just the connections.
But thanks for reminding me. We still have one that works fine. The catalog number is A12726. We repaired them back in the early ’80’s so this one is old also.
(My wife picked it at a garage sale over 20 years ago.)
But crimping something on to my toaster’s likely wouldn’t work. Lots of corrosion on the surface of the elements.
In the days of open fires we had a 100+ year old brass toasting fork. Although my mother tended to make smoked bread on occasions
I have to add something about the Sunbeam automatic radiant toasters.
Back in the days before circuit boards, it had a slot where if you put a slice of bread in it, the bread would trip a lever and slowly lower itself and power the heating elements. When the bread was “toast”, it would then slowly raise it.
That was the “automatic” part.
No lever to lower or raise the bread.
Also back then in other toasters, when you used the lever to lower the bread, it would engage a bimetal arm and make the contact to charge the elements.
Heat would bend the bimetal and break the contact when the heat was hot enough inside the body of the toaster.
The “radiant” part was the the bimetal arm was primarily focused on the temperature of surface temperature of the bread. When that was met, the power would shut off and the toast would slowly rise.
(I’m not aware of any toaster then or now, even after circuit boards, that will do the same thing.)
That fits in with the other funny thing about the toaster. I use both frozen and thawed bread and it still toasts perfect whether the bread is frozen or not, without adjustment. The raising and lowering of the bread is powered by expansion and contraction of the 4 aluminum rods with the heating elements wrapped around them.The mechanism multiplies their change in length over 200 times.The toaster is a little engineering marvel.
Don’t know if WalMart carries it, but we gave away our Hoover to purchase a “Shark”. One of the best purchases we have made.
Same for most tools sold at Big Box “Home improvement ” stores. I still have the Makita, battery, Drill I bought 35 years ago, and a “Craftsman” battery that is 50 years old. I have only replaced their batteries about every 10 years. It is now cheaper to buy a new tool, which gives you a new battery, than repair the broken one. Broken ones end up in the local dump – so much for sustainability. Easily verified by a visit to the dump.
Battery-operated tools have become like printers – the devices are getting cheaper, but the batteries are getting more and more pricey with reduced capacity.
Just like printer cartridges.
Recurring revenue from initial customers is the best business model there is.
The EV as it stands is the wrong product.
If it were a light, small, town runabout, that could do 60 miles, with a top speed of say 60 mph, that you could recharge at home and use for commuting to work, it would sell.
But trying to compete with a highway, mile eating luxury car is a disaster.
It is the wrong product.
Fiat tried a light small town runabout and I don’t see very many on the road.
Price is a major factor also. That embarrassingly tiny car is/was too pricey.
A lot of families can’t afford two cars.
And if you’re looking for a “light, small, town runabout” you aren’t going to pay $60,000.
What’s often forgotten is that more and more of the American population is the retiring baby boomers. I don’t know any who can afford an EV even if they wanted it. How many younger folks who haven’t peaked in their career income can afford that when they probably still owe more than that on their college loans? Then they have to spend a fortune for a home. And the millions in low paying service jobs?
JZ… perhaps you are not seeing the millions that are retiring from jobs they had in some form of government… we encounter so many people driving quite new, expensive pickups, hauling boats, 4-wheelers, house trailers, and etc., that we wonder where the $$$ came from.
Here in Wokeachusetts, state employees, with I think 30 years, retire at 80% of the salary.
I’ve got a Skoda Karoq for longer journeys and a small Skoda Fabia for around town . I would consider a small electric car for around town , but the Fabia has lots of miles left in it so why spend all that capital buying an electric car ?
Get a 54 mpg Prius hybrid, not a plug-in
Low insurance, low price, low maintenance, repairable, high mileage, loooong range, loooong lasting, all the attributes an EV will never have
Yes, they should be pushing non-plugin hybrids.
Non-plugin hybrids don’t require the grid to be rebuilt and do away with range anxiety, and spending time recharging the batteries, and get better gas mileage.
What’s not to like? Well, the climate alarmists don’t like them because they use fossil fuels. That’s why this option is not promoted.
The hybrid has more things to go wrong. After a while its battery will need to be replaced at significant cost, even if it is a bit cheaper than a full EV one. IIRC a relative was charged £3,000 for one in her MHEV BMW.
Of course all modern cars have more things to go wrong with all the extra driver aids that are fast becoming mandatory. Pushes up insurance costs too, with replacement sensors, rewiring, resetting the onboard computers etc. adding to the bill of even a modest fender bender.
We passed peak car reliability about 20 years ago.
Multiple onboard computers and sensors and copious LED lamps are one of the banes of new cars. My right headlamp (adaptive LED) was replaced barely under warranty. If I had paid, it would have been close to $4,000 US. Twenty years ago, a halogen replacement lamp would have been about $20. Ten years before that, I would paid $1.95 for a headlight bulb.
Today’s cars are smothered in LEDs which are unique to the make and model, have to be replaced as light units with the housing, and do not last forever. They are often also embedded with sensors and connections to vehicle computers. There are the famous YouTube videos of Ford F-150 tail lamp replacements that cost the owners over $5,000.
As these vehicles age and LEDs begin to fail, they won’t sell on the used car market to poor people because they can’t pay that kind of money just for a headlamp or tail lamp. There will be a Cuban style industry of refitting these light housings with cheap, replaceable conventional lamps.
Perhaps many of the illegals will pick up the slack. Along with what they are being paid in ‘welfare’, they should have quite a comfortable life style.
Those prices for repairs of LED lights are sobering.
I’m glad I drive a 1992 Chevy pickup more than ever. I can actually fix this car myself.
But I have recently seen PHEVs listed as zero-emissions. How does that work?
As soon as you need to do one journey of twice the range then you’re stuffed. Even a Citroën C1 in 1 litre form does 450+ miles to a tank. Not an ideal vehicle for Lands End to John O’Groats but a couple of hundred miles in an emergency is no problem.
I think when you own a single vehicle that comes into the decision making.
Such cars exist in china but western governments have increased tariffs to the point where
they aren’t economic here. Wired recently reviewed the Zhidou Rainbow which has a 100 mile range and costs under $5000. Or there is the BYD Seagull that costs about $10000 USD and has a range of 200 miles. Cheap EVs are easily made and as you say would be ideal for urban driving — however in the US and elsehwere people want to drive large inefficient SUVs so that is what the market produces.
Safety costs money.
Story Tip: Conclusions presented by Prof. V.Zharkova (Northumbria University) during the National Astronomy that a new Ice Age could be around the corner!
New Ice Age may begin by 2030 | EurekAlert!
I vehemently hope not !
The way things are going, most western countries will have mostly totally destroyed their electricity systems by then. The suffering would be enormous.
And the forests not nearly big enough.
This can’t be (climate) science, for a start it has predictions that can and will be checked against observations. One can only attribute this – geddit! – to boneheaded denialism of the true faith. But….
“Popova responds cautiously, while speaking about the human influence on climate.
…
“However, even if human activities influence the climate, we can say, that the Sun with the new minimum gives humanity more time or a second chance to reduce their industrial emissions and to prepare, when the Sun will return to normal activity”
They all bottle it in the end; unless they’ve retired.
For non UK readers…
In English slang, when you’ve “bottled it ,” you’ve succumbed to pressure, lost your nerve, chickened out etc
I’m a fan of the comedy cartoon, “The Family Guy”. Whenever it shows Brits, it’s hilarious. It spoofs the language, the looks, the Royalty, and especially the bad teeth. The show also spoofs other cultures. Apparently, most people on the receiving end don’t find it offensive because it’s so funny. If you don’t see that show in the UK, you’re missing something.
I find Family Guy’s depictions of the British (lets be honest here, English) hilarious in their missing the mark virtually every time.
How could that ever be offensive when it comes across as a wee bit ignorant?
Oh, I thought that meant they sold snake oil like Gore and Kerry do. 🙂
People like Gore and Kerry are what we would call Charlatans – people who pretend to have skills or knowledge that they patently do not have,
That corner is many decades away, just about the time we will run out of fossil fuel.
Never happen… and that’s MY accurate prediction (without a computer program to assist)
“Only cheap EVs will plug the gap but the tidal wave of lower-cost Chinese imports will wreck domestic manufacturers, and the only solution to that on the table is tariffs.”
We could also, finally, demand that China’s trade with the rest of the world is balanced. If it were balanced, then who cares who makes the cars.
“cheap EVs”
Is that the Saturday funny?
Control of financial systems, shipping, insurance, trade routes, access to ports, etc., should also be decentralized and balanced, with all countries having a voice and vote
Like the UN?
On one side you demand that the economy be decentralized.
On the other hand you want economic decisions to be controlled by government.
PLease make up your mind.
One country, one vote?
Should Monaco’s vote have the same weight as China or India?
Why should countries who paid nothing to build or maintain ports, have the same right to decide how those facilities are used as does the country that built them?
Your notion is the same kind of nonsense that often makes sense to college students, who know nothing about economics, and are proud of it.
Balanced? What would they buy from the west? Do we make anything anymore?
Right- bit if China tried real hard- with their merchants coming here looking to buy stuff- I’m sure lots of Americans would find something to sell.
And then, of course, there is the ‘grid’ problem, and where the power to charge the EVs will come from. Not to mention that it can sometimes get bloody cold, and it also snows.
I’m looking into aspects of that. I found some daily data on filling station sales that tell us how motorists top up their petrol and diesel vehicles (separate figures for each fuel) and also broken down regionally, showing that demand in London craters during the summer holidays, but goes up in holiday areas (it seems as if Londoners drive to Scotland for the grouse shooting starting on the Glorious 12th of August!). You get an impression of the extra demand caused by national Bank Holidays, and the pattern of filling up across the week. In London they top up more over the weekend, but in the rest of the country it tends to be more ahead of it. Sunday is a low day typically, but also a low day for electricity demand – will EV owners have to forego their Sunday drive for a cheap recharge?
Range anxiety is more a psychological issue than practical. How many people drive over 300 km a day? In my previous job I did 70 km so I would need to charge every 4-5 days.
I looked up the BYD Seagull (not available here) and get a price of €11.000. Would I buy the Seagull? Yes and no.
Yes – I only use a car 1 or 2 times a week for a short distance. So at €11.000 this give me good value and I only need to charge once a month.
No – I can’t charge at home so it stays inconvienent. Occasionaly I want to make a day trip and then I would need to charge on the road and I don’t want to waste time. And I worry about the lifespan, I want to drive at least 15 years with my car.
If giving the choice I go for a cheap petrol car, that’s the car I need.
I don’t care if we all be driving Chinese cars. The EU and USA is to blame for stupid policies and destroying their own car manufacturers, and economy. In reality they are detested by the public, we own them nothing.
Longer distance driving may be an infrequent event for many of us, but it still happens. For example I did about 350 miles on the day to attend a funeral, and I did regular 300 mile round trips to visit my parents, potentially at no more notice than a phone call. A motoring holiday can run 1,000 miles or more. Such journeys become a nightmare in an EV. Not only does a recharge take time, but the charger may not be working, and requires a deviation from the route and is likely expensive. You may not find one at all at your destination when it might be more convenient, and you may end up late for the event. Imagine a number of attendees at a funeral or wedding all needing a top-up.
These things sear on the memory every bit as much as having a puncture en route and having to call out roadside tyre replacement for delay and expense.
Don’t you carry a ‘spare’?
Yes, I was carrying a spare. But I was a lot further away from my parents than the recommended mileage on the spare (also limited to 50mph) with a fully laden car, and the regular tyre fitters were closed for the evening. I’ve had to use the spare a couple of other times for pothole damage: fortunately in both cases I was near journey’s end for the day. Much better to get the repair where we were (village outskirts with green space for dog walking) than risk having the spare blow on the motorway as well, and no real space for the punctured wheel or the spacers for the spare from the wheel well. It added about 90 mins to the journey in all.
Just getting a newer car that unfortunately comes without one, so have to decide whether to spend £250 on the spare kit to replace the inflator kit. I had another (slow) puncture a few months ago which I could pump up sufficiently to make it to the tyre fitter. Turned out to be a screw right in the middle of the tread, so they were able to repair it rather than having to replace with still 6mm of tread. It’s been holding pressure well since.
A note about distances: Place yourself on Interstate 8 at the Arizona/California border and start driving west until you reach the I-8/I-5 interchange, then take the I-5 North exit. Continue on I-5 north until you you reach the Oregon border, at which point you have driven 900 statute miles. For two years I was
Who could have possibly forseen this unfolding disaster? I’m shocked – shocked I tell you!
But, but, but, myusername keeps telling us sales of EVs are soaring!
And one that is full of potholes
“secondhand market”
My comment below springs from the mentioned concept. I’m starting to see ideas for the use of older EVs. The Cadillac Ranch en masse offers a solution.
Cadillac Ranch and Palo Duro Canyon – Route 66 | ROAD TRIP USA
Back in the 1950s and ’60s, in the USA, The better-off would buy a new car every two years. Those a step down the income ladder would buy the trade-ins, getting a good autos with (usually) low mileage.
Each fall a new model car would be put in the showroom and draped in a covering so only the outline could be ascertained. Sleuths would hang around test tracks, factories, and any place a glimpse of the “new” might be had. Car companies would oddly paint or sticker the vehicles to hide the new and compelling features.
Now they all have the same characteristics – except Musk’s Cybertruck.
From the above article:
“Only cheap EVs will plug the gap but . . .”
I don’t know if the pun was intended or not, but the fact is that, independent of EV car sales numbers and cost per vehicle, a gap will remain due to:
— inadequate electrical grid structure available to support the government-planned increase in EV sales associated with achieving “net zero”
— inadequate power plants to support the 24/7/365 electrical power such numbers of EVs will require, especially considering the intermittency/unreliability of solar and wind power plants.
Too many minds think simplistically that electric energy is something that just comes out of plug inserted into a wall socket.
Similar mentality about ‘water comes out of a tap’.
Electric chargers, even supercharger, supply a pitiful amount of energy per minute as compared to a consumer gas pump or commercial diesel pump.
As a result, it is physically impossible to swap out ICE to EV using existing or planned technology. The increased number of chargers required to replace existing gas pumps is staggering, as is the increased demand on the electrical grid.
True. It takes no more than 2-3 minutes to add 600 miles of range to my car at the pump, and perhaps another 2 minutes to pay at the kiosk (I’m less trusting – the pump may have been hacked).
Call it 3 miles of range per second, which is 1kWh for an EV. A 360kW battery destroying fast charger takes 10 times as long. And a 22kW “fast” charge… adds about a mile a minute.
Also mostly I am passing filling stations without need for any route deviation to top up, with the range buffer meaning I rarely have to fill, which allows me to shop by price as well. Just occasionally I might get caught with the need for an unexpected longer trip and have to deviate to fuel up. In an EV that would be a much more regular occurrence, adding time and extra mileage. Waiting for a 7kW home charger would prove unacceptable.
I recently spent 6 months driving rental cars in the EU. Every single one was a plug-in hybrid and I never plugged one in. There were no charging spots and parking was a zoo everywhere.
What I did notice is that none of the cars would charge up while driving for more that a minute of battery operation. Even going down a huge hill the regenerative Braking might add 5% charge to the battery which quickly went back to 0% charge
Seemed like a while lot more complexity for no benefit.
And weight.
The majority of the Countries(by number) in the world are small enough that an EV MIGHT make a modicum of sense. Canada, America, Russia, etc., are far too large to change the “travel urge” from efficient so called fossil fuels to EVs, though Hybrids do have good points. imho
You might run an EV living in Moscow in the summer if you had an officially allocated charging space. But you really wouldn’t want to be doing it in winter. I’ve seen log fires under truck sumps, and car spark plugs got warmed up in the flame of the stove in the kitchen in cold weather. Battery killing weather.
The pessimism reflected in the comments is amazing. I would suggest that the readers read all the articles that have been published in Whatsupwiththat noting the high cost of storage in a renewable electricity dominated world. The cost of storage could be reduced greatly by requiring EVs to have two-way transmissions.. EVs could be charged when electricity was plentiful and could sell the electricity when the grid was approaching its limit
Using EV batteries as grid storage is an idea that will never be accepted by the public, but it may be forced onto us.
You would accept the idea that your car may or may not have enough charge to get you to work in the morning, depending on whether the grid needed your power during the night?
Would the cost of the electricity pulled from the car be credited back to the car owner?
Who’s going to pay the owner for the extra wear and tear such draw downs are going to inflict on the battery.
Beyond that, the peak demand in the summer occurs in the late afternoon and early evening.
During that time, the car is either in the employer’s parking lot, on the way home or arriving home and in need of being charged.
I thought you made that comment before. I pointed out that V2G could supply about 600GWh in the UK if every vehicle took part, less than 1% of the necessary storage to run a renewables based grid – over 100TWh according to the Royal Society. Then they would all need to be recharged, using 25% more energy than they delivered. It’s a fantasy beloved of those who’ve never done the storage maths.
roflmao.
So the EV now has zero charge left in the morning….. That really is a really DUMB idea. !
And wear out your 20,000$ battery pack twice as fast? Sure, Jan.
Why would you wear out your expensive battery feeding the power to the grid?
Don’t you have to use the vehicle to get to work? How would it feed power then, and would the price be high then if everyone’s car was at work and not plugged in to increase demand?
When you get home and want to charge it.. oops so does everyone else and the price skyrockets.
The EV as storage for the grid was a talking point not an actual, worked out plan. Would never work unless you just left the car plugged in and never used it. Might as well get a Powerwall or equivalent, but only if the price differential makes sense, factoring in wear on the battery.
This is so dumb. Forcing people to pay for wearing out their own batteries quicker is incredibly wasteful and irresponsible, and it doesn’t “solve” and “problem” in reality.
When an alarmist rag like The Guardian starts admitting that there’s a limited market for EVs in North America and Europe, it becomes even more obvious that these vehicles are likely to continue falling into a niche market. In addition, since EVs in general have earned the reputation of having limited reliability and low resale values, it won’t make much difference where they’re produced. Regardless of their country of origin, unless EVs can be priced competitively with ICE types, it will take many years or maybe never before they make up a significant market share. I’m currently driving a 13-year-old S. Korean compact ICE that’s proven to be the most reliable car I’ve ever owned, and I have few worries about having to replace the engine. Are there any EVs around whose power plants have lasted that long?
“By 2035, the International Energy Agency (IEA) says there will need to be 790 million EVs if we’re to hit Net Zero by the middle of the century.”
By exactly what metric will the construction and use of over a quarter billion EV’s achieve anything remotely “net zero”. The production and use of these vehicles will, I submit, produce more CO2 emissions than if they were never built in the first place.
Blame it on cliiiiimate change-
BBC admits the EV market is ‘collapsing’ (msn.com)
Mguy in Oz along with Geoff Buys Cars and The Macmaster in Britain are having a field day on Youtube with the EV fan club and they’re getting fed story tips from all over-
Mercedes and Volkswagen DITCH their EV ambitions! | MGUY Australia (youtube.com)
They’ve even flown to meet up internationally and they must be driving the usual suspects crazy wanting to shut them up. Sooner or later the lefty MSM can’t continue to ignore these democratic internet focal points lest they slide into complete irrelevance.