The Scottish results will be fascinating. I expect movement against both parties of government, made more entertaining that the SNP will blame the Tories and vice versa. So it should be a good election for Labour and the LibDems, but the problem comes in seats like my own where the local Tory is an arse but his only viable opponent is the SNP.
Do you vote SNP in protest at the disastrous policies of the Tory government impacting on local farming, fishing and energy interests? Or vote Tory in protest at the disastrous policies of the SNP government impacting local energy interests and services?
Or will the Boundary Review actually go through - in which case I will be in Aberdeenshire Central which is mostly the old Gordon seat. This was held by Malcolm Bruce of my own party until 2015, though LD votes have dissipated a lot since then.
So, much to play for and the new constituencies could shake a load of things up...
I hadn't realised that the new boundaries were still not in force. This is beyond ridiculous. Atm I am in Dundee West and would probably vote Labour in the vain hope they can recover the seat. If they go through I will be in the new Tayside North where the Tories will clearly be the strongest challenger.
Final recommendations are due by 1st July and will presumably be approved by Parliament in the autumn. I don't think there's a real rush because Sunak ain't calling an election before then.
IIRC the new boundaries don’t now need a vote in Parliament, with the legislation already passed. This was to stop the MPs voting them down again, after the debacle last time. The old boundaries have been in place since 2010, based on population numbers from 2005 or 2006.
No, the new boundaries are not based on population numbers. As part of the Cameron/Osborne gerrymandering programme (that cost them the EU referendum and both their careers), seats are based on the numbers of registered voters.
So biased towards elderly house-owners and Tory voters. Which will make the existential crisis of the UK state even worse.
Biased towards actual voters. No vote, no voice...
Biased towards actual numbers vs an estimate of population size and demographics
Buying ICE vehicles now is like buying analog film cameras 20 years ago. Soon the ICE for personal transport will be as obsolete as cassette tapes or CDs.
Analog (sic) film cameras are trendy right now, and CDs are still viable.
Cassette tapes are more niche
Not the mass market by a long way, despite the hipster interest in vinyl.
Sure, ICE vehicles have some advantages still, particularly for rural areas. We have an ICE hybrid as well as an EV. Increasingly though EVs have the advantage. I think it will be my last ever ICE vehicle.
Film cameras and vinyl records were never turned into culture war battlegrounds in the way that BEVs have been by right wing shitbags though.
How useless is Boris that he could not get a decent Brexit agreement even though it is now confirmed that German car makers really do run Europe?
It’s rather amusing, that the EU powers-that-be just thought the Germans and Italians were going to roll over and accept the death of their car industries in a decade’s time.
And that despite "taking back control" our own policy is thrown into doubt by an EU change.
Technology doesn’t simply spring into existence because of legislation, no matter how many politicians wish it were so. Governments would be better off working towards upgrading the power infrastructure, and encouraging/incentivising the build-out of an electric car charging network.
There will come a tipping point, after which the change will happen organically and with the support of the people, rather than the people seeing the banning of cars as something done to them without their consent.
The technology to make all cars fully EV is here. There is no reason at all that we can't meet the 2030 target, with one big exception - charging. It is the wild west, 40 different charging networks, each with their own way of taking payment (usually with a bespoke app), each with their own (lack of) maintenance and customer service arrangements.
We will need both a fundamental change to planning regulations to get charge points installed everywhere, and regulation of the charging companies to bring about universality. This was managed with connectors where we have gone from 3 to 1, so it can be done if rules are imposed.
The other consideration is whether we are happy to import all vehicles. What is left of the industry is now under threat from us going earlier than the EEA and our own wild west approach to business planning and regulations...
EVs are the future. Buying ICE vehicles now is like buying analog film cameras 20 years ago. Soon the ICE for personal transport will be as obsolete as cassette tapes or CDs.
And I would take the photo from a Nikon FE2 over that of an iPhone 6s any day of the week.
Certainly the sensor/film size in a camera is quite critical in terms of image quality, indeed more important in many ways to pixel count. Hence there is a role for DSL type cameras, as we see with photojournalists.
It is the compact digital camera that is being superseded by the camera phones. Indeed for macro-photography they can beat even quite expensive cameras. This was on my Samsung.
One of the great advantages of digital is the extraordinarily high ISo settings you can use. How do you put a photo on here? I shot one at 25,000 ISO on a four thirds leica and the quality is surprising.
How useless is Boris that he could not get a decent Brexit agreement even though it is now confirmed that German car makers really do run Europe?
It’s rather amusing, that the EU powers-that-be just thought the Germans and Italians were going to roll over and accept the death of their car industries in a decade’s time.
And that despite "taking back control" our own policy is thrown into doubt by an EU change.
Technology doesn’t simply spring into existence because of legislation, no matter how many politicians wish it were so. Governments would be better off working towards upgrading the power infrastructure, and encouraging/incentivising the build-out of an electric car charging network.
There will come a tipping point, after which the change will happen organically and with the support of the people, rather than the people seeing the banning of cars as something done to them without their consent.
The technology to make all cars fully EV is here. There is no reason at all that we can't meet the 2030 target, with one big exception - charging. It is the wild west, 40 different charging networks, each with their own way of taking payment (usually with a bespoke app), each with their own (lack of) maintenance and customer service arrangements.
We will need both a fundamental change to planning regulations to get charge points installed everywhere, and regulation of the charging companies to bring about universality. This was managed with connectors where we have gone from 3 to 1, so it can be done if rules are imposed.
The other consideration is whether we are happy to import all vehicles. What is left of the industry is now under threat from us going earlier than the EEA and our own wild west approach to business planning and regulations...
EVs are the future. Buying ICE vehicles now is like buying analog film cameras 20 years ago. Soon the ICE for personal transport will be as obsolete as cassette tapes or CDs.
A few people I’ve spoke to recently have commented how impressed they’ve been by the Gen2 EV products now on the market. They are likely to wait for Gen3 or Gen4 before committing but said it was coming quickly
Buying ICE vehicles now is like buying analog film cameras 20 years ago. Soon the ICE for personal transport will be as obsolete as cassette tapes or CDs.
Analog (sic) film cameras are trendy right now, and CDs are still viable.
Cassette tapes are more niche
Not the mass market by a long way, despite the hipster interest in vinyl.
Sure, ICE vehicles have some advantages still, particularly for rural areas. We have an ICE hybrid as well as an EV. Increasingly though EVs have the advantage. I think it will be my last ever ICE vehicle.
Currently EVs are 3% of the UK car fleet, but by Dec 22 had 30% of new sales. This is being driven by demand, and is only heading one way. The manufacturers see this too, which is why so much of the new design and engineering is centered on them, with ICE vehicle increasingly neglected.
There is an issue with any technological change of when to jump to the new tech, but as EV prices drop, practicality increases, and psychological barriers drop, it is only going one way.
I largely agree. My reservation is how much the prices of EVs will drop. It's one of those things I've been waiting for for some time and doesn't appear to be happening.
I do also wonder if there is a future in which the most common model is owning small EVs for the 90% of our journeys which are local and renting large ICEs or other type for longer journeys. My understanding is that EVs are much more cost effective as small, relatively low range vehicles, and I wonder whether by trying to make EVs do what ICEs do we are solving the wrong problem.
As a personal example, in my family we have two cars: a 14 year old Ford Focus and a rather newer MPV. We initially bought an MPV because we had three children under 5, and needed something which could fit three car seats in - but we're through that stage now. Now the reason for having an MPV is that a few times a year, all five of us plus luggage will go on a journey of more than 200 miles. I think many people are the same - we have the car we need for the extreme example of the journeys we make, rather than the typical example. 90% of the time, though, there is at least one car parked outside our house. And weeks, months can go by without ever going much more than 50 miles from home. It feels like a much more resource-efficient solution would be to own a small EV, and on the rare occasion we needed two cars at once, or that we needed a bigger car, rent one.
An EV works well as a second car, for most people who have a private driveway and a regular job. It does the daily commute, runs errands around town, and goes on charge every night. That covers 90% of journeys.
I can definitely see the last of the MPV and SUV petrol cars being snapped up by rental companies, they’re going to hold up in value and everyone’s going to want one at Christmas.
The worry for those buying an EV today, is that the technology moves so quickly that a five-year-old car is as popular as a five-year-old phone. When the new one does 500 miles and charges in 5 minutes, who will want an old one? What if the charging standard changes to enable faster speeds, and you’re stuck with the old one? I’d always lease an EV rather than buy it, which gives some random bank the risk of prices imploding. There are EV taxis that have done huge mileages (500,000+), but the concern is that the battery has a life measured mostly in time rather than usage.
There’s also concerns around the connectivity of EVs in particular, especially with Tesla who own the chargers. There’s stories from the US, of cars repaired outside the dealer network being banned from the charging network for “safety” reasons. Even if you own the car, do you really actually *own* the car?
The next big change in architecture is 800V charging (vs the current 400V). The problem with this is that not only does it cost more on the car, the demands on the electricity network to install 800V chargers is so much more.
In practice the drive for manufacturers should be efficiency. They have have made big strides in fuel economy from their ICE engines, yet the likes of Jag / BMW / Audi / Mercedes don't seem to give a toss about developing an efficient drivetrain. Simply stick a bigger and bigger battery in to get to a claimed range they won't ever get near. Sticking an ugly massive pointless grill on the front is far more important apparently.
The drivetrains are increasingly efficient (see for example Tesla's latest motors). Most if the mass manufactures are only just starting to enter the market.
Early adopters always pay more for any new technology. Which is why the luxury end of the market got in.
Buying ICE vehicles now is like buying analog film cameras 20 years ago. Soon the ICE for personal transport will be as obsolete as cassette tapes or CDs.
Analog (sic) film cameras are trendy right now, and CDs are still viable.
Cassette tapes are more niche
Not the mass market by a long way, despite the hipster interest in vinyl.
Sure, ICE vehicles have some advantages still, particularly for rural areas. We have an ICE hybrid as well as an EV. Increasingly though EVs have the advantage. I think it will be my last ever ICE vehicle.
Currently EVs are 3% of the UK car fleet, but by Dec 22 had 30% of new sales. This is being driven by demand, and is only heading one way. The manufacturers see this too, which is why so much of the new design and engineering is centered on them, with ICE vehicle increasingly neglected.
There is an issue with any technological change of when to jump to the new tech, but as EV prices drop, practicality increases, and psychological barriers drop, it is only going one way.
I largely agree. My reservation is how much the prices of EVs will drop. It's one of those things I've been waiting for for some time and doesn't appear to be happening.
I do also wonder if there is a future in which the most common model is owning small EVs for the 90% of our journeys which are local and renting large ICEs or other type for longer journeys. My understanding is that EVs are much more cost effective as small, relatively low range vehicles, and I wonder whether by trying to make EVs do what ICEs do we are solving the wrong problem.
As a personal example, in my family we have two cars: a 14 year old Ford Focus and a rather newer MPV. We initially bought an MPV because we had three children under 5, and needed something which could fit three car seats in - but we're through that stage now. Now the reason for having an MPV is that a few times a year, all five of us plus luggage will go on a journey of more than 200 miles. I think many people are the same - we have the car we need for the extreme example of the journeys we make, rather than the typical example. 90% of the time, though, there is at least one car parked outside our house. And weeks, months can go by without ever going much more than 50 miles from home. It feels like a much more resource-efficient solution would be to own a small EV, and on the rare occasion we needed two cars at once, or that we needed a bigger car, rent one.
An EV works well as a second car, for most people who have a private driveway and a regular job. It does the daily commute, runs errands around town, and goes on charge every night. That covers 90% of journeys.
I can definitely see the last of the MPV and SUV petrol cars being snapped up by rental companies, they’re going to hold up in value and everyone’s going to want one at Christmas.
The worry for those buying an EV today, is that the technology moves so quickly that a five-year-old car is as popular as a five-year-old phone. When the new one does 500 miles and charges in 5 minutes, who will want an old one? What if the charging standard changes to enable faster speeds, and you’re stuck with the old one? I’d always lease an EV rather than buy it, which gives some random bank the risk of prices imploding. There are EV taxis that have done huge mileages (500,000+), but the concern is that the battery has a life measured mostly in time rather than usage.
There’s also concerns around the connectivity of EVs in particular, especially with Tesla who own the chargers. There’s stories from the US, of cars repaired outside the dealer network being banned from the charging network for “safety” reasons. Even if you own the car, do you really actually *own* the car?
We've never paid more than a few thousand for any of our second (or fourth) hand diesel cars. The chances of us, or the large number of other car drivers like us, putting down a five figure deposit and a few hundred a month for a new car are very slim. There will be lots of demand for five year old EV cars.
Oh indeed. I have a 17-year-old E-class Merc, that I paid £4k for. It’ll last forever, so long as the oil gets changed occasionally.
The worry with an older EV, is that it needs a battery replacement one day that basically writes it off. Owning one outside the warranty is going to be like owning a Range Rover with no warranty, potentially very painful.
Perhaps there will be a cottage industry of battery repair shops, or perhaps it will be impossible to do anything outside the dealer network who will sell you a whole new pack? There is a cottage industry around the old Nissan Leaf, which seems to be simple enough that batteries can be swapped out and even upgraded. It remains to be seen, whether that is possible with other EVs in the future.
Buying ICE vehicles now is like buying analog film cameras 20 years ago. Soon the ICE for personal transport will be as obsolete as cassette tapes or CDs.
Analog (sic) film cameras are trendy right now, and CDs are still viable.
Cassette tapes are more niche
Not the mass market by a long way, despite the hipster interest in vinyl.
Sure, ICE vehicles have some advantages still, particularly for rural areas. We have an ICE hybrid as well as an EV. Increasingly though EVs have the advantage. I think it will be my last ever ICE vehicle.
Currently EVs are 3% of the UK car fleet, but by Dec 22 had 30% of new sales. This is being driven by demand, and is only heading one way. The manufacturers see this too, which is why so much of the new design and engineering is centered on them, with ICE vehicle increasingly neglected.
There is an issue with any technological change of when to jump to the new tech, but as EV prices drop, practicality increases, and psychological barriers drop, it is only going one way.
I largely agree. My reservation is how much the prices of EVs will drop. It's one of those things I've been waiting for for some time and doesn't appear to be happening...
Largely because demand greatly exceeds supply, so manufacturers have no incentive to make cheaper models. That will change in the next 3-5 years, looking at the number of factories being built now and in planning.
And both batteries and motors are steadily getting cheaper to make, alongside the increase in capacity.
I will never have an electric car until they solve the charging issue ie having to wait to get to a charging point and. Then 40 mins for a half charge....I suspect I will have met my maker by then.
You can do 10-80% in about 25 min on the latest chargers. To get to half should be a fraction of that - the charging is faster on an empty battery.
Buying ICE vehicles now is like buying analog film cameras 20 years ago. Soon the ICE for personal transport will be as obsolete as cassette tapes or CDs.
Analog (sic) film cameras are trendy right now, and CDs are still viable.
Cassette tapes are more niche
Not the mass market by a long way, despite the hipster interest in vinyl.
Sure, ICE vehicles have some advantages still, particularly for rural areas. We have an ICE hybrid as well as an EV. Increasingly though EVs have the advantage. I think it will be my last ever ICE vehicle.
Film cameras and vinyl records were never turned into culture war battlegrounds in the way that BEVs have been by right wing shitbags though.
Yes. The right posts utter bullshit about EVs because they need to attack environmentalism and the kind of people who want to adopt new technology because change threatens a status quo which is very profitable for their owners.
Buying ICE vehicles now is like buying analog film cameras 20 years ago. Soon the ICE for personal transport will be as obsolete as cassette tapes or CDs.
Analog (sic) film cameras are trendy right now, and CDs are still viable.
Cassette tapes are more niche
Not the mass market by a long way, despite the hipster interest in vinyl.
Sure, ICE vehicles have some advantages still, particularly for rural areas. We have an ICE hybrid as well as an EV. Increasingly though EVs have the advantage. I think it will be my last ever ICE vehicle.
Film cameras and vinyl records were never turned into culture war battlegrounds in the way that BEVs have been by right wing shitbags though.
I don't think EVs are a culture war issue. I know which side of the culture war I'm on, but I am pretty enthusiastic about electrification and expect my next or next-but-one vehicle to be electric. I don't know many who don't. ULEZs however may be.
Julia Hartley Brewer starting to go full on antivax on talkradio this morning. She says we have been big pharma guinea pigs. Interesting.
The world needs contrarians. But the problem with contrarians is that they grow to feel the need to take the contrary view on EVERYTHING.
Trouble is more that the GB News, shock jock, right wing tabloid, Spiked, Free Speech Union contrarians are just another silo of similar views, not many in that tribe who take issue with each other’s pov. A few relentless contrarians in amongst that motley crew would make a refreshing change.
They cancelled Guto Harri for taking the knee, lest we forget.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning we will remember him.
Buying ICE vehicles now is like buying analog film cameras 20 years ago. Soon the ICE for personal transport will be as obsolete as cassette tapes or CDs.
Analog (sic) film cameras are trendy right now, and CDs are still viable.
Cassette tapes are more niche
Not the mass market by a long way, despite the hipster interest in vinyl.
Sure, ICE vehicles have some advantages still, particularly for rural areas. We have an ICE hybrid as well as an EV. Increasingly though EVs have the advantage. I think it will be my last ever ICE vehicle.
Currently EVs are 3% of the UK car fleet, but by Dec 22 had 30% of new sales. This is being driven by demand, and is only heading one way. The manufacturers see this too, which is why so much of the new design and engineering is centered on them, with ICE vehicle increasingly neglected.
There is an issue with any technological change of when to jump to the new tech, but as EV prices drop, practicality increases, and psychological barriers drop, it is only going one way.
I largely agree. My reservation is how much the prices of EVs will drop. It's one of those things I've been waiting for for some time and doesn't appear to be happening.
I do also wonder if there is a future in which the most common model is owning small EVs for the 90% of our journeys which are local and renting large ICEs or other type for longer journeys. My understanding is that EVs are much more cost effective as small, relatively low range vehicles, and I wonder whether by trying to make EVs do what ICEs do we are solving the wrong problem.
As a personal example, in my family we have two cars: a 14 year old Ford Focus and a rather newer MPV. We initially bought an MPV because we had three children under 5, and needed something which could fit three car seats in - but we're through that stage now. Now the reason for having an MPV is that a few times a year, all five of us plus luggage will go on a journey of more than 200 miles. I think many people are the same - we have the car we need for the extreme example of the journeys we make, rather than the typical example. 90% of the time, though, there is at least one car parked outside our house. And weeks, months can go by without ever going much more than 50 miles from home. It feels like a much more resource-efficient solution would be to own a small EV, and on the rare occasion we needed two cars at once, or that we needed a bigger car, rent one.
An EV works well as a second car, for most people who have a private driveway and a regular job. It does the daily commute, runs errands around town, and goes on charge every night. That covers 90% of journeys.
I can definitely see the last of the MPV and SUV petrol cars being snapped up by rental companies, they’re going to hold up in value and everyone’s going to want one at Christmas.
The worry for those buying an EV today, is that the technology moves so quickly that a five-year-old car is as popular as a five-year-old phone. When the new one does 500 miles and charges in 5 minutes, who will want an old one? What if the charging standard changes to enable faster speeds, and you’re stuck with the old one? I’d always lease an EV rather than buy it, which gives some random bank the risk of prices imploding. There are EV taxis that have done huge mileages (500,000+), but the concern is that the battery has a life measured mostly in time rather than usage.
There’s also concerns around the connectivity of EVs in particular, especially with Tesla who own the chargers. There’s stories from the US, of cars repaired outside the dealer network being banned from the charging network for “safety” reasons. Even if you own the car, do you really actually *own* the car?
The next big change in architecture is 800V charging (vs the current 400V). The problem with this is that not only does it cost more on the car, the demands on the electricity network to install 800V chargers is so much more.
In practice the drive for manufacturers should be efficiency. They have have made big strides in fuel economy from their ICE engines, yet the likes of Jag / BMW / Audi / Mercedes don't seem to give a toss about developing an efficient drivetrain. Simply stick a bigger and bigger battery in to get to a claimed range they won't ever get near. Sticking an ugly massive pointless grill on the front is far more important apparently.
The drivetrains are increasingly efficient (see for example Tesla's latest motors). Most if the mass manufactures are only just starting to enter the market.
Early adopters always pay more for any new technology. Which is why the luxury end of the market got in.
Tesla yes. Hyundai/Kia yes. Ze Germans, nein.
Purely anecdotal, but it seems like every time a car producing particularly noticeably diesel pollution goes past, it's either a Volkswagen or an Audi.
The UK government has delivered on its promises in remarkably quick time. Described by the Ukrainians as a "true friend of Ukraine".
I know it’s been said numerous times, but this looks again like a turning point in the war. The enemy has thrown so much, in terms of men and materiel, at the conflict, yet has failed to gain any significant territory over the winter.
The juxtaposition of numerous Western tanks arriving in Ukraine, as the Russians are pulling 60-year-old T-55 tanks out of museums for recommissioning, is very stark.
A T-55 vs a Challenger 2, is the enemy bringing a knife to a gun fight.
200 T-55 vs 14 Challenger 2s… I wouldn’t bet against the T-55s
I refer you to the Battle of Norfolk.
Not quite the same tank versions but earlier iterations.
From wiki. Quite something.
"A British Challenger 1 tank during the 1st Gulf War. The British Challenger tank was the most efficient tank of the Gulf war suffering no losses while destroying approximately 300 Iraqi tanks during combat operations."
The Challengers will have four major advantages over the older Russian tanks
i) Longer firing range
ii) Much better armour
iii) GPS
iv) Night vision
In the original Gulf War a single battalion of Abrams, which are comparable to Challengers, destroyed an entire Iraqi division.
Also, like then, the Ukrainians will have much better live time intelligence info.
Buying ICE vehicles now is like buying analog film cameras 20 years ago. Soon the ICE for personal transport will be as obsolete as cassette tapes or CDs.
Analog (sic) film cameras are trendy right now, and CDs are still viable.
Cassette tapes are more niche
Not the mass market by a long way, despite the hipster interest in vinyl.
Sure, ICE vehicles have some advantages still, particularly for rural areas. We have an ICE hybrid as well as an EV. Increasingly though EVs have the advantage. I think it will be my last ever ICE vehicle.
Film cameras and vinyl records were never turned into culture war battlegrounds in the way that BEVs have been by right wing shitbags though.
I don't think EVs are a culture war issue. I know which side of the culture war I'm on, but I am pretty enthusiastic about electrification and expect my next or next-but-one vehicle to be electric. I don't know many who don't. ULEZs however may be.
If there's a culture war around cars, it's coming from the people who want to use EVs as an excuse to move away from mass car ownership.
The UK government has delivered on its promises in remarkably quick time. Described by the Ukrainians as a "true friend of Ukraine".
I know it’s been said numerous times, but this looks again like a turning point in the war. The enemy has thrown so much, in terms of men and materiel, at the conflict, yet has failed to gain any significant territory over the winter.
The juxtaposition of numerous Western tanks arriving in Ukraine, as the Russians are pulling 60-year-old T-55 tanks out of museums for recommissioning, is very stark.
A T-55 vs a Challenger 2, is the enemy bringing a knife to a gun fight.
I'm a bit nervous about the Challenger 2's. A few 152mm artillery shells and ATGM strikes could quickly knock most of the 14 sent out.
Meanwhile France is doubling its supply of 155mm artillery shells to 2,000. A month. The lack of artillery ammunition is a huge problem.
A huge problem for both sides, given the apparent reduction in artillery usage by both sides. That is, unless one or both sides are keeping a lot of ammunition in reserve for a push.
Russia's problem is that given time, the west can easily outstrip Russian production, whilst just buffing our nails - given the political will. Russia's economy was relatively small *before* the war, and even going to a WW2-style footing and devoting 50% of their economy to the war effort will do little to change that. Especially with sanctions biting.
I keep on hearing that the West can easily outstrip Russian production, but I don't see it. The shortage of artillery ammunition has been an issue for a long time, and is still an issue. The West is still sending armoured vehicles from existing stocks, with no discernible sign of new production - even Poland's planned production of licensed Korean tanks is some way off.
If the war is still being fought in 2024 what equipment will the West be able to send to Ukraine? SFA by the look of it.
With political will, we can. Russia's GDP is $1.5-1.6 trillion, below both Canada and Italy's. Our economy is $1 trillion above that; Germany's is double Russia's. France's is about the same as ours. Even leaving aside a potentially-flaky USA, the allies' economies are much larger than Russia's.
Artillery production is being increased in many countries, from Australia to Canada; France to Norway. No individual country will produce enough, but combined we get to serious numbers. And yes, the increases will take time: but once ramped up, the taps will keep flowing as long as the funding does.
To ask a question similar to yours: if the war is still being fought in 2024 what equipment will Russia be able to send to Ukraine?
The risk is that Russia will have supplies from China, where it's politically a lot easier to redirect industrial production and resources to the military than it is in the West.
The ability of Russia to fight on despite heavy equipment losses has been consistently underestimated. Russian tank losses, for example, are in the range of 1900 (visually confirmed) to 3600 (Ukrainian general staff) compared to just under 3000 tanks in active service at the start of the war.
According to some estimates the Russians will still be able to send significant numbers of reconditioned T-72 tanks removed from storage well into 2024.
I think the West needs to do a lot more to increase armaments production to support Ukraine. Experience during the war to date is that we appear to be trying to do the minimum necessary and continually have to incrementally increase what we are doing. I foresee major announcements on new investment in armaments production later in the year, at least a year later than they should have happened. Everything is so reluctant and slow.
If China joins the game, then all bets are off - depending on how whole-heartedly they join. But I can't see why Xi would want to join in in any significant manner. The downsides for him are large in many ways.
"According to some estimates the Russians will still be able to send significant numbers of reconditioned T-72 tanks removed from storage well into 2024."
The questions are how large are those 'significant numbers' (i.e. are they significant enough?), and how good the reconditioning is. Besides, it's not just a question of tanks (which are the large, sexy objects people obsess on): it's a case of IFVs, APCs, logistics trucks and everything else. The unsexy things that this war has been using up at an alarming rate.
Perun's latest video covers this a little, and he makes a point that it's not just a case of combat losses of vehicles: it's a case of vehicles simply wearing out. If that T-72 was near the end of its service life when it went into deep storage, then the reconditioning becomes a very, very large project: and if it's not done fully, that vehicle's life is reduced.
And in addition: parts of a tank plant that is busy reconditioning old tanks cannot be used to build new tanks. Neither can the skilled workers. Again, the west/Ukrainian allies have a much greater capacity for new build, repair and refurbishment of Ukrainian kit.
The Oryx site shows a Russian loss rate that exceeds the estimates (high and low) for Russian tank production combined with refurbishment.
Which is why we are seeing older and older tanks on the frontline.
The T54/55 we say a while back in transport might well be going to be converted into recovery vehicles etc, rather than as front line MBT. On the other hand…
So. What was @Scott_xP doing on stage at the Usher Hall?
I never said I was on stage.
I was the sound engineer for a 2 night stand at the Fringe one year.
And the first night did not go well...
I for one am literally GOBSMACKED that it turns out you’re a sound engineer, not the axemeister general in a notorious Death Metal combo
Scott wasn’t in a death metal band but had just auditioned successfully for a Swedish hair metal band, he was in the Final Countdown to his first gig and then found the deal was torn up. This is why you will find that Scott is obsessed with not being part of Europe anymore.
There’s also concerns around the connectivity of EVs in particular, especially with Tesla who own the chargers. There’s stories from the US, of cars repaired outside the dealer network being banned from the charging network for “safety” reasons. Even if you own the car, do you really actually *own* the car?
A Tesla will be barred from connection to the Supercharger network if the VIN has been recorded as written off so even if you get one on a salvage title and repair it you can still use it on other chargers or at home.
Repairs outside the dealer network are fine and Tesla subcontract out most of the maintenance and repairs to 3rd parties now.
The UK government has delivered on its promises in remarkably quick time. Described by the Ukrainians as a "true friend of Ukraine".
I know it’s been said numerous times, but this looks again like a turning point in the war. The enemy has thrown so much, in terms of men and materiel, at the conflict, yet has failed to gain any significant territory over the winter.
The juxtaposition of numerous Western tanks arriving in Ukraine, as the Russians are pulling 60-year-old T-55 tanks out of museums for recommissioning, is very stark.
A T-55 vs a Challenger 2, is the enemy bringing a knife to a gun fight.
200 T-55 vs 14 Challenger 2s… I wouldn’t bet against the T-55s
I refer you to the Battle of Norfolk.
Not quite the same tank versions but earlier iterations.
From wiki. Quite something.
"A British Challenger 1 tank during the 1st Gulf War. The British Challenger tank was the most efficient tank of the Gulf war suffering no losses while destroying approximately 300 Iraqi tanks during combat operations."
The Challengers will have four major advantages over the older Russian tanks
i) Longer firing range
ii) Much better armour
iii) GPS
iv) Night vision
In the original Gulf War a single battalion of Abrams, which are comparable to Challengers, destroyed an entire Iraqi division.
Also, like then, the Ukranians will have much better live time intelligence info.
The night vision stuff is interesting. I hadn't realised this is where NATO have a big advantage over other forces.
Buying ICE vehicles now is like buying analog film cameras 20 years ago. Soon the ICE for personal transport will be as obsolete as cassette tapes or CDs.
Analog (sic) film cameras are trendy right now, and CDs are still viable.
Cassette tapes are more niche
Not the mass market by a long way, despite the hipster interest in vinyl.
Sure, ICE vehicles have some advantages still, particularly for rural areas. We have an ICE hybrid as well as an EV. Increasingly though EVs have the advantage. I think it will be my last ever ICE vehicle.
Currently EVs are 3% of the UK car fleet, but by Dec 22 had 30% of new sales. This is being driven by demand, and is only heading one way. The manufacturers see this too, which is why so much of the new design and engineering is centered on them, with ICE vehicle increasingly neglected.
There is an issue with any technological change of when to jump to the new tech, but as EV prices drop, practicality increases, and psychological barriers drop, it is only going one way.
I largely agree. My reservation is how much the prices of EVs will drop. It's one of those things I've been waiting for for some time and doesn't appear to be happening.
I do also wonder if there is a future in which the most common model is owning small EVs for the 90% of our journeys which are local and renting large ICEs or other type for longer journeys. My understanding is that EVs are much more cost effective as small, relatively low range vehicles, and I wonder whether by trying to make EVs do what ICEs do we are solving the wrong problem.
As a personal example, in my family we have two cars: a 14 year old Ford Focus and a rather newer MPV. We initially bought an MPV because we had three children under 5, and needed something which could fit three car seats in - but we're through that stage now. Now the reason for having an MPV is that a few times a year, all five of us plus luggage will go on a journey of more than 200 miles. I think many people are the same - we have the car we need for the extreme example of the journeys we make, rather than the typical example. 90% of the time, though, there is at least one car parked outside our house. And weeks, months can go by without ever going much more than 50 miles from home. It feels like a much more resource-efficient solution would be to own a small EV, and on the rare occasion we needed two cars at once, or that we needed a bigger car, rent one.
An EV works well as a second car, for most people who have a private driveway and a regular job. It does the daily commute, runs errands around town, and goes on charge every night. That covers 90% of journeys.
I can definitely see the last of the MPV and SUV petrol cars being snapped up by rental companies, they’re going to hold up in value and everyone’s going to want one at Christmas.
The worry for those buying an EV today, is that the technology moves so quickly that a five-year-old car is as popular as a five-year-old phone. When the new one does 500 miles and charges in 5 minutes, who will want an old one? What if the charging standard changes to enable faster speeds, and you’re stuck with the old one? I’d always lease an EV rather than buy it, which gives some random bank the risk of prices imploding. There are EV taxis that have done huge mileages (500,000+), but the concern is that the battery has a life measured mostly in time rather than usage.
There’s also concerns around the connectivity of EVs in particular, especially with Tesla who own the chargers. There’s stories from the US, of cars repaired outside the dealer network being banned from the charging network for “safety” reasons. Even if you own the car, do you really actually *own* the car?
We've never paid more than a few thousand for any of our second (or fourth) hand diesel cars. The chances of us, or the large number of other car drivers like us, putting down a five figure deposit and a few hundred a month for a new car are very slim. There will be lots of demand for five year old EV cars.
Oh indeed. I have a 17-year-old E-class Merc, that I paid £4k for. It’ll last forever, so long as the oil gets changed occasionally.
The worry with an older EV, is that it needs a battery replacement one day that basically writes it off. Owning one outside the warranty is going to be like owning a Range Rover with no warranty, potentially very painful.
Perhaps there will be a cottage industry of battery repair shops, or perhaps it will be impossible to do anything outside the dealer network who will sell you a whole new pack? There is a cottage industry around the old Nissan Leaf, which seems to be simple enough that batteries can be swapped out and even upgraded. It remains to be seen, whether that is possible with other EVs in the future.
My Renault Zoe can also have its battery replaced. The new car costs about 19k (or did when I last checked, I got it secondhand for 12k) and the battery around 6k, or leased for £60 a month.
Buying ICE vehicles now is like buying analog film cameras 20 years ago. Soon the ICE for personal transport will be as obsolete as cassette tapes or CDs.
Analog (sic) film cameras are trendy right now, and CDs are still viable.
Cassette tapes are more niche
Not the mass market by a long way, despite the hipster interest in vinyl.
Sure, ICE vehicles have some advantages still, particularly for rural areas. We have an ICE hybrid as well as an EV. Increasingly though EVs have the advantage. I think it will be my last ever ICE vehicle.
Currently EVs are 3% of the UK car fleet, but by Dec 22 had 30% of new sales. This is being driven by demand, and is only heading one way. The manufacturers see this too, which is why so much of the new design and engineering is centered on them, with ICE vehicle increasingly neglected.
There is an issue with any technological change of when to jump to the new tech, but as EV prices drop, practicality increases, and psychological barriers drop, it is only going one way.
I largely agree. My reservation is how much the prices of EVs will drop. It's one of those things I've been waiting for for some time and doesn't appear to be happening.
I do also wonder if there is a future in which the most common model is owning small EVs for the 90% of our journeys which are local and renting large ICEs or other type for longer journeys. My understanding is that EVs are much more cost effective as small, relatively low range vehicles, and I wonder whether by trying to make EVs do what ICEs do we are solving the wrong problem.
As a personal example, in my family we have two cars: a 14 year old Ford Focus and a rather newer MPV. We initially bought an MPV because we had three children under 5, and needed something which could fit three car seats in - but we're through that stage now. Now the reason for having an MPV is that a few times a year, all five of us plus luggage will go on a journey of more than 200 miles. I think many people are the same - we have the car we need for the extreme example of the journeys we make, rather than the typical example. 90% of the time, though, there is at least one car parked outside our house. And weeks, months can go by without ever going much more than 50 miles from home. It feels like a much more resource-efficient solution would be to own a small EV, and on the rare occasion we needed two cars at once, or that we needed a bigger car, rent one.
An EV works well as a second car, for most people who have a private driveway and a regular job. It does the daily commute, runs errands around town, and goes on charge every night. That covers 90% of journeys.
I can definitely see the last of the MPV and SUV petrol cars being snapped up by rental companies, they’re going to hold up in value and everyone’s going to want one at Christmas.
The worry for those buying an EV today, is that the technology moves so quickly that a five-year-old car is as popular as a five-year-old phone. When the new one does 500 miles and charges in 5 minutes, who will want an old one? What if the charging standard changes to enable faster speeds, and you’re stuck with the old one? I’d always lease an EV rather than buy it, which gives some random bank the risk of prices imploding. There are EV taxis that have done huge mileages (500,000+), but the concern is that the battery has a life measured mostly in time rather than usage.
There’s also concerns around the connectivity of EVs in particular, especially with Tesla who own the chargers. There’s stories from the US, of cars repaired outside the dealer network being banned from the charging network for “safety” reasons. Even if you own the car, do you really actually *own* the car?
Man living in petrostate not a fan of EVs.
Just playing the devil’s advocate. There’s actually a few EVs out here, but electricity is expensive and petrol is cheap.
At least there’s the infrastructure though, which isn’t the case in large parts of the world outside the West. There’s not going to be a huge rise in EV use in large parts of Asia or Africa any time soon.
Buying ICE vehicles now is like buying analog film cameras 20 years ago. Soon the ICE for personal transport will be as obsolete as cassette tapes or CDs.
Analog (sic) film cameras are trendy right now, and CDs are still viable.
Cassette tapes are more niche
Not the mass market by a long way, despite the hipster interest in vinyl.
Sure, ICE vehicles have some advantages still, particularly for rural areas. We have an ICE hybrid as well as an EV. Increasingly though EVs have the advantage. I think it will be my last ever ICE vehicle.
Currently EVs are 3% of the UK car fleet, but by Dec 22 had 30% of new sales. This is being driven by demand, and is only heading one way. The manufacturers see this too, which is why so much of the new design and engineering is centered on them, with ICE vehicle increasingly neglected.
There is an issue with any technological change of when to jump to the new tech, but as EV prices drop, practicality increases, and psychological barriers drop, it is only going one way.
I largely agree. My reservation is how much the prices of EVs will drop. It's one of those things I've been waiting for for some time and doesn't appear to be happening...
Largely because demand greatly exceeds supply, so manufacturers have no incentive to make cheaper models. That will change in the next 3-5 years, looking at the number of factories being built now and in planning.
And both batteries and motors are steadily getting cheaper to make, alongside the increase in capacity.
I will never have an electric car until they solve the charging issue ie having to wait to get to a charging point and. Then 40 mins for a half charge....I suspect I will have met my maker by then.
In 3 years of EV ownership, I have only had to use a public charger twice, and neither time did I have to wait. It is not often that I drive more than 280 miles in a day, and charging overnight on cheap electricity is better.
The chief executive of Britain's biggest supermarket has criticised the SNP's confusing bottle recycling scheme, warning it risks setting back broader UK efforts to go green.
Ken Murphy, chief executive of Tesco, said the scheme championed by Nicola Sturgeon was "not fit for purpose, and worse, it risks driving up prices and undermining consumer confidence".
The UK government has delivered on its promises in remarkably quick time. Described by the Ukrainians as a "true friend of Ukraine".
I know it’s been said numerous times, but this looks again like a turning point in the war. The enemy has thrown so much, in terms of men and materiel, at the conflict, yet has failed to gain any significant territory over the winter.
The juxtaposition of numerous Western tanks arriving in Ukraine, as the Russians are pulling 60-year-old T-55 tanks out of museums for recommissioning, is very stark.
A T-55 vs a Challenger 2, is the enemy bringing a knife to a gun fight.
200 T-55 vs 14 Challenger 2s… I wouldn’t bet against the T-55s
I refer you to the Battle of Norfolk.
Not quite the same tank versions but earlier iterations.
From wiki. Quite something.
"A British Challenger 1 tank during the 1st Gulf War. The British Challenger tank was the most efficient tank of the Gulf war suffering no losses while destroying approximately 300 Iraqi tanks during combat operations."
The Challengers will have four major advantages over the older Russian tanks
i) Longer firing range
ii) Much better armour
iii) GPS
iv) Night vision
In the original Gulf War a single battalion of Abrams, which are comparable to Challengers, destroyed an entire Iraqi division.
Also, like then, the Ukranians will have much better live time intelligence info.
The night vision stuff is interesting. I hadn't realised this is where NATO have a big advantage over other forces.
Yup.
If the cold war had turned hot, sans nuclear, it would have been very one sided.
The forces that ejected Iraq out of Kuwait were the ones that would have pulverised the Soviets.
The UK government has delivered on its promises in remarkably quick time. Described by the Ukrainians as a "true friend of Ukraine".
I know it’s been said numerous times, but this looks again like a turning point in the war. The enemy has thrown so much, in terms of men and materiel, at the conflict, yet has failed to gain any significant territory over the winter.
The juxtaposition of numerous Western tanks arriving in Ukraine, as the Russians are pulling 60-year-old T-55 tanks out of museums for recommissioning, is very stark.
A T-55 vs a Challenger 2, is the enemy bringing a knife to a gun fight.
200 T-55 vs 14 Challenger 2s… I wouldn’t bet against the T-55s
I refer you to the Battle of Norfolk.
Not quite the same tank versions but earlier iterations.
From wiki. Quite something.
"A British Challenger 1 tank during the 1st Gulf War. The British Challenger tank was the most efficient tank of the Gulf war suffering no losses while destroying approximately 300 Iraqi tanks during combat operations."
The Challengers will have four major advantages over the older Russian tanks
i) Longer firing range
ii) Much better armour
iii) GPS
iv) Night vision
In the original Gulf War a single battalion of Abrams, which are comparable to Challengers, destroyed an entire Iraqi division.
Also, like then, the Ukranians will have much better live time intelligence info.
It doesn't really make any sense to do a direct comparison as there has been very little hardcore tank-on-tank action in the SMO; that is not how it's being fought.
Also, you'll be very lucky to see a Russian tank as the 100% truth telling Ukrainians now claim to have destroyed every tank in the Russian army.
The UK government has delivered on its promises in remarkably quick time. Described by the Ukrainians as a "true friend of Ukraine".
I know it’s been said numerous times, but this looks again like a turning point in the war. The enemy has thrown so much, in terms of men and materiel, at the conflict, yet has failed to gain any significant territory over the winter.
The juxtaposition of numerous Western tanks arriving in Ukraine, as the Russians are pulling 60-year-old T-55 tanks out of museums for recommissioning, is very stark.
A T-55 vs a Challenger 2, is the enemy bringing a knife to a gun fight.
200 T-55 vs 14 Challenger 2s… I wouldn’t bet against the T-55s
I refer you to the Battle of Norfolk.
Not quite the same tank versions but earlier iterations.
I wondered before if the Ukrainians will resurrect the Heavy tank doctrine for their mixed force. See M103 / Conqueror
The idea is that the heavy tanks kill the enemy tanks exposed by your lighter tanks moving forward - making them move in turn. The heavy tanks do this at long range.
Buying ICE vehicles now is like buying analog film cameras 20 years ago. Soon the ICE for personal transport will be as obsolete as cassette tapes or CDs.
Analog (sic) film cameras are trendy right now, and CDs are still viable.
Cassette tapes are more niche
Not the mass market by a long way, despite the hipster interest in vinyl.
Sure, ICE vehicles have some advantages still, particularly for rural areas. We have an ICE hybrid as well as an EV. Increasingly though EVs have the advantage. I think it will be my last ever ICE vehicle.
Currently EVs are 3% of the UK car fleet, but by Dec 22 had 30% of new sales. This is being driven by demand, and is only heading one way. The manufacturers see this too, which is why so much of the new design and engineering is centered on them, with ICE vehicle increasingly neglected.
There is an issue with any technological change of when to jump to the new tech, but as EV prices drop, practicality increases, and psychological barriers drop, it is only going one way.
I largely agree. My reservation is how much the prices of EVs will drop. It's one of those things I've been waiting for for some time and doesn't appear to be happening.
I do also wonder if there is a future in which the most common model is owning small EVs for the 90% of our journeys which are local and renting large ICEs or other type for longer journeys. My understanding is that EVs are much more cost effective as small, relatively low range vehicles, and I wonder whether by trying to make EVs do what ICEs do we are solving the wrong problem.
As a personal example, in my family we have two cars: a 14 year old Ford Focus and a rather newer MPV. We initially bought an MPV because we had three children under 5, and needed something which could fit three car seats in - but we're through that stage now. Now the reason for having an MPV is that a few times a year, all five of us plus luggage will go on a journey of more than 200 miles. I think many people are the same - we have the car we need for the extreme example of the journeys we make, rather than the typical example. 90% of the time, though, there is at least one car parked outside our house. And weeks, months can go by without ever going much more than 50 miles from home. It feels like a much more resource-efficient solution would be to own a small EV, and on the rare occasion we needed two cars at once, or that we needed a bigger car, rent one.
An EV works well as a second car, for most people who have a private driveway and a regular job. It does the daily commute, runs errands around town, and goes on charge every night. That covers 90% of journeys.
I can definitely see the last of the MPV and SUV petrol cars being snapped up by rental companies, they’re going to hold up in value and everyone’s going to want one at Christmas.
The worry for those buying an EV today, is that the technology moves so quickly that a five-year-old car is as popular as a five-year-old phone. When the new one does 500 miles and charges in 5 minutes, who will want an old one? What if the charging standard changes to enable faster speeds, and you’re stuck with the old one? I’d always lease an EV rather than buy it, which gives some random bank the risk of prices imploding. There are EV taxis that have done huge mileages (500,000+), but the concern is that the battery has a life measured mostly in time rather than usage.
There’s also concerns around the connectivity of EVs in particular, especially with Tesla who own the chargers. There’s stories from the US, of cars repaired outside the dealer network being banned from the charging network for “safety” reasons. Even if you own the car, do you really actually *own* the car?
Yes indeed - but as someone who a) buys a nearly new car and then runs it until it doesn't work any more, and b) takes the same approach with phones (my current phone is 4 years old); I'd say this is an area where I'm right and most people are wrong
I can see - especially with cars - the attractiveness of waiting for more efficient models. But aside from that, how good can a car or a phone be?
I love the dashboard of my 2009 Ford Focus. It is just about perfection. You have three dials for the heater (how hard do you blow, which direction do you blow, and how hot do you blow); two buttons (heat the front window, heat the back window), hazard warning lights, a radio, a jack into which you can plug an ipod, and that's it. (It also has some sticks by which you can see stats for average speed on your journey, etc, but while I like stats I could live without those). Anything beyond this - and I include satnavs in this - is just frippery. New for new's sake. My newer MPV has all sorts of buttons and functions and I don't know what they do and I can't be bothered to learn and in any case I can't actually see what they are without my reading glasses, and I don't wear those for driving.
(One exception, actually, is that my MPV has a digital radio. I quite like that.)
Buying ICE vehicles now is like buying analog film cameras 20 years ago. Soon the ICE for personal transport will be as obsolete as cassette tapes or CDs.
Analog (sic) film cameras are trendy right now, and CDs are still viable.
Cassette tapes are more niche
Not the mass market by a long way, despite the hipster interest in vinyl.
Sure, ICE vehicles have some advantages still, particularly for rural areas. We have an ICE hybrid as well as an EV. Increasingly though EVs have the advantage. I think it will be my last ever ICE vehicle.
Currently EVs are 3% of the UK car fleet, but by Dec 22 had 30% of new sales. This is being driven by demand, and is only heading one way. The manufacturers see this too, which is why so much of the new design and engineering is centered on them, with ICE vehicle increasingly neglected.
There is an issue with any technological change of when to jump to the new tech, but as EV prices drop, practicality increases, and psychological barriers drop, it is only going one way.
I largely agree. My reservation is how much the prices of EVs will drop. It's one of those things I've been waiting for for some time and doesn't appear to be happening.
I do also wonder if there is a future in which the most common model is owning small EVs for the 90% of our journeys which are local and renting large ICEs or other type for longer journeys. My understanding is that EVs are much more cost effective as small, relatively low range vehicles, and I wonder whether by trying to make EVs do what ICEs do we are solving the wrong problem.
As a personal example, in my family we have two cars: a 14 year old Ford Focus and a rather newer MPV. We initially bought an MPV because we had three children under 5, and needed something which could fit three car seats in - but we're through that stage now. Now the reason for having an MPV is that a few times a year, all five of us plus luggage will go on a journey of more than 200 miles. I think many people are the same - we have the car we need for the extreme example of the journeys we make, rather than the typical example. 90% of the time, though, there is at least one car parked outside our house. And weeks, months can go by without ever going much more than 50 miles from home. It feels like a much more resource-efficient solution would be to own a small EV, and on the rare occasion we needed two cars at once, or that we needed a bigger car, rent one.
An EV works well as a second car, for most people who have a private driveway and a regular job. It does the daily commute, runs errands around town, and goes on charge every night. That covers 90% of journeys.
I can definitely see the last of the MPV and SUV petrol cars being snapped up by rental companies, they’re going to hold up in value and everyone’s going to want one at Christmas.
The worry for those buying an EV today, is that the technology moves so quickly that a five-year-old car is as popular as a five-year-old phone. When the new one does 500 miles and charges in 5 minutes, who will want an old one? What if the charging standard changes to enable faster speeds, and you’re stuck with the old one? I’d always lease an EV rather than buy it, which gives some random bank the risk of prices imploding. There are EV taxis that have done huge mileages (500,000+), but the concern is that the battery has a life measured mostly in time rather than usage.
There’s also concerns around the connectivity of EVs in particular, especially with Tesla who own the chargers. There’s stories from the US, of cars repaired outside the dealer network being banned from the charging network for “safety” reasons. Even if you own the car, do you really actually *own* the car?
Man living in petrostate not a fan of EVs.
Just playing the devil’s advocate. There’s actually a few EVs out here, but electricity is expensive and petrol is cheap.
At least there’s the infrastructure though, which isn’t the case in large parts of the world outside the West. There’s not going to be a huge rise in EV use in large parts of Asia or Africa any time soon.
Buying ICE vehicles now is like buying analog film cameras 20 years ago. Soon the ICE for personal transport will be as obsolete as cassette tapes or CDs.
Analog (sic) film cameras are trendy right now, and CDs are still viable.
Cassette tapes are more niche
Not the mass market by a long way, despite the hipster interest in vinyl.
Sure, ICE vehicles have some advantages still, particularly for rural areas. We have an ICE hybrid as well as an EV. Increasingly though EVs have the advantage. I think it will be my last ever ICE vehicle.
Currently EVs are 3% of the UK car fleet, but by Dec 22 had 30% of new sales. This is being driven by demand, and is only heading one way. The manufacturers see this too, which is why so much of the new design and engineering is centered on them, with ICE vehicle increasingly neglected.
There is an issue with any technological change of when to jump to the new tech, but as EV prices drop, practicality increases, and psychological barriers drop, it is only going one way.
I largely agree. My reservation is how much the prices of EVs will drop. It's one of those things I've been waiting for for some time and doesn't appear to be happening...
Largely because demand greatly exceeds supply, so manufacturers have no incentive to make cheaper models. That will change in the next 3-5 years, looking at the number of factories being built now and in planning.
And both batteries and motors are steadily getting cheaper to make, alongside the increase in capacity.
I will never have an electric car until they solve the charging issue ie having to wait to get to a charging point and. Then 40 mins for a half charge....I suspect I will have met my maker by then.
In 3 years of EV ownership, I have only had to use a public charger twice, and neither time did I have to wait. It is not often that I drive more than 280 miles in a day, and charging overnight on cheap electricity is better.
Indeed, because you have a driveway and a regular job, it’s a good fit. The concerns are around the edge cases, especially poorer people living in apartment blocks, who will have to pay a lot more to charge their car on the public network, then you would on cheap overnight home power.
Buying ICE vehicles now is like buying analog film cameras 20 years ago. Soon the ICE for personal transport will be as obsolete as cassette tapes or CDs.
Analog (sic) film cameras are trendy right now, and CDs are still viable.
Cassette tapes are more niche
Not the mass market by a long way, despite the hipster interest in vinyl.
Sure, ICE vehicles have some advantages still, particularly for rural areas. We have an ICE hybrid as well as an EV. Increasingly though EVs have the advantage. I think it will be my last ever ICE vehicle.
Currently EVs are 3% of the UK car fleet, but by Dec 22 had 30% of new sales. This is being driven by demand, and is only heading one way. The manufacturers see this too, which is why so much of the new design and engineering is centered on them, with ICE vehicle increasingly neglected.
There is an issue with any technological change of when to jump to the new tech, but as EV prices drop, practicality increases, and psychological barriers drop, it is only going one way.
I largely agree. My reservation is how much the prices of EVs will drop. It's one of those things I've been waiting for for some time and doesn't appear to be happening.
I do also wonder if there is a future in which the most common model is owning small EVs for the 90% of our journeys which are local and renting large ICEs or other type for longer journeys. My understanding is that EVs are much more cost effective as small, relatively low range vehicles, and I wonder whether by trying to make EVs do what ICEs do we are solving the wrong problem.
As a personal example, in my family we have two cars: a 14 year old Ford Focus and a rather newer MPV. We initially bought an MPV because we had three children under 5, and needed something which could fit three car seats in - but we're through that stage now. Now the reason for having an MPV is that a few times a year, all five of us plus luggage will go on a journey of more than 200 miles. I think many people are the same - we have the car we need for the extreme example of the journeys we make, rather than the typical example. 90% of the time, though, there is at least one car parked outside our house. And weeks, months can go by without ever going much more than 50 miles from home. It feels like a much more resource-efficient solution would be to own a small EV, and on the rare occasion we needed two cars at once, or that we needed a bigger car, rent one.
An EV works well as a second car, for most people who have a private driveway and a regular job. It does the daily commute, runs errands around town, and goes on charge every night. That covers 90% of journeys.
I can definitely see the last of the MPV and SUV petrol cars being snapped up by rental companies, they’re going to hold up in value and everyone’s going to want one at Christmas.
The worry for those buying an EV today, is that the technology moves so quickly that a five-year-old car is as popular as a five-year-old phone. When the new one does 500 miles and charges in 5 minutes, who will want an old one? What if the charging standard changes to enable faster speeds, and you’re stuck with the old one? I’d always lease an EV rather than buy it, which gives some random bank the risk of prices imploding. There are EV taxis that have done huge mileages (500,000+), but the concern is that the battery has a life measured mostly in time rather than usage.
There’s also concerns around the connectivity of EVs in particular, especially with Tesla who own the chargers. There’s stories from the US, of cars repaired outside the dealer network being banned from the charging network for “safety” reasons. Even if you own the car, do you really actually *own* the car?
Man living in petrostate not a fan of EVs.
Just playing the devil’s advocate. There’s actually a few EVs out here, but electricity is expensive and petrol is cheap.
At least there’s the infrastructure though, which isn’t the case in large parts of the world outside the West. There’s not going to be a huge rise in EV use in large parts of Asia or Africa any time soon.
Buying ICE vehicles now is like buying analog film cameras 20 years ago. Soon the ICE for personal transport will be as obsolete as cassette tapes or CDs.
Analog (sic) film cameras are trendy right now, and CDs are still viable.
Cassette tapes are more niche
Not the mass market by a long way, despite the hipster interest in vinyl.
Sure, ICE vehicles have some advantages still, particularly for rural areas. We have an ICE hybrid as well as an EV. Increasingly though EVs have the advantage. I think it will be my last ever ICE vehicle.
Currently EVs are 3% of the UK car fleet, but by Dec 22 had 30% of new sales. This is being driven by demand, and is only heading one way. The manufacturers see this too, which is why so much of the new design and engineering is centered on them, with ICE vehicle increasingly neglected.
There is an issue with any technological change of when to jump to the new tech, but as EV prices drop, practicality increases, and psychological barriers drop, it is only going one way.
I largely agree. My reservation is how much the prices of EVs will drop. It's one of those things I've been waiting for for some time and doesn't appear to be happening...
Largely because demand greatly exceeds supply, so manufacturers have no incentive to make cheaper models. That will change in the next 3-5 years, looking at the number of factories being built now and in planning.
And both batteries and motors are steadily getting cheaper to make, alongside the increase in capacity.
I will never have an electric car until they solve the charging issue ie having to wait to get to a charging point and. Then 40 mins for a half charge....I suspect I will have met my maker by then.
In 3 years of EV ownership, I have only had to use a public charger twice, and neither time did I have to wait. It is not often that I drive more than 280 miles in a day, and charging overnight on cheap electricity is better.
I've had my EV a year and have used a public charger exactly once, and that was no great hardship. I left the car to charge while I went out for breakfast with my family; it was fully charged and ready for the trip home when we returned to it.
I am not sure I agree with "What is very clear is that any hopes labour have of returning to power rely on a very strong performance in Scotland".
Unless the Tories + DUP have majority after the next GE Labour will return to power imo. Clearly, success for Labour in Scotland makes that easier but it's not a prerequisite.
I do think that a dozen or so Scottish seats could easily be the difference between largest party and overall majority as the polls tighten a bit.
As the election draws closer, if we are to see massive swingback to the Conservatives as highlighted and expected on these very pages, I don't see why that wouldn't also be the case for the incumbent SNP.
As it stands Labour are 10 to 15 points ahead of the Conservatives nationally (and we are expecting that to mostly drift back by election day). In Scotland Labour are 10 to 15 points adrift of the SNP (why are we not expecting that to return to its usual 20 to 25 point margin?).
Labour are doomed, doomed I say!
Swingback, if it helps Yousless at all, would come in the Scottish Parliamentary elections, not the General.
You’ve all set the bar so low for him that he’s going to clear it and look like a success.
Not a chance. He will fail in ways we can't even imagine yet. Starting with the appointment of Shona Robinson, Nicola's best mate, as deputy. I searched for her achievements on Wiki: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shona_Robison Unfortunately, achievements was a missing word!
Surely then the time is ripe for the high achievers of your party of choice to sweep to power?
Not for three years, though ...
If the predictions of Humza’s tenure not outlasting a Trussian lettuce don’t come to pass, that’s just three more years for Ross & co to put their obvious qualities on display.
That reminds me - is Mr Ross leaving Holyrood at the next election, or is my memory failing me? I am sure I recall some announcement, but can't confirm it. So I may be quite wrong, in which case apols.
He announced he was leaving Westminster at the next GE.
Buying ICE vehicles now is like buying analog film cameras 20 years ago. Soon the ICE for personal transport will be as obsolete as cassette tapes or CDs.
Analog (sic) film cameras are trendy right now, and CDs are still viable.
Cassette tapes are more niche
Not the mass market by a long way, despite the hipster interest in vinyl.
Sure, ICE vehicles have some advantages still, particularly for rural areas. We have an ICE hybrid as well as an EV. Increasingly though EVs have the advantage. I think it will be my last ever ICE vehicle.
Currently EVs are 3% of the UK car fleet, but by Dec 22 had 30% of new sales. This is being driven by demand, and is only heading one way. The manufacturers see this too, which is why so much of the new design and engineering is centered on them, with ICE vehicle increasingly neglected.
There is an issue with any technological change of when to jump to the new tech, but as EV prices drop, practicality increases, and psychological barriers drop, it is only going one way.
I largely agree. My reservation is how much the prices of EVs will drop. It's one of those things I've been waiting for for some time and doesn't appear to be happening...
Largely because demand greatly exceeds supply, so manufacturers have no incentive to make cheaper models. That will change in the next 3-5 years, looking at the number of factories being built now and in planning.
And both batteries and motors are steadily getting cheaper to make, alongside the increase in capacity.
I will never have an electric car until they solve the charging issue ie having to wait to get to a charging point and. Then 40 mins for a half charge....I suspect I will have met my maker by then.
You can do 10-80% in about 25 min on the latest chargers. To get to half should be a fraction of that - the charging is faster on an empty battery.
Not what my pal tells me. They have had nightmares queuing and it's 40.mins min to charge his ev f pace
I would be interested to see what new car stats are given the interest rate rises. Already 98.5% of cars are bought on the never, never (witness the brand spanking new RR Evoques outside bog standard terraced houses).
What is the second hand market in EVs like? Is(n't) there an issue with battery/battery life?
To be fair a bog standard terraced house costs over a million in London so they might be minted. I take your point though - definitely a lot more dickhead cars around with dickhead driving styles to match.
Driving has become appalling. So many cars without a headlight or a brake light and the cops do nothing.
And half the cars that have both headlights working have ultra-powerful LED ones that blind you when you look in the wing mirror.
Enforcing driving laws has largely been dumped onto local authorities to free up police time for murdering lone women.
Buying ICE vehicles now is like buying analog film cameras 20 years ago. Soon the ICE for personal transport will be as obsolete as cassette tapes or CDs.
Analog (sic) film cameras are trendy right now, and CDs are still viable.
Cassette tapes are more niche
Not the mass market by a long way, despite the hipster interest in vinyl.
Sure, ICE vehicles have some advantages still, particularly for rural areas. We have an ICE hybrid as well as an EV. Increasingly though EVs have the advantage. I think it will be my last ever ICE vehicle.
Currently EVs are 3% of the UK car fleet, but by Dec 22 had 30% of new sales. This is being driven by demand, and is only heading one way. The manufacturers see this too, which is why so much of the new design and engineering is centered on them, with ICE vehicle increasingly neglected.
There is an issue with any technological change of when to jump to the new tech, but as EV prices drop, practicality increases, and psychological barriers drop, it is only going one way.
I largely agree. My reservation is how much the prices of EVs will drop. It's one of those things I've been waiting for for some time and doesn't appear to be happening...
Largely because demand greatly exceeds supply, so manufacturers have no incentive to make cheaper models. That will change in the next 3-5 years, looking at the number of factories being built now and in planning.
And both batteries and motors are steadily getting cheaper to make, alongside the increase in capacity.
I will never have an electric car until they solve the charging issue ie having to wait to get to a charging point and. Then 40 mins for a half charge....I suspect I will have met my maker by then.
You can do 10-80% in about 25 min on the latest chargers. To get to half should be a fraction of that - the charging is faster on an empty battery.
Not what my pal tells me. They have had nightmares queuing and it's 40.mins min to charge his ev f pace
And what are they charging for fast charging anyway..... The infrastructure isnt there and there is talk of banning charging at peak times.. FTFAGOS
I am not sure I agree with "What is very clear is that any hopes labour have of returning to power rely on a very strong performance in Scotland".
Unless the Tories + DUP have majority after the next GE Labour will return to power imo. Clearly, success for Labour in Scotland makes that easier but it's not a prerequisite.
I do think that a dozen or so Scottish seats could easily be the difference between largest party and overall majority as the polls tighten a bit.
As the election draws closer, if we are to see massive swingback to the Conservatives as highlighted and expected on these very pages, I don't see why that wouldn't also be the case for the incumbent SNP.
As it stands Labour are 10 to 15 points ahead of the Conservatives nationally (and we are expecting that to mostly drift back by election day). In Scotland Labour are 10 to 15 points adrift of the SNP (why are we not expecting that to return to its usual 20 to 25 point margin?).
Labour are doomed, doomed I say!
Swingback, if it helps Yousless at all, would come in the Scottish Parliamentary elections, not the General.
You’ve all set the bar so low for him that he’s going to clear it and look like a success.
Not a chance. He will fail in ways we can't even imagine yet. Starting with the appointment of Shona Robinson, Nicola's best mate, as deputy. I searched for her achievements on Wiki: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shona_Robison Unfortunately, achievements was a missing word!
Surely then the time is ripe for the high achievers of your party of choice to sweep to power?
Not for three years, though ...
If the predictions of Humza’s tenure not outlasting a Trussian lettuce don’t come to pass, that’s just three more years for Ross & co to put their obvious qualities on display.
That reminds me - is Mr Ross leaving Holyrood at the next election, or is my memory failing me? I am sure I recall some announcement, but can't confirm it. So I may be quite wrong, in which case apols.
He announced he was leaving Westminster at the next GE.
Thanks - that's it.
That means a new candidate for Moray presumably? Luckily a large pool of achievers to choose from.
Buying ICE vehicles now is like buying analog film cameras 20 years ago. Soon the ICE for personal transport will be as obsolete as cassette tapes or CDs.
Analog (sic) film cameras are trendy right now, and CDs are still viable.
Cassette tapes are more niche
Not the mass market by a long way, despite the hipster interest in vinyl.
Sure, ICE vehicles have some advantages still, particularly for rural areas. We have an ICE hybrid as well as an EV. Increasingly though EVs have the advantage. I think it will be my last ever ICE vehicle.
Film cameras and vinyl records were never turned into culture war battlegrounds in the way that BEVs have been by right wing shitbags though.
Isn’t that to do with vinyl and film cameras requiring opposable thumbs? Which means the MAGA types need to do a few million years of evolution before they can use them?
The Scottish results will be fascinating. I expect movement against both parties of government, made more entertaining that the SNP will blame the Tories and vice versa. So it should be a good election for Labour and the LibDems, but the problem comes in seats like my own where the local Tory is an arse but his only viable opponent is the SNP.
Do you vote SNP in protest at the disastrous policies of the Tory government impacting on local farming, fishing and energy interests? Or vote Tory in protest at the disastrous policies of the SNP government impacting local energy interests and services?
Or will the Boundary Review actually go through - in which case I will be in Aberdeenshire Central which is mostly the old Gordon seat. This was held by Malcolm Bruce of my own party until 2015, though LD votes have dissipated a lot since then.
So, much to play for and the new constituencies could shake a load of things up...
I hadn't realised that the new boundaries were still not in force. This is beyond ridiculous. Atm I am in Dundee West and would probably vote Labour in the vain hope they can recover the seat. If they go through I will be in the new Tayside North where the Tories will clearly be the strongest challenger.
Final recommendations are due by 1st July and will presumably be approved by Parliament in the autumn. I don't think there's a real rush because Sunak ain't calling an election before then.
IIRC the new boundaries don’t now need a vote in Parliament, with the legislation already passed. This was to stop the MPs voting them down again, after the debacle last time. The old boundaries have been in place since 2010, based on population numbers from 2005 or 2006.
No, the new boundaries are not based on population numbers. As part of the Cameron/Osborne gerrymandering programme (that cost them the EU referendum and both their careers), seats are based on the numbers of registered voters.
Well as you can't vote without being on the register that is hardly surprising
MPs do not just represent the people who voted for them, or even just the people registered to vote, but in any case the reason it is not surprising in this instance is that it was part of the Cameron/Osborne gerrymandering strategy (since copied in the US, iirc).
No, they don't, put the whole point of equalising constituency size is to equalise registered voters, not the entire population.
It's a sop to the "my vote is less equal" crowd. You don't get around that by including children in the calculation.
And, as I said, the number of registered voters is a known figure at all times. The population isn't.
No, the point is that by purging the rolls, introducing individual registration, and only then redrawing boundaries, Cameron/Osborne ensured more Tory seats would be created and Labour ones removed.
Ironically, this meant losing the European referendum and chucking Cameron and Osborne out of Downing Street. Karma's a bitch.
I am not sure I agree with "What is very clear is that any hopes labour have of returning to power rely on a very strong performance in Scotland".
Unless the Tories + DUP have majority after the next GE Labour will return to power imo. Clearly, success for Labour in Scotland makes that easier but it's not a prerequisite.
I do think that a dozen or so Scottish seats could easily be the difference between largest party and overall majority as the polls tighten a bit.
As the election draws closer, if we are to see massive swingback to the Conservatives as highlighted and expected on these very pages, I don't see why that wouldn't also be the case for the incumbent SNP.
As it stands Labour are 10 to 15 points ahead of the Conservatives nationally (and we are expecting that to mostly drift back by election day). In Scotland Labour are 10 to 15 points adrift of the SNP (why are we not expecting that to return to its usual 20 to 25 point margin?).
Labour are doomed, doomed I say!
Swingback, if it helps Yousless at all, would come in the Scottish Parliamentary elections, not the General.
You’ve all set the bar so low for him that he’s going to clear it and look like a success.
Not a chance. He will fail in ways we can't even imagine yet. Starting with the appointment of Shona Robinson, Nicola's best mate, as deputy. I searched for her achievements on Wiki: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shona_Robison Unfortunately, achievements was a missing word!
Surely then the time is ripe for the high achievers of your party of choice to sweep to power?
Not for three years, though ...
If the predictions of Humza’s tenure not outlasting a Trussian lettuce don’t come to pass, that’s just three more years for Ross & co to put their obvious qualities on display.
That reminds me - is Mr Ross leaving Holyrood at the next election, or is my memory failing me? I am sure I recall some announcement, but can't confirm it. So I may be quite wrong, in which case apols.
He announced he was leaving Westminster at the next GE.
Thanks - that's it.
That means a new candidate for Moray presumably? Luckily a large pool of achievers to choose from.
Hmm, fisherfolk and farmers not too happy with Brexit either. But the latter not exactly SKS voters, and it was the previous leader of the LDs who liked to be filmed in front of farm animals. Not sure that Mr C-H has quite the same knack.
There’s also concerns around the connectivity of EVs in particular, especially with Tesla who own the chargers. There’s stories from the US, of cars repaired outside the dealer network being banned from the charging network for “safety” reasons. Even if you own the car, do you really actually *own* the car?
A Tesla will be barred from connection to the Supercharger network if the VIN has been recorded as written off so even if you get one on a salvage title and repair it you can still use it on other chargers or at home.
Repairs outside the dealer network are fine and Tesla subcontract out most of the maintenance and repairs to 3rd parties now.
Yes, most of the issues were around accident repairs, because in the early days they were writing off a lot of cars with minor damage, due to an absence of available spare parts and body panels. These ended up at auction, but had been banned from charging on the Supercharger network.
Buying ICE vehicles now is like buying analog film cameras 20 years ago. Soon the ICE for personal transport will be as obsolete as cassette tapes or CDs.
Analog (sic) film cameras are trendy right now, and CDs are still viable.
Cassette tapes are more niche
Not the mass market by a long way, despite the hipster interest in vinyl.
Sure, ICE vehicles have some advantages still, particularly for rural areas. We have an ICE hybrid as well as an EV. Increasingly though EVs have the advantage. I think it will be my last ever ICE vehicle.
Film cameras and vinyl records were never turned into culture war battlegrounds in the way that BEVs have been by right wing shitbags though.
Isn’t that to do with vinyl and film cameras requiring opposable thumbs? Which means the MAGA types need to do a few million years of evolution before therms can use them?
Buying ICE vehicles now is like buying analog film cameras 20 years ago. Soon the ICE for personal transport will be as obsolete as cassette tapes or CDs.
Analog (sic) film cameras are trendy right now, and CDs are still viable.
Cassette tapes are more niche
Not the mass market by a long way, despite the hipster interest in vinyl.
Sure, ICE vehicles have some advantages still, particularly for rural areas. We have an ICE hybrid as well as an EV. Increasingly though EVs have the advantage. I think it will be my last ever ICE vehicle.
Currently EVs are 3% of the UK car fleet, but by Dec 22 had 30% of new sales. This is being driven by demand, and is only heading one way. The manufacturers see this too, which is why so much of the new design and engineering is centered on them, with ICE vehicle increasingly neglected.
There is an issue with any technological change of when to jump to the new tech, but as EV prices drop, practicality increases, and psychological barriers drop, it is only going one way.
I largely agree. My reservation is how much the prices of EVs will drop. It's one of those things I've been waiting for for some time and doesn't appear to be happening.
I do also wonder if there is a future in which the most common model is owning small EVs for the 90% of our journeys which are local and renting large ICEs or other type for longer journeys. My understanding is that EVs are much more cost effective as small, relatively low range vehicles, and I wonder whether by trying to make EVs do what ICEs do we are solving the wrong problem.
As a personal example, in my family we have two cars: a 14 year old Ford Focus and a rather newer MPV. We initially bought an MPV because we had three children under 5, and needed something which could fit three car seats in - but we're through that stage now. Now the reason for having an MPV is that a few times a year, all five of us plus luggage will go on a journey of more than 200 miles. I think many people are the same - we have the car we need for the extreme example of the journeys we make, rather than the typical example. 90% of the time, though, there is at least one car parked outside our house. And weeks, months can go by without ever going much more than 50 miles from home. It feels like a much more resource-efficient solution would be to own a small EV, and on the rare occasion we needed two cars at once, or that we needed a bigger car, rent one.
An EV works well as a second car, for most people who have a private driveway and a regular job. It does the daily commute, runs errands around town, and goes on charge every night. That covers 90% of journeys.
I can definitely see the last of the MPV and SUV petrol cars being snapped up by rental companies, they’re going to hold up in value and everyone’s going to want one at Christmas.
The worry for those buying an EV today, is that the technology moves so quickly that a five-year-old car is as popular as a five-year-old phone. When the new one does 500 miles and charges in 5 minutes, who will want an old one? What if the charging standard changes to enable faster speeds, and you’re stuck with the old one? I’d always lease an EV rather than buy it, which gives some random bank the risk of prices imploding. There are EV taxis that have done huge mileages (500,000+), but the concern is that the battery has a life measured mostly in time rather than usage.
There’s also concerns around the connectivity of EVs in particular, especially with Tesla who own the chargers. There’s stories from the US, of cars repaired outside the dealer network being banned from the charging network for “safety” reasons. Even if you own the car, do you really actually *own* the car?
We've never paid more than a few thousand for any of our second (or fourth) hand diesel cars. The chances of us, or the large number of other car drivers like us, putting down a five figure deposit and a few hundred a month for a new car are very slim. There will be lots of demand for five year old EV cars.
Oh indeed. I have a 17-year-old E-class Merc, that I paid £4k for. It’ll last forever, so long as the oil gets changed occasionally.
The worry with an older EV, is that it needs a battery replacement one day that basically writes it off. Owning one outside the warranty is going to be like owning a Range Rover with no warranty, potentially very painful.
Perhaps there will be a cottage industry of battery repair shops, or perhaps it will be impossible to do anything outside the dealer network who will sell you a whole new pack? There is a cottage industry around the old Nissan Leaf, which seems to be simple enough that batteries can be swapped out and even upgraded. It remains to be seen, whether that is possible with other EVs in the future.
It has been suggested that old EV batteries can be repurposed to store power from renewables.
Buying ICE vehicles now is like buying analog film cameras 20 years ago. Soon the ICE for personal transport will be as obsolete as cassette tapes or CDs.
Analog (sic) film cameras are trendy right now, and CDs are still viable.
Cassette tapes are more niche
Not the mass market by a long way, despite the hipster interest in vinyl.
Sure, ICE vehicles have some advantages still, particularly for rural areas. We have an ICE hybrid as well as an EV. Increasingly though EVs have the advantage. I think it will be my last ever ICE vehicle.
Currently EVs are 3% of the UK car fleet, but by Dec 22 had 30% of new sales. This is being driven by demand, and is only heading one way. The manufacturers see this too, which is why so much of the new design and engineering is centered on them, with ICE vehicle increasingly neglected.
There is an issue with any technological change of when to jump to the new tech, but as EV prices drop, practicality increases, and psychological barriers drop, it is only going one way.
I largely agree. My reservation is how much the prices of EVs will drop. It's one of those things I've been waiting for for some time and doesn't appear to be happening...
Largely because demand greatly exceeds supply, so manufacturers have no incentive to make cheaper models. That will change in the next 3-5 years, looking at the number of factories being built now and in planning.
And both batteries and motors are steadily getting cheaper to make, alongside the increase in capacity.
I will never have an electric car until they solve the charging issue ie having to wait to get to a charging point and. Then 40 mins for a half charge....I suspect I will have met my maker by then.
You can do 10-80% in about 25 min on the latest chargers. To get to half should be a fraction of that - the charging is faster on an empty battery.
Not what my pal tells me. They have had nightmares queuing and it's 40.mins min to charge his ev f pace
Tbf that's about the same time I spend queuing at my local Costco yesterday for diesel.
There's no way any EV charging station will be able to match the sheer throughput of energy that a 12 pump Costco can get into vehicles in a day though.
Buying ICE vehicles now is like buying analog film cameras 20 years ago. Soon the ICE for personal transport will be as obsolete as cassette tapes or CDs.
Analog (sic) film cameras are trendy right now, and CDs are still viable.
Cassette tapes are more niche
Not the mass market by a long way, despite the hipster interest in vinyl.
Sure, ICE vehicles have some advantages still, particularly for rural areas. We have an ICE hybrid as well as an EV. Increasingly though EVs have the advantage. I think it will be my last ever ICE vehicle.
Currently EVs are 3% of the UK car fleet, but by Dec 22 had 30% of new sales. This is being driven by demand, and is only heading one way. The manufacturers see this too, which is why so much of the new design and engineering is centered on them, with ICE vehicle increasingly neglected.
There is an issue with any technological change of when to jump to the new tech, but as EV prices drop, practicality increases, and psychological barriers drop, it is only going one way.
I largely agree. My reservation is how much the prices of EVs will drop. It's one of those things I've been waiting for for some time and doesn't appear to be happening.
I do also wonder if there is a future in which the most common model is owning small EVs for the 90% of our journeys which are local and renting large ICEs or other type for longer journeys. My understanding is that EVs are much more cost effective as small, relatively low range vehicles, and I wonder whether by trying to make EVs do what ICEs do we are solving the wrong problem.
As a personal example, in my family we have two cars: a 14 year old Ford Focus and a rather newer MPV. We initially bought an MPV because we had three children under 5, and needed something which could fit three car seats in - but we're through that stage now. Now the reason for having an MPV is that a few times a year, all five of us plus luggage will go on a journey of more than 200 miles. I think many people are the same - we have the car we need for the extreme example of the journeys we make, rather than the typical example. 90% of the time, though, there is at least one car parked outside our house. And weeks, months can go by without ever going much more than 50 miles from home. It feels like a much more resource-efficient solution would be to own a small EV, and on the rare occasion we needed two cars at once, or that we needed a bigger car, rent one.
An EV works well as a second car, for most people who have a private driveway and a regular job. It does the daily commute, runs errands around town, and goes on charge every night. That covers 90% of journeys.
I can definitely see the last of the MPV and SUV petrol cars being snapped up by rental companies, they’re going to hold up in value and everyone’s going to want one at Christmas.
The worry for those buying an EV today, is that the technology moves so quickly that a five-year-old car is as popular as a five-year-old phone. When the new one does 500 miles and charges in 5 minutes, who will want an old one? What if the charging standard changes to enable faster speeds, and you’re stuck with the old one? I’d always lease an EV rather than buy it, which gives some random bank the risk of prices imploding. There are EV taxis that have done huge mileages (500,000+), but the concern is that the battery has a life measured mostly in time rather than usage.
There’s also concerns around the connectivity of EVs in particular, especially with Tesla who own the chargers. There’s stories from the US, of cars repaired outside the dealer network being banned from the charging network for “safety” reasons. Even if you own the car, do you really actually *own* the car?
We've never paid more than a few thousand for any of our second (or fourth) hand diesel cars. The chances of us, or the large number of other car drivers like us, putting down a five figure deposit and a few hundred a month for a new car are very slim. There will be lots of demand for five year old EV cars.
Oh indeed. I have a 17-year-old E-class Merc, that I paid £4k for. It’ll last forever, so long as the oil gets changed occasionally.
The worry with an older EV, is that it needs a battery replacement one day that basically writes it off. Owning one outside the warranty is going to be like owning a Range Rover with no warranty, potentially very painful.
Perhaps there will be a cottage industry of battery repair shops, or perhaps it will be impossible to do anything outside the dealer network who will sell you a whole new pack? There is a cottage industry around the old Nissan Leaf, which seems to be simple enough that batteries can be swapped out and even upgraded. It remains to be seen, whether that is possible with other EVs in the future.
Your Merc may last forever - though you can't say the same for all Merc engines. Plenty of other cars will not just run and run - engines are designed to implode at a certain point and increasingly require expensive servicing to change things like cam belts which are designed to be as awkwardly sited as possible. Which so many owners don't do as can't afford and so bang.
The threat from EVs for manufacturers is that servicing isn't needed, not really. My Tesla has no maintenance schedule, its all as required.
As is obvious, it is deep in Uncanny Valley. The likeness is good enough to be provoking, but bad enough to be obviously wrong in weird ways: the combination of these reactions is often a sense of deep unease
On present trends these videos will be perfect in a year or two, just like the still images now. Then what?
Buying ICE vehicles now is like buying analog film cameras 20 years ago. Soon the ICE for personal transport will be as obsolete as cassette tapes or CDs.
Analog (sic) film cameras are trendy right now, and CDs are still viable.
Cassette tapes are more niche
Not the mass market by a long way, despite the hipster interest in vinyl.
Sure, ICE vehicles have some advantages still, particularly for rural areas. We have an ICE hybrid as well as an EV. Increasingly though EVs have the advantage. I think it will be my last ever ICE vehicle.
Currently EVs are 3% of the UK car fleet, but by Dec 22 had 30% of new sales. This is being driven by demand, and is only heading one way. The manufacturers see this too, which is why so much of the new design and engineering is centered on them, with ICE vehicle increasingly neglected.
There is an issue with any technological change of when to jump to the new tech, but as EV prices drop, practicality increases, and psychological barriers drop, it is only going one way.
I largely agree. My reservation is how much the prices of EVs will drop. It's one of those things I've been waiting for for some time and doesn't appear to be happening.
I do also wonder if there is a future in which the most common model is owning small EVs for the 90% of our journeys which are local and renting large ICEs or other type for longer journeys. My understanding is that EVs are much more cost effective as small, relatively low range vehicles, and I wonder whether by trying to make EVs do what ICEs do we are solving the wrong problem.
As a personal example, in my family we have two cars: a 14 year old Ford Focus and a rather newer MPV. We initially bought an MPV because we had three children under 5, and needed something which could fit three car seats in - but we're through that stage now. Now the reason for having an MPV is that a few times a year, all five of us plus luggage will go on a journey of more than 200 miles. I think many people are the same - we have the car we need for the extreme example of the journeys we make, rather than the typical example. 90% of the time, though, there is at least one car parked outside our house. And weeks, months can go by without ever going much more than 50 miles from home. It feels like a much more resource-efficient solution would be to own a small EV, and on the rare occasion we needed two cars at once, or that we needed a bigger car, rent one.
An EV works well as a second car, for most people who have a private driveway and a regular job. It does the daily commute, runs errands around town, and goes on charge every night. That covers 90% of journeys.
I can definitely see the last of the MPV and SUV petrol cars being snapped up by rental companies, they’re going to hold up in value and everyone’s going to want one at Christmas.
The worry for those buying an EV today, is that the technology moves so quickly that a five-year-old car is as popular as a five-year-old phone. When the new one does 500 miles and charges in 5 minutes, who will want an old one? What if the charging standard changes to enable faster speeds, and you’re stuck with the old one? I’d always lease an EV rather than buy it, which gives some random bank the risk of prices imploding. There are EV taxis that have done huge mileages (500,000+), but the concern is that the battery has a life measured mostly in time rather than usage.
There’s also concerns around the connectivity of EVs in particular, especially with Tesla who own the chargers. There’s stories from the US, of cars repaired outside the dealer network being banned from the charging network for “safety” reasons. Even if you own the car, do you really actually *own* the car?
Man living in petrostate not a fan of EVs.
Just playing the devil’s advocate. There’s actually a few EVs out here, but electricity is expensive and petrol is cheap.
At least there’s the infrastructure though, which isn’t the case in large parts of the world outside the West. There’s not going to be a huge rise in EV use in large parts of Asia or Africa any time soon.
Buying ICE vehicles now is like buying analog film cameras 20 years ago. Soon the ICE for personal transport will be as obsolete as cassette tapes or CDs.
Analog (sic) film cameras are trendy right now, and CDs are still viable.
Cassette tapes are more niche
Not the mass market by a long way, despite the hipster interest in vinyl.
Sure, ICE vehicles have some advantages still, particularly for rural areas. We have an ICE hybrid as well as an EV. Increasingly though EVs have the advantage. I think it will be my last ever ICE vehicle.
Currently EVs are 3% of the UK car fleet, but by Dec 22 had 30% of new sales. This is being driven by demand, and is only heading one way. The manufacturers see this too, which is why so much of the new design and engineering is centered on them, with ICE vehicle increasingly neglected.
There is an issue with any technological change of when to jump to the new tech, but as EV prices drop, practicality increases, and psychological barriers drop, it is only going one way.
I largely agree. My reservation is how much the prices of EVs will drop. It's one of those things I've been waiting for for some time and doesn't appear to be happening...
Largely because demand greatly exceeds supply, so manufacturers have no incentive to make cheaper models. That will change in the next 3-5 years, looking at the number of factories being built now and in planning.
And both batteries and motors are steadily getting cheaper to make, alongside the increase in capacity.
I will never have an electric car until they solve the charging issue ie having to wait to get to a charging point and. Then 40 mins for a half charge....I suspect I will have met my maker by then.
In 3 years of EV ownership, I have only had to use a public charger twice, and neither time did I have to wait. It is not often that I drive more than 280 miles in a day, and charging overnight on cheap electricity is better.
Indeed, because you have a driveway and a regular job, it’s a good fit. The concerns are around the edge cases, especially poorer people living in apartment blocks, who will have to pay a lot more to charge their car on the public network, then you would on cheap overnight home power.
Not just tower blocks. Any home without off-street parking is screwed as you cannot safely run power cables across the pavement.
Buying ICE vehicles now is like buying analog film cameras 20 years ago. Soon the ICE for personal transport will be as obsolete as cassette tapes or CDs.
Analog (sic) film cameras are trendy right now, and CDs are still viable.
Cassette tapes are more niche
Not the mass market by a long way, despite the hipster interest in vinyl.
Sure, ICE vehicles have some advantages still, particularly for rural areas. We have an ICE hybrid as well as an EV. Increasingly though EVs have the advantage. I think it will be my last ever ICE vehicle.
Currently EVs are 3% of the UK car fleet, but by Dec 22 had 30% of new sales. This is being driven by demand, and is only heading one way. The manufacturers see this too, which is why so much of the new design and engineering is centered on them, with ICE vehicle increasingly neglected.
There is an issue with any technological change of when to jump to the new tech, but as EV prices drop, practicality increases, and psychological barriers drop, it is only going one way.
I largely agree. My reservation is how much the prices of EVs will drop. It's one of those things I've been waiting for for some time and doesn't appear to be happening.
I do also wonder if there is a future in which the most common model is owning small EVs for the 90% of our journeys which are local and renting large ICEs or other type for longer journeys. My understanding is that EVs are much more cost effective as small, relatively low range vehicles, and I wonder whether by trying to make EVs do what ICEs do we are solving the wrong problem.
As a personal example, in my family we have two cars: a 14 year old Ford Focus and a rather newer MPV. We initially bought an MPV because we had three children under 5, and needed something which could fit three car seats in - but we're through that stage now. Now the reason for having an MPV is that a few times a year, all five of us plus luggage will go on a journey of more than 200 miles. I think many people are the same - we have the car we need for the extreme example of the journeys we make, rather than the typical example. 90% of the time, though, there is at least one car parked outside our house. And weeks, months can go by without ever going much more than 50 miles from home. It feels like a much more resource-efficient solution would be to own a small EV, and on the rare occasion we needed two cars at once, or that we needed a bigger car, rent one.
An EV works well as a second car, for most people who have a private driveway and a regular job. It does the daily commute, runs errands around town, and goes on charge every night. That covers 90% of journeys.
I can definitely see the last of the MPV and SUV petrol cars being snapped up by rental companies, they’re going to hold up in value and everyone’s going to want one at Christmas.
The worry for those buying an EV today, is that the technology moves so quickly that a five-year-old car is as popular as a five-year-old phone. When the new one does 500 miles and charges in 5 minutes, who will want an old one? What if the charging standard changes to enable faster speeds, and you’re stuck with the old one? I’d always lease an EV rather than buy it, which gives some random bank the risk of prices imploding. There are EV taxis that have done huge mileages (500,000+), but the concern is that the battery has a life measured mostly in time rather than usage.
There’s also concerns around the connectivity of EVs in particular, especially with Tesla who own the chargers. There’s stories from the US, of cars repaired outside the dealer network being banned from the charging network for “safety” reasons. Even if you own the car, do you really actually *own* the car?
We've never paid more than a few thousand for any of our second (or fourth) hand diesel cars. The chances of us, or the large number of other car drivers like us, putting down a five figure deposit and a few hundred a month for a new car are very slim. There will be lots of demand for five year old EV cars.
Oh indeed. I have a 17-year-old E-class Merc, that I paid £4k for. It’ll last forever, so long as the oil gets changed occasionally.
The worry with an older EV, is that it needs a battery replacement one day that basically writes it off. Owning one outside the warranty is going to be like owning a Range Rover with no warranty, potentially very painful.
Perhaps there will be a cottage industry of battery repair shops, or perhaps it will be impossible to do anything outside the dealer network who will sell you a whole new pack? There is a cottage industry around the old Nissan Leaf, which seems to be simple enough that batteries can be swapped out and even upgraded. It remains to be seen, whether that is possible with other EVs in the future.
The cottage industry that I would be particularly interested in is the one that would provide an adaptor pack so that you could use your old car battery as a back-up for your home, or to time-shift rooftop solar.
Buying ICE vehicles now is like buying analog film cameras 20 years ago. Soon the ICE for personal transport will be as obsolete as cassette tapes or CDs.
Analog (sic) film cameras are trendy right now, and CDs are still viable.
Cassette tapes are more niche
Not the mass market by a long way, despite the hipster interest in vinyl.
Sure, ICE vehicles have some advantages still, particularly for rural areas. We have an ICE hybrid as well as an EV. Increasingly though EVs have the advantage. I think it will be my last ever ICE vehicle.
Currently EVs are 3% of the UK car fleet, but by Dec 22 had 30% of new sales. This is being driven by demand, and is only heading one way. The manufacturers see this too, which is why so much of the new design and engineering is centered on them, with ICE vehicle increasingly neglected.
There is an issue with any technological change of when to jump to the new tech, but as EV prices drop, practicality increases, and psychological barriers drop, it is only going one way.
I largely agree. My reservation is how much the prices of EVs will drop. It's one of those things I've been waiting for for some time and doesn't appear to be happening.
I do also wonder if there is a future in which the most common model is owning small EVs for the 90% of our journeys which are local and renting large ICEs or other type for longer journeys. My understanding is that EVs are much more cost effective as small, relatively low range vehicles, and I wonder whether by trying to make EVs do what ICEs do we are solving the wrong problem.
As a personal example, in my family we have two cars: a 14 year old Ford Focus and a rather newer MPV. We initially bought an MPV because we had three children under 5, and needed something which could fit three car seats in - but we're through that stage now. Now the reason for having an MPV is that a few times a year, all five of us plus luggage will go on a journey of more than 200 miles. I think many people are the same - we have the car we need for the extreme example of the journeys we make, rather than the typical example. 90% of the time, though, there is at least one car parked outside our house. And weeks, months can go by without ever going much more than 50 miles from home. It feels like a much more resource-efficient solution would be to own a small EV, and on the rare occasion we needed two cars at once, or that we needed a bigger car, rent one.
An EV works well as a second car, for most people who have a private driveway and a regular job. It does the daily commute, runs errands around town, and goes on charge every night. That covers 90% of journeys.
I can definitely see the last of the MPV and SUV petrol cars being snapped up by rental companies, they’re going to hold up in value and everyone’s going to want one at Christmas.
The worry for those buying an EV today, is that the technology moves so quickly that a five-year-old car is as popular as a five-year-old phone. When the new one does 500 miles and charges in 5 minutes, who will want an old one? What if the charging standard changes to enable faster speeds, and you’re stuck with the old one? I’d always lease an EV rather than buy it, which gives some random bank the risk of prices imploding. There are EV taxis that have done huge mileages (500,000+), but the concern is that the battery has a life measured mostly in time rather than usage.
There’s also concerns around the connectivity of EVs in particular, especially with Tesla who own the chargers. There’s stories from the US, of cars repaired outside the dealer network being banned from the charging network for “safety” reasons. Even if you own the car, do you really actually *own* the car?
We've never paid more than a few thousand for any of our second (or fourth) hand diesel cars. The chances of us, or the large number of other car drivers like us, putting down a five figure deposit and a few hundred a month for a new car are very slim. There will be lots of demand for five year old EV cars.
Oh indeed. I have a 17-year-old E-class Merc, that I paid £4k for. It’ll last forever, so long as the oil gets changed occasionally.
The worry with an older EV, is that it needs a battery replacement one day that basically writes it off. Owning one outside the warranty is going to be like owning a Range Rover with no warranty, potentially very painful.
Perhaps there will be a cottage industry of battery repair shops, or perhaps it will be impossible to do anything outside the dealer network who will sell you a whole new pack? There is a cottage industry around the old Nissan Leaf, which seems to be simple enough that batteries can be swapped out and even upgraded. It remains to be seen, whether that is possible with other EVs in the future.
It has been suggested that old EV batteries can be repurposed to store power from renewables.
Yes, that’s going to be the market for a lot of used batteries in the coming years, both for domestic use and for large-scale storage facilities. It doesn’t matter so much if the cells are degraded, when they’re not in a car.
Buying ICE vehicles now is like buying analog film cameras 20 years ago. Soon the ICE for personal transport will be as obsolete as cassette tapes or CDs.
Analog (sic) film cameras are trendy right now, and CDs are still viable.
Cassette tapes are more niche
Not the mass market by a long way, despite the hipster interest in vinyl.
Sure, ICE vehicles have some advantages still, particularly for rural areas. We have an ICE hybrid as well as an EV. Increasingly though EVs have the advantage. I think it will be my last ever ICE vehicle.
Film cameras and vinyl records were never turned into culture war battlegrounds in the way that BEVs have been by right wing shitbags though.
I don't think EVs are a culture war issue. I know which side of the culture war I'm on, but I am pretty enthusiastic about electrification and expect my next or next-but-one vehicle to be electric. I don't know many who don't. ULEZs however may be.
If there's a culture war around cars, it's coming from the people who want to use EVs as an excuse to move away from mass car ownership.
Not everything is a "culture war" ffs.
It's an interesting policy idea that would work well in densely populated parts of the country like the central belt of Scotland. Lots of positive externalities - congestion, emissions, obesity, noise pollution.
It would need to be paired with better public transport provision (on the Lothian Buses model), car club rollout, cycle infrastructure etc.
But Scotland has a severe rural/urban divide, so policy makers need to be very careful to keep those who need to drive on side.
I am not sure I agree with "What is very clear is that any hopes labour have of returning to power rely on a very strong performance in Scotland".
Unless the Tories + DUP have majority after the next GE Labour will return to power imo. Clearly, success for Labour in Scotland makes that easier but it's not a prerequisite.
I do think that a dozen or so Scottish seats could easily be the difference between largest party and overall majority as the polls tighten a bit.
As the election draws closer, if we are to see massive swingback to the Conservatives as highlighted and expected on these very pages, I don't see why that wouldn't also be the case for the incumbent SNP.
As it stands Labour are 10 to 15 points ahead of the Conservatives nationally (and we are expecting that to mostly drift back by election day). In Scotland Labour are 10 to 15 points adrift of the SNP (why are we not expecting that to return to its usual 20 to 25 point margin?).
Labour are doomed, doomed I say!
Swingback, if it helps Yousless at all, would come in the Scottish Parliamentary elections, not the General.
You’ve all set the bar so low for him that he’s going to clear it and look like a success.
Not a chance. He will fail in ways we can't even imagine yet. Starting with the appointment of Shona Robinson, Nicola's best mate, as deputy. I searched for her achievements on Wiki: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shona_Robison Unfortunately, achievements was a missing word!
Surely then the time is ripe for the high achievers of your party of choice to sweep to power?
Not for three years, though ...
If the predictions of Humza’s tenure not outlasting a Trussian lettuce don’t come to pass, that’s just three more years for Ross & co to put their obvious qualities on display.
That reminds me - is Mr Ross leaving Holyrood at the next election, or is my memory failing me? I am sure I recall some announcement, but can't confirm it. So I may be quite wrong, in which case apols.
He announced he was leaving Westminster at the next GE.
Thanks - that's it.
That means a new candidate for Moray presumably? Luckily a large pool of achievers to choose from.
Hmm, fisherfolk and farmers not too happy with Brexit either. But the latter not exactly SKS voters, and it was the previous leader of the LDs who liked to be filmed in front of farm animals. Not sure that Mr C-H has quite the same knack.
"Fisherfolk"? This conjures an image of olde worlde types for whom the 19th century is dangerously modern. Nice alliteration though.
The UK government has delivered on its promises in remarkably quick time. Described by the Ukrainians as a "true friend of Ukraine".
I know it’s been said numerous times, but this looks again like a turning point in the war. The enemy has thrown so much, in terms of men and materiel, at the conflict, yet has failed to gain any significant territory over the winter.
The juxtaposition of numerous Western tanks arriving in Ukraine, as the Russians are pulling 60-year-old T-55 tanks out of museums for recommissioning, is very stark.
A T-55 vs a Challenger 2, is the enemy bringing a knife to a gun fight.
200 T-55 vs 14 Challenger 2s… I wouldn’t bet against the T-55s
I refer you to the Battle of Norfolk.
Not quite the same tank versions but earlier iterations.
From wiki. Quite something.
"A British Challenger 1 tank during the 1st Gulf War. The British Challenger tank was the most efficient tank of the Gulf war suffering no losses while destroying approximately 300 Iraqi tanks during combat operations."
The Challengers will have four major advantages over the older Russian tanks
i) Longer firing range
ii) Much better armour
iii) GPS
iv) Night vision
In the original Gulf War a single battalion of Abrams, which are comparable to Challengers, destroyed an entire Iraqi division.
Also, like then, the Ukranians will have much better live time intelligence info.
The night vision stuff is interesting. I hadn't realised this is where NATO have a big advantage over other forces.
Intelligence is the biggie. Nato can supply Ukraine with real-time data on enemy positions and Russia daren't attack their elint aircraft like they would in a 1-on-1 war, for fear of retaliation and its Black Sea fleet suddenly disappearing.
I don’t believe it will work. Whoever gets the best AGI first will become enormously powerful and enormously rich. When have humans ever resisted that?
Plus, the Chinese, Koreans, Taiwanese, Japanese, Russians etc will be working on their own versions, they won’t stop because the military capabilities of AGI will be monumental, and if you’re enemy has them and you don’t you’re screwed
I am not sure I agree with "What is very clear is that any hopes labour have of returning to power rely on a very strong performance in Scotland".
Unless the Tories + DUP have majority after the next GE Labour will return to power imo. Clearly, success for Labour in Scotland makes that easier but it's not a prerequisite.
I do think that a dozen or so Scottish seats could easily be the difference between largest party and overall majority as the polls tighten a bit.
As the election draws closer, if we are to see massive swingback to the Conservatives as highlighted and expected on these very pages, I don't see why that wouldn't also be the case for the incumbent SNP.
As it stands Labour are 10 to 15 points ahead of the Conservatives nationally (and we are expecting that to mostly drift back by election day). In Scotland Labour are 10 to 15 points adrift of the SNP (why are we not expecting that to return to its usual 20 to 25 point margin?).
Labour are doomed, doomed I say!
Swingback, if it helps Yousless at all, would come in the Scottish Parliamentary elections, not the General.
You’ve all set the bar so low for him that he’s going to clear it and look like a success.
Not a chance. He will fail in ways we can't even imagine yet. Starting with the appointment of Shona Robinson, Nicola's best mate, as deputy. I searched for her achievements on Wiki: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shona_Robison Unfortunately, achievements was a missing word!
Surely then the time is ripe for the high achievers of your party of choice to sweep to power?
Not for three years, though ...
If the predictions of Humza’s tenure not outlasting a Trussian lettuce don’t come to pass, that’s just three more years for Ross & co to put their obvious qualities on display.
That reminds me - is Mr Ross leaving Holyrood at the next election, or is my memory failing me? I am sure I recall some announcement, but can't confirm it. So I may be quite wrong, in which case apols.
He announced he was leaving Westminster at the next GE.
Thanks - that's it.
That means a new candidate for Moray presumably? Luckily a large pool of achievers to choose from.
Hmm, fisherfolk and farmers not too happy with Brexit either. But the latter not exactly SKS voters, and it was the previous leader of the LDs who liked to be filmed in front of farm animals. Not sure that Mr C-H has quite the same knack.
"Fisherfolk"? This conjures an image of olde worlde types for whom the 19th century is dangerously modern. Nice alliteration though.
Non-gendered*. Also means the family members, comer to think of it, so works well in political terms.
Edit: like e.g. convenor instead of chairperson.
Also: avoids confusion with the people with rod and line.
As is obvious, it is deep in Uncanny Valley. The likeness is good enough to be provoking, but bad enough to be obviously wrong in weird ways: the combination of these reactions is often a sense of deep unease
On present trends these videos will be perfect in a year or two, just like the still images now. Then what?
Buying ICE vehicles now is like buying analog film cameras 20 years ago. Soon the ICE for personal transport will be as obsolete as cassette tapes or CDs.
Analog (sic) film cameras are trendy right now, and CDs are still viable.
Cassette tapes are more niche
Not the mass market by a long way, despite the hipster interest in vinyl.
Sure, ICE vehicles have some advantages still, particularly for rural areas. We have an ICE hybrid as well as an EV. Increasingly though EVs have the advantage. I think it will be my last ever ICE vehicle.
Currently EVs are 3% of the UK car fleet, but by Dec 22 had 30% of new sales. This is being driven by demand, and is only heading one way. The manufacturers see this too, which is why so much of the new design and engineering is centered on them, with ICE vehicle increasingly neglected.
There is an issue with any technological change of when to jump to the new tech, but as EV prices drop, practicality increases, and psychological barriers drop, it is only going one way.
I largely agree. My reservation is how much the prices of EVs will drop. It's one of those things I've been waiting for for some time and doesn't appear to be happening.
I do also wonder if there is a future in which the most common model is owning small EVs for the 90% of our journeys which are local and renting large ICEs or other type for longer journeys. My understanding is that EVs are much more cost effective as small, relatively low range vehicles, and I wonder whether by trying to make EVs do what ICEs do we are solving the wrong problem.
As a personal example, in my family we have two cars: a 14 year old Ford Focus and a rather newer MPV. We initially bought an MPV because we had three children under 5, and needed something which could fit three car seats in - but we're through that stage now. Now the reason for having an MPV is that a few times a year, all five of us plus luggage will go on a journey of more than 200 miles. I think many people are the same - we have the car we need for the extreme example of the journeys we make, rather than the typical example. 90% of the time, though, there is at least one car parked outside our house. And weeks, months can go by without ever going much more than 50 miles from home. It feels like a much more resource-efficient solution would be to own a small EV, and on the rare occasion we needed two cars at once, or that we needed a bigger car, rent one.
An EV works well as a second car, for most people who have a private driveway and a regular job. It does the daily commute, runs errands around town, and goes on charge every night. That covers 90% of journeys.
I can definitely see the last of the MPV and SUV petrol cars being snapped up by rental companies, they’re going to hold up in value and everyone’s going to want one at Christmas.
The worry for those buying an EV today, is that the technology moves so quickly that a five-year-old car is as popular as a five-year-old phone. When the new one does 500 miles and charges in 5 minutes, who will want an old one? What if the charging standard changes to enable faster speeds, and you’re stuck with the old one? I’d always lease an EV rather than buy it, which gives some random bank the risk of prices imploding. There are EV taxis that have done huge mileages (500,000+), but the concern is that the battery has a life measured mostly in time rather than usage.
There’s also concerns around the connectivity of EVs in particular, especially with Tesla who own the chargers. There’s stories from the US, of cars repaired outside the dealer network being banned from the charging network for “safety” reasons. Even if you own the car, do you really actually *own* the car?
Man living in petrostate not a fan of EVs.
Just playing the devil’s advocate. There’s actually a few EVs out here, but electricity is expensive and petrol is cheap.
At least there’s the infrastructure though, which isn’t the case in large parts of the world outside the West. There’s not going to be a huge rise in EV use in large parts of Asia or Africa any time soon.
Buying ICE vehicles now is like buying analog film cameras 20 years ago. Soon the ICE for personal transport will be as obsolete as cassette tapes or CDs.
Analog (sic) film cameras are trendy right now, and CDs are still viable.
Cassette tapes are more niche
Not the mass market by a long way, despite the hipster interest in vinyl.
Sure, ICE vehicles have some advantages still, particularly for rural areas. We have an ICE hybrid as well as an EV. Increasingly though EVs have the advantage. I think it will be my last ever ICE vehicle.
Currently EVs are 3% of the UK car fleet, but by Dec 22 had 30% of new sales. This is being driven by demand, and is only heading one way. The manufacturers see this too, which is why so much of the new design and engineering is centered on them, with ICE vehicle increasingly neglected.
There is an issue with any technological change of when to jump to the new tech, but as EV prices drop, practicality increases, and psychological barriers drop, it is only going one way.
I largely agree. My reservation is how much the prices of EVs will drop. It's one of those things I've been waiting for for some time and doesn't appear to be happening...
Largely because demand greatly exceeds supply, so manufacturers have no incentive to make cheaper models. That will change in the next 3-5 years, looking at the number of factories being built now and in planning.
And both batteries and motors are steadily getting cheaper to make, alongside the increase in capacity.
I will never have an electric car until they solve the charging issue ie having to wait to get to a charging point and. Then 40 mins for a half charge....I suspect I will have met my maker by then.
In 3 years of EV ownership, I have only had to use a public charger twice, and neither time did I have to wait. It is not often that I drive more than 280 miles in a day, and charging overnight on cheap electricity is better.
Indeed, because you have a driveway and a regular job, it’s a good fit. The concerns are around the edge cases, especially poorer people living in apartment blocks, who will have to pay a lot more to charge their car on the public network, then you would on cheap overnight home power.
Not just tower blocks. Any home without off-street parking is screwed as you cannot safely run power cables across the pavement.
Not exactly safe, but in some areas of South London I regularly see cables coming out of a downstairs window, across the pavement above head height, secured on the other side in a convenient tree on the road side of the pavement and then plugged in overnight. Typically Edwardian terraces, relatively quiet streets. No idea if those houses where the trees line up well command a premium yet...
As is obvious, it is deep in Uncanny Valley. The likeness is good enough to be provoking, but bad enough to be obviously wrong in weird ways: the combination of these reactions is often a sense of deep unease
On present trends these videos will be perfect in a year or two, just like the still images now. Then what?
The Scottish results will be fascinating. I expect movement against both parties of government, made more entertaining that the SNP will blame the Tories and vice versa. So it should be a good election for Labour and the LibDems, but the problem comes in seats like my own where the local Tory is an arse but his only viable opponent is the SNP.
Do you vote SNP in protest at the disastrous policies of the Tory government impacting on local farming, fishing and energy interests? Or vote Tory in protest at the disastrous policies of the SNP government impacting local energy interests and services?
Or will the Boundary Review actually go through - in which case I will be in Aberdeenshire Central which is mostly the old Gordon seat. This was held by Malcolm Bruce of my own party until 2015, though LD votes have dissipated a lot since then.
So, much to play for and the new constituencies could shake a load of things up...
I hadn't realised that the new boundaries were still not in force. This is beyond ridiculous. Atm I am in Dundee West and would probably vote Labour in the vain hope they can recover the seat. If they go through I will be in the new Tayside North where the Tories will clearly be the strongest challenger.
Final recommendations are due by 1st July and will presumably be approved by Parliament in the autumn. I don't think there's a real rush because Sunak ain't calling an election before then.
IIRC the new boundaries don’t now need a vote in Parliament, with the legislation already passed. This was to stop the MPs voting them down again, after the debacle last time. The old boundaries have been in place since 2010, based on population numbers from 2005 or 2006.
No, the new boundaries are not based on population numbers. As part of the Cameron/Osborne gerrymandering programme (that cost them the EU referendum and both their careers), seats are based on the numbers of registered voters.
Well as you can't vote without being on the register that is hardly surprising
MPs do not just represent the people who voted for them, or even just the people registered to vote, but in any case the reason it is not surprising in this instance is that it was part of the Cameron/Osborne gerrymandering strategy (since copied in the US, iirc).
No, they don't, put the whole point of equalising constituency size is to equalise registered voters, not the entire population.
It's a sop to the "my vote is less equal" crowd. You don't get around that by including children in the calculation.
And, as I said, the number of registered voters is a known figure at all times. The population isn't.
No, the point is that by purging the rolls, introducing individual registration, and only then redrawing boundaries, Cameron/Osborne ensured more Tory seats would be created and Labour ones removed.
Ironically, this meant losing the European referendum and chucking Cameron and Osborne out of Downing Street. Karma's a bitch.
If parliament had let the last boundary review pass then individual registration would have come in after it.
But IER isn't why Cameron lost the EU referendum. The Remain campaign being utterly shit did that.
Buying ICE vehicles now is like buying analog film cameras 20 years ago. Soon the ICE for personal transport will be as obsolete as cassette tapes or CDs.
Analog (sic) film cameras are trendy right now, and CDs are still viable.
Cassette tapes are more niche
Not the mass market by a long way, despite the hipster interest in vinyl.
Sure, ICE vehicles have some advantages still, particularly for rural areas. We have an ICE hybrid as well as an EV. Increasingly though EVs have the advantage. I think it will be my last ever ICE vehicle.
Currently EVs are 3% of the UK car fleet, but by Dec 22 had 30% of new sales. This is being driven by demand, and is only heading one way. The manufacturers see this too, which is why so much of the new design and engineering is centered on them, with ICE vehicle increasingly neglected.
There is an issue with any technological change of when to jump to the new tech, but as EV prices drop, practicality increases, and psychological barriers drop, it is only going one way.
I largely agree. My reservation is how much the prices of EVs will drop. It's one of those things I've been waiting for for some time and doesn't appear to be happening.
I do also wonder if there is a future in which the most common model is owning small EVs for the 90% of our journeys which are local and renting large ICEs or other type for longer journeys. My understanding is that EVs are much more cost effective as small, relatively low range vehicles, and I wonder whether by trying to make EVs do what ICEs do we are solving the wrong problem.
As a personal example, in my family we have two cars: a 14 year old Ford Focus and a rather newer MPV. We initially bought an MPV because we had three children under 5, and needed something which could fit three car seats in - but we're through that stage now. Now the reason for having an MPV is that a few times a year, all five of us plus luggage will go on a journey of more than 200 miles. I think many people are the same - we have the car we need for the extreme example of the journeys we make, rather than the typical example. 90% of the time, though, there is at least one car parked outside our house. And weeks, months can go by without ever going much more than 50 miles from home. It feels like a much more resource-efficient solution would be to own a small EV, and on the rare occasion we needed two cars at once, or that we needed a bigger car, rent one.
An EV works well as a second car, for most people who have a private driveway and a regular job. It does the daily commute, runs errands around town, and goes on charge every night. That covers 90% of journeys.
I can definitely see the last of the MPV and SUV petrol cars being snapped up by rental companies, they’re going to hold up in value and everyone’s going to want one at Christmas.
The worry for those buying an EV today, is that the technology moves so quickly that a five-year-old car is as popular as a five-year-old phone. When the new one does 500 miles and charges in 5 minutes, who will want an old one? What if the charging standard changes to enable faster speeds, and you’re stuck with the old one? I’d always lease an EV rather than buy it, which gives some random bank the risk of prices imploding. There are EV taxis that have done huge mileages (500,000+), but the concern is that the battery has a life measured mostly in time rather than usage.
There’s also concerns around the connectivity of EVs in particular, especially with Tesla who own the chargers. There’s stories from the US, of cars repaired outside the dealer network being banned from the charging network for “safety” reasons. Even if you own the car, do you really actually *own* the car?
Man living in petrostate not a fan of EVs.
Just playing the devil’s advocate. There’s actually a few EVs out here, but electricity is expensive and petrol is cheap.
At least there’s the infrastructure though, which isn’t the case in large parts of the world outside the West. There’s not going to be a huge rise in EV use in large parts of Asia or Africa any time soon.
Buying ICE vehicles now is like buying analog film cameras 20 years ago. Soon the ICE for personal transport will be as obsolete as cassette tapes or CDs.
Analog (sic) film cameras are trendy right now, and CDs are still viable.
Cassette tapes are more niche
Not the mass market by a long way, despite the hipster interest in vinyl.
Sure, ICE vehicles have some advantages still, particularly for rural areas. We have an ICE hybrid as well as an EV. Increasingly though EVs have the advantage. I think it will be my last ever ICE vehicle.
Currently EVs are 3% of the UK car fleet, but by Dec 22 had 30% of new sales. This is being driven by demand, and is only heading one way. The manufacturers see this too, which is why so much of the new design and engineering is centered on them, with ICE vehicle increasingly neglected.
There is an issue with any technological change of when to jump to the new tech, but as EV prices drop, practicality increases, and psychological barriers drop, it is only going one way.
I largely agree. My reservation is how much the prices of EVs will drop. It's one of those things I've been waiting for for some time and doesn't appear to be happening...
Largely because demand greatly exceeds supply, so manufacturers have no incentive to make cheaper models. That will change in the next 3-5 years, looking at the number of factories being built now and in planning.
And both batteries and motors are steadily getting cheaper to make, alongside the increase in capacity.
I will never have an electric car until they solve the charging issue ie having to wait to get to a charging point and. Then 40 mins for a half charge....I suspect I will have met my maker by then.
In 3 years of EV ownership, I have only had to use a public charger twice, and neither time did I have to wait. It is not often that I drive more than 280 miles in a day, and charging overnight on cheap electricity is better.
Indeed, because you have a driveway and a regular job, it’s a good fit. The concerns are around the edge cases, especially poorer people living in apartment blocks, who will have to pay a lot more to charge their car on the public network, then you would on cheap overnight home power.
Not just tower blocks. Any home without off-street parking is screwed as you cannot safely run power cables across the pavement.
Buying ICE vehicles now is like buying analog film cameras 20 years ago. Soon the ICE for personal transport will be as obsolete as cassette tapes or CDs.
Analog (sic) film cameras are trendy right now, and CDs are still viable.
Cassette tapes are more niche
Not the mass market by a long way, despite the hipster interest in vinyl.
Sure, ICE vehicles have some advantages still, particularly for rural areas. We have an ICE hybrid as well as an EV. Increasingly though EVs have the advantage. I think it will be my last ever ICE vehicle.
Currently EVs are 3% of the UK car fleet, but by Dec 22 had 30% of new sales. This is being driven by demand, and is only heading one way. The manufacturers see this too, which is why so much of the new design and engineering is centered on them, with ICE vehicle increasingly neglected.
There is an issue with any technological change of when to jump to the new tech, but as EV prices drop, practicality increases, and psychological barriers drop, it is only going one way.
I largely agree. My reservation is how much the prices of EVs will drop. It's one of those things I've been waiting for for some time and doesn't appear to be happening.
I do also wonder if there is a future in which the most common model is owning small EVs for the 90% of our journeys which are local and renting large ICEs or other type for longer journeys. My understanding is that EVs are much more cost effective as small, relatively low range vehicles, and I wonder whether by trying to make EVs do what ICEs do we are solving the wrong problem.
As a personal example, in my family we have two cars: a 14 year old Ford Focus and a rather newer MPV. We initially bought an MPV because we had three children under 5, and needed something which could fit three car seats in - but we're through that stage now. Now the reason for having an MPV is that a few times a year, all five of us plus luggage will go on a journey of more than 200 miles. I think many people are the same - we have the car we need for the extreme example of the journeys we make, rather than the typical example. 90% of the time, though, there is at least one car parked outside our house. And weeks, months can go by without ever going much more than 50 miles from home. It feels like a much more resource-efficient solution would be to own a small EV, and on the rare occasion we needed two cars at once, or that we needed a bigger car, rent one.
An EV works well as a second car, for most people who have a private driveway and a regular job. It does the daily commute, runs errands around town, and goes on charge every night. That covers 90% of journeys.
I can definitely see the last of the MPV and SUV petrol cars being snapped up by rental companies, they’re going to hold up in value and everyone’s going to want one at Christmas.
The worry for those buying an EV today, is that the technology moves so quickly that a five-year-old car is as popular as a five-year-old phone. When the new one does 500 miles and charges in 5 minutes, who will want an old one? What if the charging standard changes to enable faster speeds, and you’re stuck with the old one? I’d always lease an EV rather than buy it, which gives some random bank the risk of prices imploding. There are EV taxis that have done huge mileages (500,000+), but the concern is that the battery has a life measured mostly in time rather than usage.
There’s also concerns around the connectivity of EVs in particular, especially with Tesla who own the chargers. There’s stories from the US, of cars repaired outside the dealer network being banned from the charging network for “safety” reasons. Even if you own the car, do you really actually *own* the car?
We've never paid more than a few thousand for any of our second (or fourth) hand diesel cars. The chances of us, or the large number of other car drivers like us, putting down a five figure deposit and a few hundred a month for a new car are very slim. There will be lots of demand for five year old EV cars.
Oh indeed. I have a 17-year-old E-class Merc, that I paid £4k for. It’ll last forever, so long as the oil gets changed occasionally.
The worry with an older EV, is that it needs a battery replacement one day that basically writes it off. Owning one outside the warranty is going to be like owning a Range Rover with no warranty, potentially very painful.
Perhaps there will be a cottage industry of battery repair shops, or perhaps it will be impossible to do anything outside the dealer network who will sell you a whole new pack? There is a cottage industry around the old Nissan Leaf, which seems to be simple enough that batteries can be swapped out and even upgraded. It remains to be seen, whether that is possible with other EVs in the future.
Your Merc may last forever - though you can't say the same for all Merc engines. Plenty of other cars will not just run and run - engines are designed to implode at a certain point and increasingly require expensive servicing to change things like cam belts which are designed to be as awkwardly sited as possible. Which so many owners don't do as can't afford and so bang.
The threat from EVs for manufacturers is that servicing isn't needed, not really. My Tesla has no maintenance schedule, its all as required.
Somewhat ironically, the slightly older cars are going to be the ones that run forever. Modern Euro6 turbocharged engines are made to very high tolerances, and will likely need rebuilding every couple of hundred thousand miles.
Yes, an EV needs a lot less servicing than an ICE car. Orders of magnitude fewer moving parts, and technology such as regenerative braking. The cooling system for the battery is the only thing that requires regular service, and your car will quickly tell you if it’s overheating! The franchise dealer model generates a lot of its revenue from servicing though, so many EVs still tell you to get a ‘service’ every 10,000 miles.
Buying ICE vehicles now is like buying analog film cameras 20 years ago. Soon the ICE for personal transport will be as obsolete as cassette tapes or CDs.
Analog (sic) film cameras are trendy right now, and CDs are still viable.
Cassette tapes are more niche
Not the mass market by a long way, despite the hipster interest in vinyl.
Sure, ICE vehicles have some advantages still, particularly for rural areas. We have an ICE hybrid as well as an EV. Increasingly though EVs have the advantage. I think it will be my last ever ICE vehicle.
Currently EVs are 3% of the UK car fleet, but by Dec 22 had 30% of new sales. This is being driven by demand, and is only heading one way. The manufacturers see this too, which is why so much of the new design and engineering is centered on them, with ICE vehicle increasingly neglected.
There is an issue with any technological change of when to jump to the new tech, but as EV prices drop, practicality increases, and psychological barriers drop, it is only going one way.
I largely agree. My reservation is how much the prices of EVs will drop. It's one of those things I've been waiting for for some time and doesn't appear to be happening...
Largely because demand greatly exceeds supply, so manufacturers have no incentive to make cheaper models. That will change in the next 3-5 years, looking at the number of factories being built now and in planning.
And both batteries and motors are steadily getting cheaper to make, alongside the increase in capacity.
I will never have an electric car until they solve the charging issue ie having to wait to get to a charging point and. Then 40 mins for a half charge....I suspect I will have met my maker by then.
You can do 10-80% in about 25 min on the latest chargers. To get to half should be a fraction of that - the charging is faster on an empty battery.
Not what my pal tells me. They have had nightmares queuing and it's 40.mins min to charge his ev f pace
Tbf that's about the same time I spend queuing at my local Costco yesterday for diesel.
There's no way any EV charging station will be able to match the sheer throughput of energy that a 12 pump Costco can get into vehicles in a day though.
No, which is why the model for EV charging will be a charger at every parking place, so that you can charge when you park to go shopping, or the cinema, or whatever, rather than a dedicated charging station.
I love the dashboard of my 2009 Ford Focus. It is just about perfection.
Reading these two sentences gave my eyes AIDS and caused me to have a mini-stroke. Thanks.
I thought you were a driver, Dura_Ace, not some pampered fop who needs to be able to specify the temperature of his seat and that his air temperature needs to be two degrees lower than that of his passenger and who needs a computer to tell him the way home.
And another thing: complicated climate control doesn't work. Or it doesn't work particularly effectively. Certainly less effectively than 'I am a bit cold - I will turn the dial a bit from blue to red - ah, that's better'.
I'm not saying that a 2009 Ford Focus is the best driving experience ever. It's perfectly adequate - you can keep up with the traffic, it doesn't veer off to the left. I daresay if you were racing you would want something a bit more exciting. But my point is that nothing which has happened since then - new buttons, flashing lights, push button ignition, electric handbrakes - makes life any better at all.
Where Ford Foci do fall down is that after about 70000 miles - for reasons I cannot begin to imagine - some element of watertightness is lost and throughout the winter they are very damp to get into, with condensation or ice on the inside of the windscreen.
Buying ICE vehicles now is like buying analog film cameras 20 years ago. Soon the ICE for personal transport will be as obsolete as cassette tapes or CDs.
Analog (sic) film cameras are trendy right now, and CDs are still viable.
Cassette tapes are more niche
Not the mass market by a long way, despite the hipster interest in vinyl.
Sure, ICE vehicles have some advantages still, particularly for rural areas. We have an ICE hybrid as well as an EV. Increasingly though EVs have the advantage. I think it will be my last ever ICE vehicle.
Currently EVs are 3% of the UK car fleet, but by Dec 22 had 30% of new sales. This is being driven by demand, and is only heading one way. The manufacturers see this too, which is why so much of the new design and engineering is centered on them, with ICE vehicle increasingly neglected.
There is an issue with any technological change of when to jump to the new tech, but as EV prices drop, practicality increases, and psychological barriers drop, it is only going one way.
I largely agree. My reservation is how much the prices of EVs will drop. It's one of those things I've been waiting for for some time and doesn't appear to be happening.
I do also wonder if there is a future in which the most common model is owning small EVs for the 90% of our journeys which are local and renting large ICEs or other type for longer journeys. My understanding is that EVs are much more cost effective as small, relatively low range vehicles, and I wonder whether by trying to make EVs do what ICEs do we are solving the wrong problem.
As a personal example, in my family we have two cars: a 14 year old Ford Focus and a rather newer MPV. We initially bought an MPV because we had three children under 5, and needed something which could fit three car seats in - but we're through that stage now. Now the reason for having an MPV is that a few times a year, all five of us plus luggage will go on a journey of more than 200 miles. I think many people are the same - we have the car we need for the extreme example of the journeys we make, rather than the typical example. 90% of the time, though, there is at least one car parked outside our house. And weeks, months can go by without ever going much more than 50 miles from home. It feels like a much more resource-efficient solution would be to own a small EV, and on the rare occasion we needed two cars at once, or that we needed a bigger car, rent one.
An EV works well as a second car, for most people who have a private driveway and a regular job. It does the daily commute, runs errands around town, and goes on charge every night. That covers 90% of journeys.
I can definitely see the last of the MPV and SUV petrol cars being snapped up by rental companies, they’re going to hold up in value and everyone’s going to want one at Christmas.
The worry for those buying an EV today, is that the technology moves so quickly that a five-year-old car is as popular as a five-year-old phone. When the new one does 500 miles and charges in 5 minutes, who will want an old one? What if the charging standard changes to enable faster speeds, and you’re stuck with the old one? I’d always lease an EV rather than buy it, which gives some random bank the risk of prices imploding. There are EV taxis that have done huge mileages (500,000+), but the concern is that the battery has a life measured mostly in time rather than usage.
There’s also concerns around the connectivity of EVs in particular, especially with Tesla who own the chargers. There’s stories from the US, of cars repaired outside the dealer network being banned from the charging network for “safety” reasons. Even if you own the car, do you really actually *own* the car?
Man living in petrostate not a fan of EVs.
Just playing the devil’s advocate. There’s actually a few EVs out here, but electricity is expensive and petrol is cheap.
At least there’s the infrastructure though, which isn’t the case in large parts of the world outside the West. There’s not going to be a huge rise in EV use in large parts of Asia or Africa any time soon.
Buying ICE vehicles now is like buying analog film cameras 20 years ago. Soon the ICE for personal transport will be as obsolete as cassette tapes or CDs.
Analog (sic) film cameras are trendy right now, and CDs are still viable.
Cassette tapes are more niche
Not the mass market by a long way, despite the hipster interest in vinyl.
Sure, ICE vehicles have some advantages still, particularly for rural areas. We have an ICE hybrid as well as an EV. Increasingly though EVs have the advantage. I think it will be my last ever ICE vehicle.
Currently EVs are 3% of the UK car fleet, but by Dec 22 had 30% of new sales. This is being driven by demand, and is only heading one way. The manufacturers see this too, which is why so much of the new design and engineering is centered on them, with ICE vehicle increasingly neglected.
There is an issue with any technological change of when to jump to the new tech, but as EV prices drop, practicality increases, and psychological barriers drop, it is only going one way.
I largely agree. My reservation is how much the prices of EVs will drop. It's one of those things I've been waiting for for some time and doesn't appear to be happening...
Largely because demand greatly exceeds supply, so manufacturers have no incentive to make cheaper models. That will change in the next 3-5 years, looking at the number of factories being built now and in planning.
And both batteries and motors are steadily getting cheaper to make, alongside the increase in capacity.
I will never have an electric car until they solve the charging issue ie having to wait to get to a charging point and. Then 40 mins for a half charge....I suspect I will have met my maker by then.
In 3 years of EV ownership, I have only had to use a public charger twice, and neither time did I have to wait. It is not often that I drive more than 280 miles in a day, and charging overnight on cheap electricity is better.
Indeed, because you have a driveway and a regular job, it’s a good fit. The concerns are around the edge cases, especially poorer people living in apartment blocks, who will have to pay a lot more to charge their car on the public network, then you would on cheap overnight home power.
Not just tower blocks. Any home without off-street parking is screwed as you cannot safely run power cables across the pavement.
Not exactly safe, but in some areas of South London I regularly see cables coming out of a downstairs window, across the pavement above head height, secured on the other side in a convenient tree on the road side of the pavement and then plugged in overnight. Typically Edwardian terraces, relatively quiet streets. No idea if those houses where the trees line up well command a premium yet...
A retractable arm attached to a tree or fence post works too. The easiest solution though (but not yet supported by councils) is simply to dig a shallow culvert across the pavement covered with a hinged metal grate.
The Scottish results will be fascinating. I expect movement against both parties of government, made more entertaining that the SNP will blame the Tories and vice versa. So it should be a good election for Labour and the LibDems, but the problem comes in seats like my own where the local Tory is an arse but his only viable opponent is the SNP.
Do you vote SNP in protest at the disastrous policies of the Tory government impacting on local farming, fishing and energy interests? Or vote Tory in protest at the disastrous policies of the SNP government impacting local energy interests and services?
Or will the Boundary Review actually go through - in which case I will be in Aberdeenshire Central which is mostly the old Gordon seat. This was held by Malcolm Bruce of my own party until 2015, though LD votes have dissipated a lot since then.
So, much to play for and the new constituencies could shake a load of things up...
I hadn't realised that the new boundaries were still not in force. This is beyond ridiculous. Atm I am in Dundee West and would probably vote Labour in the vain hope they can recover the seat. If they go through I will be in the new Tayside North where the Tories will clearly be the strongest challenger.
Final recommendations are due by 1st July and will presumably be approved by Parliament in the autumn. I don't think there's a real rush because Sunak ain't calling an election before then.
IIRC the new boundaries don’t now need a vote in Parliament, with the legislation already passed. This was to stop the MPs voting them down again, after the debacle last time. The old boundaries have been in place since 2010, based on population numbers from 2005 or 2006.
No, the new boundaries are not based on population numbers. As part of the Cameron/Osborne gerrymandering programme (that cost them the EU referendum and both their careers), seats are based on the numbers of registered voters.
Well as you can't vote without being on the register that is hardly surprising
MPs do not just represent the people who voted for them, or even just the people registered to vote, but in any case the reason it is not surprising in this instance is that it was part of the Cameron/Osborne gerrymandering strategy (since copied in the US, iirc).
No, they don't, put the whole point of equalising constituency size is to equalise registered voters, not the entire population.
It's a sop to the "my vote is less equal" crowd. You don't get around that by including children in the calculation.
And, as I said, the number of registered voters is a known figure at all times. The population isn't.
No, the point is that by purging the rolls, introducing individual registration, and only then redrawing boundaries, Cameron/Osborne ensured more Tory seats would be created and Labour ones removed.
Ironically, this meant losing the European referendum and chucking Cameron and Osborne out of Downing Street. Karma's a bitch.
If parliament had let the last boundary review pass then individual registration would have come in after it.
But IER isn't why Cameron lost the EU referendum. The Remain campaign being utterly shit did that.
The Remain campaign was a shambles, true, but registration, and in particular disenfranchising a lot of remain-leaning young and urban voters was another significant factor. You may recall this was realised at the time so HMG ran a registration drive, and even an extended deadline, over protests from the Leave side.
Buying ICE vehicles now is like buying analog film cameras 20 years ago. Soon the ICE for personal transport will be as obsolete as cassette tapes or CDs.
Analog (sic) film cameras are trendy right now, and CDs are still viable.
Cassette tapes are more niche
Not the mass market by a long way, despite the hipster interest in vinyl.
Sure, ICE vehicles have some advantages still, particularly for rural areas. We have an ICE hybrid as well as an EV. Increasingly though EVs have the advantage. I think it will be my last ever ICE vehicle.
Currently EVs are 3% of the UK car fleet, but by Dec 22 had 30% of new sales. This is being driven by demand, and is only heading one way. The manufacturers see this too, which is why so much of the new design and engineering is centered on them, with ICE vehicle increasingly neglected.
There is an issue with any technological change of when to jump to the new tech, but as EV prices drop, practicality increases, and psychological barriers drop, it is only going one way.
I largely agree. My reservation is how much the prices of EVs will drop. It's one of those things I've been waiting for for some time and doesn't appear to be happening.
I do also wonder if there is a future in which the most common model is owning small EVs for the 90% of our journeys which are local and renting large ICEs or other type for longer journeys. My understanding is that EVs are much more cost effective as small, relatively low range vehicles, and I wonder whether by trying to make EVs do what ICEs do we are solving the wrong problem.
As a personal example, in my family we have two cars: a 14 year old Ford Focus and a rather newer MPV. We initially bought an MPV because we had three children under 5, and needed something which could fit three car seats in - but we're through that stage now. Now the reason for having an MPV is that a few times a year, all five of us plus luggage will go on a journey of more than 200 miles. I think many people are the same - we have the car we need for the extreme example of the journeys we make, rather than the typical example. 90% of the time, though, there is at least one car parked outside our house. And weeks, months can go by without ever going much more than 50 miles from home. It feels like a much more resource-efficient solution would be to own a small EV, and on the rare occasion we needed two cars at once, or that we needed a bigger car, rent one.
An EV works well as a second car, for most people who have a private driveway and a regular job. It does the daily commute, runs errands around town, and goes on charge every night. That covers 90% of journeys.
I can definitely see the last of the MPV and SUV petrol cars being snapped up by rental companies, they’re going to hold up in value and everyone’s going to want one at Christmas.
The worry for those buying an EV today, is that the technology moves so quickly that a five-year-old car is as popular as a five-year-old phone. When the new one does 500 miles and charges in 5 minutes, who will want an old one? What if the charging standard changes to enable faster speeds, and you’re stuck with the old one? I’d always lease an EV rather than buy it, which gives some random bank the risk of prices imploding. There are EV taxis that have done huge mileages (500,000+), but the concern is that the battery has a life measured mostly in time rather than usage.
There’s also concerns around the connectivity of EVs in particular, especially with Tesla who own the chargers. There’s stories from the US, of cars repaired outside the dealer network being banned from the charging network for “safety” reasons. Even if you own the car, do you really actually *own* the car?
Man living in petrostate not a fan of EVs.
Just playing the devil’s advocate. There’s actually a few EVs out here, but electricity is expensive and petrol is cheap.
At least there’s the infrastructure though, which isn’t the case in large parts of the world outside the West. There’s not going to be a huge rise in EV use in large parts of Asia or Africa any time soon.
Buying ICE vehicles now is like buying analog film cameras 20 years ago. Soon the ICE for personal transport will be as obsolete as cassette tapes or CDs.
Analog (sic) film cameras are trendy right now, and CDs are still viable.
Cassette tapes are more niche
Not the mass market by a long way, despite the hipster interest in vinyl.
Sure, ICE vehicles have some advantages still, particularly for rural areas. We have an ICE hybrid as well as an EV. Increasingly though EVs have the advantage. I think it will be my last ever ICE vehicle.
Currently EVs are 3% of the UK car fleet, but by Dec 22 had 30% of new sales. This is being driven by demand, and is only heading one way. The manufacturers see this too, which is why so much of the new design and engineering is centered on them, with ICE vehicle increasingly neglected.
There is an issue with any technological change of when to jump to the new tech, but as EV prices drop, practicality increases, and psychological barriers drop, it is only going one way.
I largely agree. My reservation is how much the prices of EVs will drop. It's one of those things I've been waiting for for some time and doesn't appear to be happening...
Largely because demand greatly exceeds supply, so manufacturers have no incentive to make cheaper models. That will change in the next 3-5 years, looking at the number of factories being built now and in planning.
And both batteries and motors are steadily getting cheaper to make, alongside the increase in capacity.
I will never have an electric car until they solve the charging issue ie having to wait to get to a charging point and. Then 40 mins for a half charge....I suspect I will have met my maker by then.
In 3 years of EV ownership, I have only had to use a public charger twice, and neither time did I have to wait. It is not often that I drive more than 280 miles in a day, and charging overnight on cheap electricity is better.
Indeed, because you have a driveway and a regular job, it’s a good fit. The concerns are around the edge cases, especially poorer people living in apartment blocks, who will have to pay a lot more to charge their car on the public network, then you would on cheap overnight home power.
60% of motorists have access to a driveway, so that will be the norm for most people.
There clearly needs to be investment in the charging network for everyone else. Cheap solar panels will be the answer for Asia and Africa. There are big solar developments in lots of countries there.
I am not sure I agree with "What is very clear is that any hopes labour have of returning to power rely on a very strong performance in Scotland".
Unless the Tories + DUP have majority after the next GE Labour will return to power imo. Clearly, success for Labour in Scotland makes that easier but it's not a prerequisite.
I do think that a dozen or so Scottish seats could easily be the difference between largest party and overall majority as the polls tighten a bit.
As the election draws closer, if we are to see massive swingback to the Conservatives as highlighted and expected on these very pages, I don't see why that wouldn't also be the case for the incumbent SNP.
As it stands Labour are 10 to 15 points ahead of the Conservatives nationally (and we are expecting that to mostly drift back by election day). In Scotland Labour are 10 to 15 points adrift of the SNP (why are we not expecting that to return to its usual 20 to 25 point margin?).
Labour are doomed, doomed I say!
Swingback, if it helps Yousless at all, would come in the Scottish Parliamentary elections, not the General.
You’ve all set the bar so low for him that he’s going to clear it and look like a success.
Not a chance. He will fail in ways we can't even imagine yet. Starting with the appointment of Shona Robinson, Nicola's best mate, as deputy. I searched for her achievements on Wiki: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shona_Robison Unfortunately, achievements was a missing word!
Surely then the time is ripe for the high achievers of your party of choice to sweep to power?
Not for three years, though ...
If the predictions of Humza’s tenure not outlasting a Trussian lettuce don’t come to pass, that’s just three more years for Ross & co to put their obvious qualities on display.
That reminds me - is Mr Ross leaving Holyrood at the next election, or is my memory failing me? I am sure I recall some announcement, but can't confirm it. So I may be quite wrong, in which case apols.
He announced he was leaving Westminster at the next GE.
Thanks - that's it.
That means a new candidate for Moray presumably? Luckily a large pool of achievers to choose from.
Hmm, fisherfolk and farmers not too happy with Brexit either. But the latter not exactly SKS voters, and it was the previous leader of the LDs who liked to be filmed in front of farm animals. Not sure that Mr C-H has quite the same knack.
"Fisherfolk"? This conjures an image of olde worlde types for whom the 19th century is dangerously modern. Nice alliteration though.
Non-gendered*. Also means the family members, comer to think of it, so works well in political terms.
Edit: like e.g. convenor instead of chairperson.
Also: avoids confusion with the people with rod and line.
Do you get many (any?) women on trawlers? Your points about family and anglers are good though (though again in my mind conjures up images of 18th century communities). I don't have a better word, mind.
EDIT: I rather like 'convenor', though. 'Chairperson' always sounded horribly clunky. (And irritation with Chairman/Chair/Chairperson goes back at least to the 70s. I can remember my grandfather, somewhat implausibly, claiming that the 'man' in chairman referred not to a male human but was short for 'manifesto'. I was sceptical then and remain so now.)
Buying ICE vehicles now is like buying analog film cameras 20 years ago. Soon the ICE for personal transport will be as obsolete as cassette tapes or CDs.
Analog (sic) film cameras are trendy right now, and CDs are still viable.
Cassette tapes are more niche
Not the mass market by a long way, despite the hipster interest in vinyl.
Sure, ICE vehicles have some advantages still, particularly for rural areas. We have an ICE hybrid as well as an EV. Increasingly though EVs have the advantage. I think it will be my last ever ICE vehicle.
Currently EVs are 3% of the UK car fleet, but by Dec 22 had 30% of new sales. This is being driven by demand, and is only heading one way. The manufacturers see this too, which is why so much of the new design and engineering is centered on them, with ICE vehicle increasingly neglected.
There is an issue with any technological change of when to jump to the new tech, but as EV prices drop, practicality increases, and psychological barriers drop, it is only going one way.
I largely agree. My reservation is how much the prices of EVs will drop. It's one of those things I've been waiting for for some time and doesn't appear to be happening.
I do also wonder if there is a future in which the most common model is owning small EVs for the 90% of our journeys which are local and renting large ICEs or other type for longer journeys. My understanding is that EVs are much more cost effective as small, relatively low range vehicles, and I wonder whether by trying to make EVs do what ICEs do we are solving the wrong problem.
As a personal example, in my family we have two cars: a 14 year old Ford Focus and a rather newer MPV. We initially bought an MPV because we had three children under 5, and needed something which could fit three car seats in - but we're through that stage now. Now the reason for having an MPV is that a few times a year, all five of us plus luggage will go on a journey of more than 200 miles. I think many people are the same - we have the car we need for the extreme example of the journeys we make, rather than the typical example. 90% of the time, though, there is at least one car parked outside our house. And weeks, months can go by without ever going much more than 50 miles from home. It feels like a much more resource-efficient solution would be to own a small EV, and on the rare occasion we needed two cars at once, or that we needed a bigger car, rent one.
An EV works well as a second car, for most people who have a private driveway and a regular job. It does the daily commute, runs errands around town, and goes on charge every night. That covers 90% of journeys.
I can definitely see the last of the MPV and SUV petrol cars being snapped up by rental companies, they’re going to hold up in value and everyone’s going to want one at Christmas.
The worry for those buying an EV today, is that the technology moves so quickly that a five-year-old car is as popular as a five-year-old phone. When the new one does 500 miles and charges in 5 minutes, who will want an old one? What if the charging standard changes to enable faster speeds, and you’re stuck with the old one? I’d always lease an EV rather than buy it, which gives some random bank the risk of prices imploding. There are EV taxis that have done huge mileages (500,000+), but the concern is that the battery has a life measured mostly in time rather than usage.
There’s also concerns around the connectivity of EVs in particular, especially with Tesla who own the chargers. There’s stories from the US, of cars repaired outside the dealer network being banned from the charging network for “safety” reasons. Even if you own the car, do you really actually *own* the car?
Man living in petrostate not a fan of EVs.
Just playing the devil’s advocate. There’s actually a few EVs out here, but electricity is expensive and petrol is cheap.
At least there’s the infrastructure though, which isn’t the case in large parts of the world outside the West. There’s not going to be a huge rise in EV use in large parts of Asia or Africa any time soon.
Buying ICE vehicles now is like buying analog film cameras 20 years ago. Soon the ICE for personal transport will be as obsolete as cassette tapes or CDs.
Analog (sic) film cameras are trendy right now, and CDs are still viable.
Cassette tapes are more niche
Not the mass market by a long way, despite the hipster interest in vinyl.
Sure, ICE vehicles have some advantages still, particularly for rural areas. We have an ICE hybrid as well as an EV. Increasingly though EVs have the advantage. I think it will be my last ever ICE vehicle.
Currently EVs are 3% of the UK car fleet, but by Dec 22 had 30% of new sales. This is being driven by demand, and is only heading one way. The manufacturers see this too, which is why so much of the new design and engineering is centered on them, with ICE vehicle increasingly neglected.
There is an issue with any technological change of when to jump to the new tech, but as EV prices drop, practicality increases, and psychological barriers drop, it is only going one way.
I largely agree. My reservation is how much the prices of EVs will drop. It's one of those things I've been waiting for for some time and doesn't appear to be happening...
Largely because demand greatly exceeds supply, so manufacturers have no incentive to make cheaper models. That will change in the next 3-5 years, looking at the number of factories being built now and in planning.
And both batteries and motors are steadily getting cheaper to make, alongside the increase in capacity.
I will never have an electric car until they solve the charging issue ie having to wait to get to a charging point and. Then 40 mins for a half charge....I suspect I will have met my maker by then.
In 3 years of EV ownership, I have only had to use a public charger twice, and neither time did I have to wait. It is not often that I drive more than 280 miles in a day, and charging overnight on cheap electricity is better.
Indeed, because you have a driveway and a regular job, it’s a good fit. The concerns are around the edge cases, especially poorer people living in apartment blocks, who will have to pay a lot more to charge their car on the public network, then you would on cheap overnight home power.
60% of motorists have access to a driveway, so that will be the norm for most people.
There clearly needs to be investment in the charging network for everyone else. Cheap solar panels will be the answer for Asia and Africa. There are big solar developments in lots of countries there.
I’ll go out on a limb here, and say there’s a massive socio-economic divide between those motorists with access to a driveway, and those without.
Buying ICE vehicles now is like buying analog film cameras 20 years ago. Soon the ICE for personal transport will be as obsolete as cassette tapes or CDs.
Analog (sic) film cameras are trendy right now, and CDs are still viable.
Cassette tapes are more niche
Not the mass market by a long way, despite the hipster interest in vinyl.
Sure, ICE vehicles have some advantages still, particularly for rural areas. We have an ICE hybrid as well as an EV. Increasingly though EVs have the advantage. I think it will be my last ever ICE vehicle.
Currently EVs are 3% of the UK car fleet, but by Dec 22 had 30% of new sales. This is being driven by demand, and is only heading one way. The manufacturers see this too, which is why so much of the new design and engineering is centered on them, with ICE vehicle increasingly neglected.
There is an issue with any technological change of when to jump to the new tech, but as EV prices drop, practicality increases, and psychological barriers drop, it is only going one way.
I largely agree. My reservation is how much the prices of EVs will drop. It's one of those things I've been waiting for for some time and doesn't appear to be happening.
I do also wonder if there is a future in which the most common model is owning small EVs for the 90% of our journeys which are local and renting large ICEs or other type for longer journeys. My understanding is that EVs are much more cost effective as small, relatively low range vehicles, and I wonder whether by trying to make EVs do what ICEs do we are solving the wrong problem.
As a personal example, in my family we have two cars: a 14 year old Ford Focus and a rather newer MPV. We initially bought an MPV because we had three children under 5, and needed something which could fit three car seats in - but we're through that stage now. Now the reason for having an MPV is that a few times a year, all five of us plus luggage will go on a journey of more than 200 miles. I think many people are the same - we have the car we need for the extreme example of the journeys we make, rather than the typical example. 90% of the time, though, there is at least one car parked outside our house. And weeks, months can go by without ever going much more than 50 miles from home. It feels like a much more resource-efficient solution would be to own a small EV, and on the rare occasion we needed two cars at once, or that we needed a bigger car, rent one.
An EV works well as a second car, for most people who have a private driveway and a regular job. It does the daily commute, runs errands around town, and goes on charge every night. That covers 90% of journeys.
I can definitely see the last of the MPV and SUV petrol cars being snapped up by rental companies, they’re going to hold up in value and everyone’s going to want one at Christmas.
The worry for those buying an EV today, is that the technology moves so quickly that a five-year-old car is as popular as a five-year-old phone. When the new one does 500 miles and charges in 5 minutes, who will want an old one? What if the charging standard changes to enable faster speeds, and you’re stuck with the old one? I’d always lease an EV rather than buy it, which gives some random bank the risk of prices imploding. There are EV taxis that have done huge mileages (500,000+), but the concern is that the battery has a life measured mostly in time rather than usage.
There’s also concerns around the connectivity of EVs in particular, especially with Tesla who own the chargers. There’s stories from the US, of cars repaired outside the dealer network being banned from the charging network for “safety” reasons. Even if you own the car, do you really actually *own* the car?
Man living in petrostate not a fan of EVs.
Just playing the devil’s advocate. There’s actually a few EVs out here, but electricity is expensive and petrol is cheap.
At least there’s the infrastructure though, which isn’t the case in large parts of the world outside the West. There’s not going to be a huge rise in EV use in large parts of Asia or Africa any time soon.
Buying ICE vehicles now is like buying analog film cameras 20 years ago. Soon the ICE for personal transport will be as obsolete as cassette tapes or CDs.
Analog (sic) film cameras are trendy right now, and CDs are still viable.
Cassette tapes are more niche
Not the mass market by a long way, despite the hipster interest in vinyl.
Sure, ICE vehicles have some advantages still, particularly for rural areas. We have an ICE hybrid as well as an EV. Increasingly though EVs have the advantage. I think it will be my last ever ICE vehicle.
Currently EVs are 3% of the UK car fleet, but by Dec 22 had 30% of new sales. This is being driven by demand, and is only heading one way. The manufacturers see this too, which is why so much of the new design and engineering is centered on them, with ICE vehicle increasingly neglected.
There is an issue with any technological change of when to jump to the new tech, but as EV prices drop, practicality increases, and psychological barriers drop, it is only going one way.
I largely agree. My reservation is how much the prices of EVs will drop. It's one of those things I've been waiting for for some time and doesn't appear to be happening...
Largely because demand greatly exceeds supply, so manufacturers have no incentive to make cheaper models. That will change in the next 3-5 years, looking at the number of factories being built now and in planning.
And both batteries and motors are steadily getting cheaper to make, alongside the increase in capacity.
I will never have an electric car until they solve the charging issue ie having to wait to get to a charging point and. Then 40 mins for a half charge....I suspect I will have met my maker by then.
In 3 years of EV ownership, I have only had to use a public charger twice, and neither time did I have to wait. It is not often that I drive more than 280 miles in a day, and charging overnight on cheap electricity is better.
Indeed, because you have a driveway and a regular job, it’s a good fit. The concerns are around the edge cases, especially poorer people living in apartment blocks, who will have to pay a lot more to charge their car on the public network, then you would on cheap overnight home power.
60% of motorists have access to a driveway, so that will be the norm for most people.
There clearly needs to be investment in the charging network for everyone else. Cheap solar panels will be the answer for Asia and Africa. There are big solar developments in lots of countries there.
Julia Hartley Brewer starting to go full on antivax on talkradio this morning. She says we have been big pharma guinea pigs. Interesting.
Does anyone still read or listen to Julia Hartley Brewer anymore?
The kind of poster that @rcs1000 bans from time to time, almost certainly.
Anti vaxxery is spreading, however, and it’s not all nutters and Russian bots seeding division
In recent days I’ve heard “vax skeptical” opinions, in different forms, from a few sources I’d regard as definitely sane 🤷♂️
Vaccines are not a universal panacea, and scepticism is warranted for any medical treatment or intervention. But most vaccine 'scepticism' around at the moment is uninformed conspiracist rubbish.
Buying ICE vehicles now is like buying analog film cameras 20 years ago. Soon the ICE for personal transport will be as obsolete as cassette tapes or CDs.
Analog (sic) film cameras are trendy right now, and CDs are still viable.
Cassette tapes are more niche
Not the mass market by a long way, despite the hipster interest in vinyl.
Sure, ICE vehicles have some advantages still, particularly for rural areas. We have an ICE hybrid as well as an EV. Increasingly though EVs have the advantage. I think it will be my last ever ICE vehicle.
Currently EVs are 3% of the UK car fleet, but by Dec 22 had 30% of new sales. This is being driven by demand, and is only heading one way. The manufacturers see this too, which is why so much of the new design and engineering is centered on them, with ICE vehicle increasingly neglected.
There is an issue with any technological change of when to jump to the new tech, but as EV prices drop, practicality increases, and psychological barriers drop, it is only going one way.
I largely agree. My reservation is how much the prices of EVs will drop. It's one of those things I've been waiting for for some time and doesn't appear to be happening.
I do also wonder if there is a future in which the most common model is owning small EVs for the 90% of our journeys which are local and renting large ICEs or other type for longer journeys. My understanding is that EVs are much more cost effective as small, relatively low range vehicles, and I wonder whether by trying to make EVs do what ICEs do we are solving the wrong problem.
As a personal example, in my family we have two cars: a 14 year old Ford Focus and a rather newer MPV. We initially bought an MPV because we had three children under 5, and needed something which could fit three car seats in - but we're through that stage now. Now the reason for having an MPV is that a few times a year, all five of us plus luggage will go on a journey of more than 200 miles. I think many people are the same - we have the car we need for the extreme example of the journeys we make, rather than the typical example. 90% of the time, though, there is at least one car parked outside our house. And weeks, months can go by without ever going much more than 50 miles from home. It feels like a much more resource-efficient solution would be to own a small EV, and on the rare occasion we needed two cars at once, or that we needed a bigger car, rent one.
An EV works well as a second car, for most people who have a private driveway and a regular job. It does the daily commute, runs errands around town, and goes on charge every night. That covers 90% of journeys.
I can definitely see the last of the MPV and SUV petrol cars being snapped up by rental companies, they’re going to hold up in value and everyone’s going to want one at Christmas.
The worry for those buying an EV today, is that the technology moves so quickly that a five-year-old car is as popular as a five-year-old phone. When the new one does 500 miles and charges in 5 minutes, who will want an old one? What if the charging standard changes to enable faster speeds, and you’re stuck with the old one? I’d always lease an EV rather than buy it, which gives some random bank the risk of prices imploding. There are EV taxis that have done huge mileages (500,000+), but the concern is that the battery has a life measured mostly in time rather than usage.
There’s also concerns around the connectivity of EVs in particular, especially with Tesla who own the chargers. There’s stories from the US, of cars repaired outside the dealer network being banned from the charging network for “safety” reasons. Even if you own the car, do you really actually *own* the car?
Man living in petrostate not a fan of EVs.
Just playing the devil’s advocate. There’s actually a few EVs out here, but electricity is expensive and petrol is cheap.
At least there’s the infrastructure though, which isn’t the case in large parts of the world outside the West. There’s not going to be a huge rise in EV use in large parts of Asia or Africa any time soon.
Buying ICE vehicles now is like buying analog film cameras 20 years ago. Soon the ICE for personal transport will be as obsolete as cassette tapes or CDs.
Analog (sic) film cameras are trendy right now, and CDs are still viable.
Cassette tapes are more niche
Not the mass market by a long way, despite the hipster interest in vinyl.
Sure, ICE vehicles have some advantages still, particularly for rural areas. We have an ICE hybrid as well as an EV. Increasingly though EVs have the advantage. I think it will be my last ever ICE vehicle.
Currently EVs are 3% of the UK car fleet, but by Dec 22 had 30% of new sales. This is being driven by demand, and is only heading one way. The manufacturers see this too, which is why so much of the new design and engineering is centered on them, with ICE vehicle increasingly neglected.
There is an issue with any technological change of when to jump to the new tech, but as EV prices drop, practicality increases, and psychological barriers drop, it is only going one way.
I largely agree. My reservation is how much the prices of EVs will drop. It's one of those things I've been waiting for for some time and doesn't appear to be happening...
Largely because demand greatly exceeds supply, so manufacturers have no incentive to make cheaper models. That will change in the next 3-5 years, looking at the number of factories being built now and in planning.
And both batteries and motors are steadily getting cheaper to make, alongside the increase in capacity.
I will never have an electric car until they solve the charging issue ie having to wait to get to a charging point and. Then 40 mins for a half charge....I suspect I will have met my maker by then.
In 3 years of EV ownership, I have only had to use a public charger twice, and neither time did I have to wait. It is not often that I drive more than 280 miles in a day, and charging overnight on cheap electricity is better.
Indeed, because you have a driveway and a regular job, it’s a good fit. The concerns are around the edge cases, especially poorer people living in apartment blocks, who will have to pay a lot more to charge their car on the public network, then you would on cheap overnight home power.
60% of motorists have access to a driveway, so that will be the norm for most people.
There clearly needs to be investment in the charging network for everyone else. Cheap solar panels will be the answer for Asia and Africa. There are big solar developments in lots of countries there.
60% does seem rather high
I can believe it if it includes off-road parking at blocks of flats, although charging infrastructure there is up to the management companies.
Buying ICE vehicles now is like buying analog film cameras 20 years ago. Soon the ICE for personal transport will be as obsolete as cassette tapes or CDs.
Analog (sic) film cameras are trendy right now, and CDs are still viable.
Cassette tapes are more niche
Not the mass market by a long way, despite the hipster interest in vinyl.
Sure, ICE vehicles have some advantages still, particularly for rural areas. We have an ICE hybrid as well as an EV. Increasingly though EVs have the advantage. I think it will be my last ever ICE vehicle.
Currently EVs are 3% of the UK car fleet, but by Dec 22 had 30% of new sales. This is being driven by demand, and is only heading one way. The manufacturers see this too, which is why so much of the new design and engineering is centered on them, with ICE vehicle increasingly neglected.
There is an issue with any technological change of when to jump to the new tech, but as EV prices drop, practicality increases, and psychological barriers drop, it is only going one way.
I largely agree. My reservation is how much the prices of EVs will drop. It's one of those things I've been waiting for for some time and doesn't appear to be happening.
I do also wonder if there is a future in which the most common model is owning small EVs for the 90% of our journeys which are local and renting large ICEs or other type for longer journeys. My understanding is that EVs are much more cost effective as small, relatively low range vehicles, and I wonder whether by trying to make EVs do what ICEs do we are solving the wrong problem.
As a personal example, in my family we have two cars: a 14 year old Ford Focus and a rather newer MPV. We initially bought an MPV because we had three children under 5, and needed something which could fit three car seats in - but we're through that stage now. Now the reason for having an MPV is that a few times a year, all five of us plus luggage will go on a journey of more than 200 miles. I think many people are the same - we have the car we need for the extreme example of the journeys we make, rather than the typical example. 90% of the time, though, there is at least one car parked outside our house. And weeks, months can go by without ever going much more than 50 miles from home. It feels like a much more resource-efficient solution would be to own a small EV, and on the rare occasion we needed two cars at once, or that we needed a bigger car, rent one.
An EV works well as a second car, for most people who have a private driveway and a regular job. It does the daily commute, runs errands around town, and goes on charge every night. That covers 90% of journeys.
I can definitely see the last of the MPV and SUV petrol cars being snapped up by rental companies, they’re going to hold up in value and everyone’s going to want one at Christmas.
The worry for those buying an EV today, is that the technology moves so quickly that a five-year-old car is as popular as a five-year-old phone. When the new one does 500 miles and charges in 5 minutes, who will want an old one? What if the charging standard changes to enable faster speeds, and you’re stuck with the old one? I’d always lease an EV rather than buy it, which gives some random bank the risk of prices imploding. There are EV taxis that have done huge mileages (500,000+), but the concern is that the battery has a life measured mostly in time rather than usage.
There’s also concerns around the connectivity of EVs in particular, especially with Tesla who own the chargers. There’s stories from the US, of cars repaired outside the dealer network being banned from the charging network for “safety” reasons. Even if you own the car, do you really actually *own* the car?
Man living in petrostate not a fan of EVs.
Just playing the devil’s advocate. There’s actually a few EVs out here, but electricity is expensive and petrol is cheap.
At least there’s the infrastructure though, which isn’t the case in large parts of the world outside the West. There’s not going to be a huge rise in EV use in large parts of Asia or Africa any time soon.
Buying ICE vehicles now is like buying analog film cameras 20 years ago. Soon the ICE for personal transport will be as obsolete as cassette tapes or CDs.
Analog (sic) film cameras are trendy right now, and CDs are still viable.
Cassette tapes are more niche
Not the mass market by a long way, despite the hipster interest in vinyl.
Sure, ICE vehicles have some advantages still, particularly for rural areas. We have an ICE hybrid as well as an EV. Increasingly though EVs have the advantage. I think it will be my last ever ICE vehicle.
Currently EVs are 3% of the UK car fleet, but by Dec 22 had 30% of new sales. This is being driven by demand, and is only heading one way. The manufacturers see this too, which is why so much of the new design and engineering is centered on them, with ICE vehicle increasingly neglected.
There is an issue with any technological change of when to jump to the new tech, but as EV prices drop, practicality increases, and psychological barriers drop, it is only going one way.
I largely agree. My reservation is how much the prices of EVs will drop. It's one of those things I've been waiting for for some time and doesn't appear to be happening...
Largely because demand greatly exceeds supply, so manufacturers have no incentive to make cheaper models. That will change in the next 3-5 years, looking at the number of factories being built now and in planning.
And both batteries and motors are steadily getting cheaper to make, alongside the increase in capacity.
I will never have an electric car until they solve the charging issue ie having to wait to get to a charging point and. Then 40 mins for a half charge....I suspect I will have met my maker by then.
In 3 years of EV ownership, I have only had to use a public charger twice, and neither time did I have to wait. It is not often that I drive more than 280 miles in a day, and charging overnight on cheap electricity is better.
Indeed, because you have a driveway and a regular job, it’s a good fit. The concerns are around the edge cases, especially poorer people living in apartment blocks, who will have to pay a lot more to charge their car on the public network, then you would on cheap overnight home power.
60% of motorists have access to a driveway, so that will be the norm for most people.
There clearly needs to be investment in the charging network for everyone else. Cheap solar panels will be the answer for Asia and Africa. There are big solar developments in lots of countries there.
60% does seem rather high
Worth remembering that about one-third of households don't have a car at all. So that's 60% of two-thirds, or about 40% of all households.
Buying ICE vehicles now is like buying analog film cameras 20 years ago. Soon the ICE for personal transport will be as obsolete as cassette tapes or CDs.
Analog (sic) film cameras are trendy right now, and CDs are still viable.
Cassette tapes are more niche
Not the mass market by a long way, despite the hipster interest in vinyl.
Sure, ICE vehicles have some advantages still, particularly for rural areas. We have an ICE hybrid as well as an EV. Increasingly though EVs have the advantage. I think it will be my last ever ICE vehicle.
Currently EVs are 3% of the UK car fleet, but by Dec 22 had 30% of new sales. This is being driven by demand, and is only heading one way. The manufacturers see this too, which is why so much of the new design and engineering is centered on them, with ICE vehicle increasingly neglected.
There is an issue with any technological change of when to jump to the new tech, but as EV prices drop, practicality increases, and psychological barriers drop, it is only going one way.
I largely agree. My reservation is how much the prices of EVs will drop. It's one of those things I've been waiting for for some time and doesn't appear to be happening.
I do also wonder if there is a future in which the most common model is owning small EVs for the 90% of our journeys which are local and renting large ICEs or other type for longer journeys. My understanding is that EVs are much more cost effective as small, relatively low range vehicles, and I wonder whether by trying to make EVs do what ICEs do we are solving the wrong problem.
As a personal example, in my family we have two cars: a 14 year old Ford Focus and a rather newer MPV. We initially bought an MPV because we had three children under 5, and needed something which could fit three car seats in - but we're through that stage now. Now the reason for having an MPV is that a few times a year, all five of us plus luggage will go on a journey of more than 200 miles. I think many people are the same - we have the car we need for the extreme example of the journeys we make, rather than the typical example. 90% of the time, though, there is at least one car parked outside our house. And weeks, months can go by without ever going much more than 50 miles from home. It feels like a much more resource-efficient solution would be to own a small EV, and on the rare occasion we needed two cars at once, or that we needed a bigger car, rent one.
An EV works well as a second car, for most people who have a private driveway and a regular job. It does the daily commute, runs errands around town, and goes on charge every night. That covers 90% of journeys.
I can definitely see the last of the MPV and SUV petrol cars being snapped up by rental companies, they’re going to hold up in value and everyone’s going to want one at Christmas.
The worry for those buying an EV today, is that the technology moves so quickly that a five-year-old car is as popular as a five-year-old phone. When the new one does 500 miles and charges in 5 minutes, who will want an old one? What if the charging standard changes to enable faster speeds, and you’re stuck with the old one? I’d always lease an EV rather than buy it, which gives some random bank the risk of prices imploding. There are EV taxis that have done huge mileages (500,000+), but the concern is that the battery has a life measured mostly in time rather than usage.
There’s also concerns around the connectivity of EVs in particular, especially with Tesla who own the chargers. There’s stories from the US, of cars repaired outside the dealer network being banned from the charging network for “safety” reasons. Even if you own the car, do you really actually *own* the car?
Man living in petrostate not a fan of EVs.
Just playing the devil’s advocate. There’s actually a few EVs out here, but electricity is expensive and petrol is cheap.
At least there’s the infrastructure though, which isn’t the case in large parts of the world outside the West. There’s not going to be a huge rise in EV use in large parts of Asia or Africa any time soon.
Buying ICE vehicles now is like buying analog film cameras 20 years ago. Soon the ICE for personal transport will be as obsolete as cassette tapes or CDs.
Analog (sic) film cameras are trendy right now, and CDs are still viable.
Cassette tapes are more niche
Not the mass market by a long way, despite the hipster interest in vinyl.
Sure, ICE vehicles have some advantages still, particularly for rural areas. We have an ICE hybrid as well as an EV. Increasingly though EVs have the advantage. I think it will be my last ever ICE vehicle.
Currently EVs are 3% of the UK car fleet, but by Dec 22 had 30% of new sales. This is being driven by demand, and is only heading one way. The manufacturers see this too, which is why so much of the new design and engineering is centered on them, with ICE vehicle increasingly neglected.
There is an issue with any technological change of when to jump to the new tech, but as EV prices drop, practicality increases, and psychological barriers drop, it is only going one way.
I largely agree. My reservation is how much the prices of EVs will drop. It's one of those things I've been waiting for for some time and doesn't appear to be happening...
Largely because demand greatly exceeds supply, so manufacturers have no incentive to make cheaper models. That will change in the next 3-5 years, looking at the number of factories being built now and in planning.
And both batteries and motors are steadily getting cheaper to make, alongside the increase in capacity.
I will never have an electric car until they solve the charging issue ie having to wait to get to a charging point and. Then 40 mins for a half charge....I suspect I will have met my maker by then.
In 3 years of EV ownership, I have only had to use a public charger twice, and neither time did I have to wait. It is not often that I drive more than 280 miles in a day, and charging overnight on cheap electricity is better.
Indeed, because you have a driveway and a regular job, it’s a good fit. The concerns are around the edge cases, especially poorer people living in apartment blocks, who will have to pay a lot more to charge their car on the public network, then you would on cheap overnight home power.
60% of motorists have access to a driveway, so that will be the norm for most people.
There clearly needs to be investment in the charging network for everyone else. Cheap solar panels will be the answer for Asia and Africa. There are big solar developments in lots of countries there.
I’ll go out on a limb here, and say there’s a massive socio-economic divide between those motorists with access to a driveway, and those without.
More socio than economic. Would be interesting to see the breakdowns but I would hazard a guess at:
No driveway: remain Driveway: leave
So those on the right wing side of the culture wars probably also better placed to own an EV. Which helps to make it less of a partisan issue (a bit like Covid lockdowns - those most negatively affected by lockdown and least at risk of Covid were also more likely to be on the left).
Driveways start to appear in numbers around here just beyond the Shooter’s Hill line of demarcation.
Buying ICE vehicles now is like buying analog film cameras 20 years ago. Soon the ICE for personal transport will be as obsolete as cassette tapes or CDs.
Analog (sic) film cameras are trendy right now, and CDs are still viable.
Cassette tapes are more niche
Not the mass market by a long way, despite the hipster interest in vinyl.
Sure, ICE vehicles have some advantages still, particularly for rural areas. We have an ICE hybrid as well as an EV. Increasingly though EVs have the advantage. I think it will be my last ever ICE vehicle.
Currently EVs are 3% of the UK car fleet, but by Dec 22 had 30% of new sales. This is being driven by demand, and is only heading one way. The manufacturers see this too, which is why so much of the new design and engineering is centered on them, with ICE vehicle increasingly neglected.
There is an issue with any technological change of when to jump to the new tech, but as EV prices drop, practicality increases, and psychological barriers drop, it is only going one way.
I largely agree. My reservation is how much the prices of EVs will drop. It's one of those things I've been waiting for for some time and doesn't appear to be happening...
Largely because demand greatly exceeds supply, so manufacturers have no incentive to make cheaper models. That will change in the next 3-5 years, looking at the number of factories being built now and in planning.
And both batteries and motors are steadily getting cheaper to make, alongside the increase in capacity.
I will never have an electric car until they solve the charging issue ie having to wait to get to a charging point and. Then 40 mins for a half charge....I suspect I will have met my maker by then.
You can do 10-80% in about 25 min on the latest chargers. To get to half should be a fraction of that - the charging is faster on an empty battery.
Not what my pal tells me. They have had nightmares queuing and it's 40.mins min to charge his ev f pace
Tbf that's about the same time I spend queuing at my local Costco yesterday for diesel.
There's no way any EV charging station will be able to match the sheer throughput of energy that a 12 pump Costco can get into vehicles in a day though.
No, which is why the model for EV charging will be a charger at every parking place, so that you can charge when you park to go shopping, or the cinema, or whatever, rather than a dedicated charging station.
All those fuel stations will disappear.
So... why aren't supermarkets doing this already? Seems like an opportunity to get ahead of the competition.
Buying ICE vehicles now is like buying analog film cameras 20 years ago. Soon the ICE for personal transport will be as obsolete as cassette tapes or CDs.
Analog (sic) film cameras are trendy right now, and CDs are still viable.
Cassette tapes are more niche
Not the mass market by a long way, despite the hipster interest in vinyl.
Sure, ICE vehicles have some advantages still, particularly for rural areas. We have an ICE hybrid as well as an EV. Increasingly though EVs have the advantage. I think it will be my last ever ICE vehicle.
Currently EVs are 3% of the UK car fleet, but by Dec 22 had 30% of new sales. This is being driven by demand, and is only heading one way. The manufacturers see this too, which is why so much of the new design and engineering is centered on them, with ICE vehicle increasingly neglected.
There is an issue with any technological change of when to jump to the new tech, but as EV prices drop, practicality increases, and psychological barriers drop, it is only going one way.
I largely agree. My reservation is how much the prices of EVs will drop. It's one of those things I've been waiting for for some time and doesn't appear to be happening.
I do also wonder if there is a future in which the most common model is owning small EVs for the 90% of our journeys which are local and renting large ICEs or other type for longer journeys. My understanding is that EVs are much more cost effective as small, relatively low range vehicles, and I wonder whether by trying to make EVs do what ICEs do we are solving the wrong problem.
As a personal example, in my family we have two cars: a 14 year old Ford Focus and a rather newer MPV. We initially bought an MPV because we had three children under 5, and needed something which could fit three car seats in - but we're through that stage now. Now the reason for having an MPV is that a few times a year, all five of us plus luggage will go on a journey of more than 200 miles. I think many people are the same - we have the car we need for the extreme example of the journeys we make, rather than the typical example. 90% of the time, though, there is at least one car parked outside our house. And weeks, months can go by without ever going much more than 50 miles from home. It feels like a much more resource-efficient solution would be to own a small EV, and on the rare occasion we needed two cars at once, or that we needed a bigger car, rent one.
An EV works well as a second car, for most people who have a private driveway and a regular job. It does the daily commute, runs errands around town, and goes on charge every night. That covers 90% of journeys.
I can definitely see the last of the MPV and SUV petrol cars being snapped up by rental companies, they’re going to hold up in value and everyone’s going to want one at Christmas.
The worry for those buying an EV today, is that the technology moves so quickly that a five-year-old car is as popular as a five-year-old phone. When the new one does 500 miles and charges in 5 minutes, who will want an old one? What if the charging standard changes to enable faster speeds, and you’re stuck with the old one? I’d always lease an EV rather than buy it, which gives some random bank the risk of prices imploding. There are EV taxis that have done huge mileages (500,000+), but the concern is that the battery has a life measured mostly in time rather than usage.
There’s also concerns around the connectivity of EVs in particular, especially with Tesla who own the chargers. There’s stories from the US, of cars repaired outside the dealer network being banned from the charging network for “safety” reasons. Even if you own the car, do you really actually *own* the car?
Man living in petrostate not a fan of EVs.
Just playing the devil’s advocate. There’s actually a few EVs out here, but electricity is expensive and petrol is cheap.
At least there’s the infrastructure though, which isn’t the case in large parts of the world outside the West. There’s not going to be a huge rise in EV use in large parts of Asia or Africa any time soon.
Buying ICE vehicles now is like buying analog film cameras 20 years ago. Soon the ICE for personal transport will be as obsolete as cassette tapes or CDs.
Analog (sic) film cameras are trendy right now, and CDs are still viable.
Cassette tapes are more niche
Not the mass market by a long way, despite the hipster interest in vinyl.
Sure, ICE vehicles have some advantages still, particularly for rural areas. We have an ICE hybrid as well as an EV. Increasingly though EVs have the advantage. I think it will be my last ever ICE vehicle.
Currently EVs are 3% of the UK car fleet, but by Dec 22 had 30% of new sales. This is being driven by demand, and is only heading one way. The manufacturers see this too, which is why so much of the new design and engineering is centered on them, with ICE vehicle increasingly neglected.
There is an issue with any technological change of when to jump to the new tech, but as EV prices drop, practicality increases, and psychological barriers drop, it is only going one way.
I largely agree. My reservation is how much the prices of EVs will drop. It's one of those things I've been waiting for for some time and doesn't appear to be happening...
Largely because demand greatly exceeds supply, so manufacturers have no incentive to make cheaper models. That will change in the next 3-5 years, looking at the number of factories being built now and in planning.
And both batteries and motors are steadily getting cheaper to make, alongside the increase in capacity.
I will never have an electric car until they solve the charging issue ie having to wait to get to a charging point and. Then 40 mins for a half charge....I suspect I will have met my maker by then.
In 3 years of EV ownership, I have only had to use a public charger twice, and neither time did I have to wait. It is not often that I drive more than 280 miles in a day, and charging overnight on cheap electricity is better.
Indeed, because you have a driveway and a regular job, it’s a good fit. The concerns are around the edge cases, especially poorer people living in apartment blocks, who will have to pay a lot more to charge their car on the public network, then you would on cheap overnight home power.
Not just tower blocks. Any home without off-street parking is screwed as you cannot safely run power cables across the pavement.
I've always wondered whether the way electric vehicles are charged is suboptimal. I wonder whether there is a solution whereby you could charge a battery in your house and then take it out and put it into your car and charge battery to battery? This might also make for a better model for roadside charging - drop off a low charge battery and swap it for a high charge battery. I'm aware this is a half-thought through solution with lots of impracticalities (like batteries with sufficient charge being bloody heavy) - but I'd argue that we've arrived at the current solution for EV charging a little arbitrarily. It feels like a better solution ought to exist.
I am not sure I agree with "What is very clear is that any hopes labour have of returning to power rely on a very strong performance in Scotland".
Unless the Tories + DUP have majority after the next GE Labour will return to power imo. Clearly, success for Labour in Scotland makes that easier but it's not a prerequisite.
I do think that a dozen or so Scottish seats could easily be the difference between largest party and overall majority as the polls tighten a bit.
As the election draws closer, if we are to see massive swingback to the Conservatives as highlighted and expected on these very pages, I don't see why that wouldn't also be the case for the incumbent SNP.
As it stands Labour are 10 to 15 points ahead of the Conservatives nationally (and we are expecting that to mostly drift back by election day). In Scotland Labour are 10 to 15 points adrift of the SNP (why are we not expecting that to return to its usual 20 to 25 point margin?).
Labour are doomed, doomed I say!
Swingback, if it helps Yousless at all, would come in the Scottish Parliamentary elections, not the General.
You’ve all set the bar so low for him that he’s going to clear it and look like a success.
Not a chance. He will fail in ways we can't even imagine yet. Starting with the appointment of Shona Robinson, Nicola's best mate, as deputy. I searched for her achievements on Wiki: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shona_Robison Unfortunately, achievements was a missing word!
Surely then the time is ripe for the high achievers of your party of choice to sweep to power?
Not for three years, though ...
If the predictions of Humza’s tenure not outlasting a Trussian lettuce don’t come to pass, that’s just three more years for Ross & co to put their obvious qualities on display.
That reminds me - is Mr Ross leaving Holyrood at the next election, or is my memory failing me? I am sure I recall some announcement, but can't confirm it. So I may be quite wrong, in which case apols.
He announced he was leaving Westminster at the next GE.
Thanks - that's it.
That means a new candidate for Moray presumably? Luckily a large pool of achievers to choose from.
Hmm, fisherfolk and farmers not too happy with Brexit either. But the latter not exactly SKS voters, and it was the previous leader of the LDs who liked to be filmed in front of farm animals. Not sure that Mr C-H has quite the same knack.
"Fisherfolk"? This conjures an image of olde worlde types for whom the 19th century is dangerously modern. Nice alliteration though.
Non-gendered*. Also means the family members, comer to think of it, so works well in political terms.
Edit: like e.g. convenor instead of chairperson.
Also: avoids confusion with the people with rod and line.
Do you get many (any?) women on trawlers? Your points about family and anglers are good though (though again in my mind conjures up images of 18th century communities). I don't have a better word, mind.
EDIT: I rather like 'convenor', though. 'Chairperson' always sounded horribly clunky. (And irritation with Chairman/Chair/Chairperson goes back at least to the 70s. I can remember my grandfather, somewhat implausibly, claiming that the 'man' in chairman referred not to a male human but was short for 'manifesto'. I was sceptical then and remain so now.)
Buying ICE vehicles now is like buying analog film cameras 20 years ago. Soon the ICE for personal transport will be as obsolete as cassette tapes or CDs.
Analog (sic) film cameras are trendy right now, and CDs are still viable.
Cassette tapes are more niche
Not the mass market by a long way, despite the hipster interest in vinyl.
Sure, ICE vehicles have some advantages still, particularly for rural areas. We have an ICE hybrid as well as an EV. Increasingly though EVs have the advantage. I think it will be my last ever ICE vehicle.
Currently EVs are 3% of the UK car fleet, but by Dec 22 had 30% of new sales. This is being driven by demand, and is only heading one way. The manufacturers see this too, which is why so much of the new design and engineering is centered on them, with ICE vehicle increasingly neglected.
There is an issue with any technological change of when to jump to the new tech, but as EV prices drop, practicality increases, and psychological barriers drop, it is only going one way.
I largely agree. My reservation is how much the prices of EVs will drop. It's one of those things I've been waiting for for some time and doesn't appear to be happening...
Largely because demand greatly exceeds supply, so manufacturers have no incentive to make cheaper models. That will change in the next 3-5 years, looking at the number of factories being built now and in planning.
And both batteries and motors are steadily getting cheaper to make, alongside the increase in capacity.
I will never have an electric car until they solve the charging issue ie having to wait to get to a charging point and. Then 40 mins for a half charge....I suspect I will have met my maker by then.
You can do 10-80% in about 25 min on the latest chargers. To get to half should be a fraction of that - the charging is faster on an empty battery.
Not what my pal tells me. They have had nightmares queuing and it's 40.mins min to charge his ev f pace
Tbf that's about the same time I spend queuing at my local Costco yesterday for diesel.
There's no way any EV charging station will be able to match the sheer throughput of energy that a 12 pump Costco can get into vehicles in a day though.
No, which is why the model for EV charging will be a charger at every parking place, so that you can charge when you park to go shopping, or the cinema, or whatever, rather than a dedicated charging station.
All those fuel stations will disappear.
So... why aren't supermarkets doing this already? Seems like an opportunity to get ahead of the competition.
They are, aren't they? Or if not at every space, at enough so that if you rock up with an EV and need a charging space one is available.
I am not sure I agree with "What is very clear is that any hopes labour have of returning to power rely on a very strong performance in Scotland".
Unless the Tories + DUP have majority after the next GE Labour will return to power imo. Clearly, success for Labour in Scotland makes that easier but it's not a prerequisite.
I do think that a dozen or so Scottish seats could easily be the difference between largest party and overall majority as the polls tighten a bit.
As the election draws closer, if we are to see massive swingback to the Conservatives as highlighted and expected on these very pages, I don't see why that wouldn't also be the case for the incumbent SNP.
As it stands Labour are 10 to 15 points ahead of the Conservatives nationally (and we are expecting that to mostly drift back by election day). In Scotland Labour are 10 to 15 points adrift of the SNP (why are we not expecting that to return to its usual 20 to 25 point margin?).
Labour are doomed, doomed I say!
Swingback, if it helps Yousless at all, would come in the Scottish Parliamentary elections, not the General.
You’ve all set the bar so low for him that he’s going to clear it and look like a success.
Not a chance. He will fail in ways we can't even imagine yet. Starting with the appointment of Shona Robinson, Nicola's best mate, as deputy. I searched for her achievements on Wiki: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shona_Robison Unfortunately, achievements was a missing word!
Surely then the time is ripe for the high achievers of your party of choice to sweep to power?
Not for three years, though ...
If the predictions of Humza’s tenure not outlasting a Trussian lettuce don’t come to pass, that’s just three more years for Ross & co to put their obvious qualities on display.
That reminds me - is Mr Ross leaving Holyrood at the next election, or is my memory failing me? I am sure I recall some announcement, but can't confirm it. So I may be quite wrong, in which case apols.
He announced he was leaving Westminster at the next GE.
Thanks - that's it.
That means a new candidate for Moray presumably? Luckily a large pool of achievers to choose from.
Hmm, fisherfolk and farmers not too happy with Brexit either. But the latter not exactly SKS voters, and it was the previous leader of the LDs who liked to be filmed in front of farm animals. Not sure that Mr C-H has quite the same knack.
"Fisherfolk"? This conjures an image of olde worlde types for whom the 19th century is dangerously modern. Nice alliteration though.
Non-gendered*. Also means the family members, comer to think of it, so works well in political terms.
Edit: like e.g. convenor instead of chairperson.
Also: avoids confusion with the people with rod and line.
Do you get many (any?) women on trawlers? Your points about family and anglers are good though (though again in my mind conjures up images of 18th century communities). I don't have a better word, mind.
EDIT: I rather like 'convenor', though. 'Chairperson' always sounded horribly clunky. (And irritation with Chairman/Chair/Chairperson goes back at least to the 70s. I can remember my grandfather, somewhat implausibly, claiming that the 'man' in chairman referred not to a male human but was short for 'manifesto'. I was sceptical then and remain so now.)
It's not just trawlers (on which a lot of thew workforce is non-UK). Inshore fishijng is a very important industry. No idea of the gender balance though.
Plenty of small towns used to have a "fishertown" wit distinct architecture and location - Berwick, Nairn, Cromarty spring to mind (and Wick, but that was specially developed - a fine sight to visit).
Buying ICE vehicles now is like buying analog film cameras 20 years ago. Soon the ICE for personal transport will be as obsolete as cassette tapes or CDs.
Analog (sic) film cameras are trendy right now, and CDs are still viable.
Cassette tapes are more niche
Not the mass market by a long way, despite the hipster interest in vinyl.
Sure, ICE vehicles have some advantages still, particularly for rural areas. We have an ICE hybrid as well as an EV. Increasingly though EVs have the advantage. I think it will be my last ever ICE vehicle.
Currently EVs are 3% of the UK car fleet, but by Dec 22 had 30% of new sales. This is being driven by demand, and is only heading one way. The manufacturers see this too, which is why so much of the new design and engineering is centered on them, with ICE vehicle increasingly neglected.
There is an issue with any technological change of when to jump to the new tech, but as EV prices drop, practicality increases, and psychological barriers drop, it is only going one way.
I largely agree. My reservation is how much the prices of EVs will drop. It's one of those things I've been waiting for for some time and doesn't appear to be happening.
I do also wonder if there is a future in which the most common model is owning small EVs for the 90% of our journeys which are local and renting large ICEs or other type for longer journeys. My understanding is that EVs are much more cost effective as small, relatively low range vehicles, and I wonder whether by trying to make EVs do what ICEs do we are solving the wrong problem.
As a personal example, in my family we have two cars: a 14 year old Ford Focus and a rather newer MPV. We initially bought an MPV because we had three children under 5, and needed something which could fit three car seats in - but we're through that stage now. Now the reason for having an MPV is that a few times a year, all five of us plus luggage will go on a journey of more than 200 miles. I think many people are the same - we have the car we need for the extreme example of the journeys we make, rather than the typical example. 90% of the time, though, there is at least one car parked outside our house. And weeks, months can go by without ever going much more than 50 miles from home. It feels like a much more resource-efficient solution would be to own a small EV, and on the rare occasion we needed two cars at once, or that we needed a bigger car, rent one.
An EV works well as a second car, for most people who have a private driveway and a regular job. It does the daily commute, runs errands around town, and goes on charge every night. That covers 90% of journeys.
I can definitely see the last of the MPV and SUV petrol cars being snapped up by rental companies, they’re going to hold up in value and everyone’s going to want one at Christmas.
The worry for those buying an EV today, is that the technology moves so quickly that a five-year-old car is as popular as a five-year-old phone. When the new one does 500 miles and charges in 5 minutes, who will want an old one? What if the charging standard changes to enable faster speeds, and you’re stuck with the old one? I’d always lease an EV rather than buy it, which gives some random bank the risk of prices imploding. There are EV taxis that have done huge mileages (500,000+), but the concern is that the battery has a life measured mostly in time rather than usage.
There’s also concerns around the connectivity of EVs in particular, especially with Tesla who own the chargers. There’s stories from the US, of cars repaired outside the dealer network being banned from the charging network for “safety” reasons. Even if you own the car, do you really actually *own* the car?
Man living in petrostate not a fan of EVs.
Just playing the devil’s advocate. There’s actually a few EVs out here, but electricity is expensive and petrol is cheap.
At least there’s the infrastructure though, which isn’t the case in large parts of the world outside the West. There’s not going to be a huge rise in EV use in large parts of Asia or Africa any time soon.
Buying ICE vehicles now is like buying analog film cameras 20 years ago. Soon the ICE for personal transport will be as obsolete as cassette tapes or CDs.
Analog (sic) film cameras are trendy right now, and CDs are still viable.
Cassette tapes are more niche
Not the mass market by a long way, despite the hipster interest in vinyl.
Sure, ICE vehicles have some advantages still, particularly for rural areas. We have an ICE hybrid as well as an EV. Increasingly though EVs have the advantage. I think it will be my last ever ICE vehicle.
Currently EVs are 3% of the UK car fleet, but by Dec 22 had 30% of new sales. This is being driven by demand, and is only heading one way. The manufacturers see this too, which is why so much of the new design and engineering is centered on them, with ICE vehicle increasingly neglected.
There is an issue with any technological change of when to jump to the new tech, but as EV prices drop, practicality increases, and psychological barriers drop, it is only going one way.
I largely agree. My reservation is how much the prices of EVs will drop. It's one of those things I've been waiting for for some time and doesn't appear to be happening...
Largely because demand greatly exceeds supply, so manufacturers have no incentive to make cheaper models. That will change in the next 3-5 years, looking at the number of factories being built now and in planning.
And both batteries and motors are steadily getting cheaper to make, alongside the increase in capacity.
I will never have an electric car until they solve the charging issue ie having to wait to get to a charging point and. Then 40 mins for a half charge....I suspect I will have met my maker by then.
In 3 years of EV ownership, I have only had to use a public charger twice, and neither time did I have to wait. It is not often that I drive more than 280 miles in a day, and charging overnight on cheap electricity is better.
Indeed, because you have a driveway and a regular job, it’s a good fit. The concerns are around the edge cases, especially poorer people living in apartment blocks, who will have to pay a lot more to charge their car on the public network, then you would on cheap overnight home power.
Not just tower blocks. Any home without off-street parking is screwed as you cannot safely run power cables across the pavement.
I've always wondered whether the way electric vehicles are charged is suboptimal. I wonder whether there is a solution whereby you could charge a battery in your house and then take it out and put it into your car and charge battery to battery? This might also make for a better model for roadside charging - drop off a low charge battery and swap it for a high charge battery. I'm aware this is a half-thought through solution with lots of impracticalities (like batteries with sufficient charge being bloody heavy) - but I'd argue that we've arrived at the current solution for EV charging a little arbitrarily. It feels like a better solution ought to exist.
The batteries will be far too heavy, you'll need two batteries for this and they're quite steep; and you'll get losses between the batteries.
I am not sure I agree with "What is very clear is that any hopes labour have of returning to power rely on a very strong performance in Scotland".
Unless the Tories + DUP have majority after the next GE Labour will return to power imo. Clearly, success for Labour in Scotland makes that easier but it's not a prerequisite.
I do think that a dozen or so Scottish seats could easily be the difference between largest party and overall majority as the polls tighten a bit.
As the election draws closer, if we are to see massive swingback to the Conservatives as highlighted and expected on these very pages, I don't see why that wouldn't also be the case for the incumbent SNP.
As it stands Labour are 10 to 15 points ahead of the Conservatives nationally (and we are expecting that to mostly drift back by election day). In Scotland Labour are 10 to 15 points adrift of the SNP (why are we not expecting that to return to its usual 20 to 25 point margin?).
Labour are doomed, doomed I say!
Swingback, if it helps Yousless at all, would come in the Scottish Parliamentary elections, not the General.
You’ve all set the bar so low for him that he’s going to clear it and look like a success.
Not a chance. He will fail in ways we can't even imagine yet. Starting with the appointment of Shona Robinson, Nicola's best mate, as deputy. I searched for her achievements on Wiki: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shona_Robison Unfortunately, achievements was a missing word!
Surely then the time is ripe for the high achievers of your party of choice to sweep to power?
Not for three years, though ...
If the predictions of Humza’s tenure not outlasting a Trussian lettuce don’t come to pass, that’s just three more years for Ross & co to put their obvious qualities on display.
That reminds me - is Mr Ross leaving Holyrood at the next election, or is my memory failing me? I am sure I recall some announcement, but can't confirm it. So I may be quite wrong, in which case apols.
He announced he was leaving Westminster at the next GE.
Thanks - that's it.
That means a new candidate for Moray presumably? Luckily a large pool of achievers to choose from.
Hmm, fisherfolk and farmers not too happy with Brexit either. But the latter not exactly SKS voters, and it was the previous leader of the LDs who liked to be filmed in front of farm animals. Not sure that Mr C-H has quite the same knack.
"Fisherfolk"? This conjures an image of olde worlde types for whom the 19th century is dangerously modern. Nice alliteration though.
Non-gendered*. Also means the family members, comer to think of it, so works well in political terms.
Edit: like e.g. convenor instead of chairperson.
Also: avoids confusion with the people with rod and line.
Do you get many (any?) women on trawlers? Your points about family and anglers are good though (though again in my mind conjures up images of 18th century communities). I don't have a better word, mind.
EDIT: I rather like 'convenor', though. 'Chairperson' always sounded horribly clunky. (And irritation with Chairman/Chair/Chairperson goes back at least to the 70s. I can remember my grandfather, somewhat implausibly, claiming that the 'man' in chairman referred not to a male human but was short for 'manifesto'. I was sceptical then and remain so now.)
"Convenor" does smack of 70s socialism.
The local Tories of the 1970s would be very surprised to hear that!
Buying ICE vehicles now is like buying analog film cameras 20 years ago. Soon the ICE for personal transport will be as obsolete as cassette tapes or CDs.
Analog (sic) film cameras are trendy right now, and CDs are still viable.
Cassette tapes are more niche
Not the mass market by a long way, despite the hipster interest in vinyl.
Sure, ICE vehicles have some advantages still, particularly for rural areas. We have an ICE hybrid as well as an EV. Increasingly though EVs have the advantage. I think it will be my last ever ICE vehicle.
Currently EVs are 3% of the UK car fleet, but by Dec 22 had 30% of new sales. This is being driven by demand, and is only heading one way. The manufacturers see this too, which is why so much of the new design and engineering is centered on them, with ICE vehicle increasingly neglected.
There is an issue with any technological change of when to jump to the new tech, but as EV prices drop, practicality increases, and psychological barriers drop, it is only going one way.
I largely agree. My reservation is how much the prices of EVs will drop. It's one of those things I've been waiting for for some time and doesn't appear to be happening.
I do also wonder if there is a future in which the most common model is owning small EVs for the 90% of our journeys which are local and renting large ICEs or other type for longer journeys. My understanding is that EVs are much more cost effective as small, relatively low range vehicles, and I wonder whether by trying to make EVs do what ICEs do we are solving the wrong problem.
As a personal example, in my family we have two cars: a 14 year old Ford Focus and a rather newer MPV. We initially bought an MPV because we had three children under 5, and needed something which could fit three car seats in - but we're through that stage now. Now the reason for having an MPV is that a few times a year, all five of us plus luggage will go on a journey of more than 200 miles. I think many people are the same - we have the car we need for the extreme example of the journeys we make, rather than the typical example. 90% of the time, though, there is at least one car parked outside our house. And weeks, months can go by without ever going much more than 50 miles from home. It feels like a much more resource-efficient solution would be to own a small EV, and on the rare occasion we needed two cars at once, or that we needed a bigger car, rent one.
An EV works well as a second car, for most people who have a private driveway and a regular job. It does the daily commute, runs errands around town, and goes on charge every night. That covers 90% of journeys.
I can definitely see the last of the MPV and SUV petrol cars being snapped up by rental companies, they’re going to hold up in value and everyone’s going to want one at Christmas.
The worry for those buying an EV today, is that the technology moves so quickly that a five-year-old car is as popular as a five-year-old phone. When the new one does 500 miles and charges in 5 minutes, who will want an old one? What if the charging standard changes to enable faster speeds, and you’re stuck with the old one? I’d always lease an EV rather than buy it, which gives some random bank the risk of prices imploding. There are EV taxis that have done huge mileages (500,000+), but the concern is that the battery has a life measured mostly in time rather than usage.
There’s also concerns around the connectivity of EVs in particular, especially with Tesla who own the chargers. There’s stories from the US, of cars repaired outside the dealer network being banned from the charging network for “safety” reasons. Even if you own the car, do you really actually *own* the car?
Man living in petrostate not a fan of EVs.
Just playing the devil’s advocate. There’s actually a few EVs out here, but electricity is expensive and petrol is cheap.
At least there’s the infrastructure though, which isn’t the case in large parts of the world outside the West. There’s not going to be a huge rise in EV use in large parts of Asia or Africa any time soon.
Buying ICE vehicles now is like buying analog film cameras 20 years ago. Soon the ICE for personal transport will be as obsolete as cassette tapes or CDs.
Analog (sic) film cameras are trendy right now, and CDs are still viable.
Cassette tapes are more niche
Not the mass market by a long way, despite the hipster interest in vinyl.
Sure, ICE vehicles have some advantages still, particularly for rural areas. We have an ICE hybrid as well as an EV. Increasingly though EVs have the advantage. I think it will be my last ever ICE vehicle.
Currently EVs are 3% of the UK car fleet, but by Dec 22 had 30% of new sales. This is being driven by demand, and is only heading one way. The manufacturers see this too, which is why so much of the new design and engineering is centered on them, with ICE vehicle increasingly neglected.
There is an issue with any technological change of when to jump to the new tech, but as EV prices drop, practicality increases, and psychological barriers drop, it is only going one way.
I largely agree. My reservation is how much the prices of EVs will drop. It's one of those things I've been waiting for for some time and doesn't appear to be happening...
Largely because demand greatly exceeds supply, so manufacturers have no incentive to make cheaper models. That will change in the next 3-5 years, looking at the number of factories being built now and in planning.
And both batteries and motors are steadily getting cheaper to make, alongside the increase in capacity.
I will never have an electric car until they solve the charging issue ie having to wait to get to a charging point and. Then 40 mins for a half charge....I suspect I will have met my maker by then.
In 3 years of EV ownership, I have only had to use a public charger twice, and neither time did I have to wait. It is not often that I drive more than 280 miles in a day, and charging overnight on cheap electricity is better.
Indeed, because you have a driveway and a regular job, it’s a good fit. The concerns are around the edge cases, especially poorer people living in apartment blocks, who will have to pay a lot more to charge their car on the public network, then you would on cheap overnight home power.
Not just tower blocks. Any home without off-street parking is screwed as you cannot safely run power cables across the pavement.
I've always wondered whether the way electric vehicles are charged is suboptimal. I wonder whether there is a solution whereby you could charge a battery in your house and then take it out and put it into your car and charge battery to battery? This might also make for a better model for roadside charging - drop off a low charge battery and swap it for a high charge battery. I'm aware this is a half-thought through solution with lots of impracticalities (like batteries with sufficient charge being bloody heavy) - but I'd argue that we've arrived at the current solution for EV charging a little arbitrarily. It feels like a better solution ought to exist.
Battery swapping is being considered for lorries, but it won’t work in cars for packaging reasons, making the battery a standard size and removable being too difficult, and you’d need to lease battery supply. A 100kWh battery weighs around 600kg!
Buying ICE vehicles now is like buying analog film cameras 20 years ago. Soon the ICE for personal transport will be as obsolete as cassette tapes or CDs.
Analog (sic) film cameras are trendy right now, and CDs are still viable.
Cassette tapes are more niche
Not the mass market by a long way, despite the hipster interest in vinyl.
Sure, ICE vehicles have some advantages still, particularly for rural areas. We have an ICE hybrid as well as an EV. Increasingly though EVs have the advantage. I think it will be my last ever ICE vehicle.
Currently EVs are 3% of the UK car fleet, but by Dec 22 had 30% of new sales. This is being driven by demand, and is only heading one way. The manufacturers see this too, which is why so much of the new design and engineering is centered on them, with ICE vehicle increasingly neglected.
There is an issue with any technological change of when to jump to the new tech, but as EV prices drop, practicality increases, and psychological barriers drop, it is only going one way.
I largely agree. My reservation is how much the prices of EVs will drop. It's one of those things I've been waiting for for some time and doesn't appear to be happening...
Largely because demand greatly exceeds supply, so manufacturers have no incentive to make cheaper models. That will change in the next 3-5 years, looking at the number of factories being built now and in planning.
And both batteries and motors are steadily getting cheaper to make, alongside the increase in capacity.
I will never have an electric car until they solve the charging issue ie having to wait to get to a charging point and. Then 40 mins for a half charge....I suspect I will have met my maker by then.
You can do 10-80% in about 25 min on the latest chargers. To get to half should be a fraction of that - the charging is faster on an empty battery.
Not what my pal tells me. They have had nightmares queuing and it's 40.mins min to charge his ev f pace
Tbf that's about the same time I spend queuing at my local Costco yesterday for diesel.
There's no way any EV charging station will be able to match the sheer throughput of energy that a 12 pump Costco can get into vehicles in a day though.
No, which is why the model for EV charging will be a charger at every parking place, so that you can charge when you park to go shopping, or the cinema, or whatever, rather than a dedicated charging station.
All those fuel stations will disappear.
Exactly; it takes time for a paradigm shift to bed in. Until then, people can't help but imagine new things as newfangled versions of old things. I'm sure people had the same difficulties as cars replaced horse-drawn carriages.
Buying ICE vehicles now is like buying analog film cameras 20 years ago. Soon the ICE for personal transport will be as obsolete as cassette tapes or CDs.
Analog (sic) film cameras are trendy right now, and CDs are still viable.
Cassette tapes are more niche
Not the mass market by a long way, despite the hipster interest in vinyl.
Sure, ICE vehicles have some advantages still, particularly for rural areas. We have an ICE hybrid as well as an EV. Increasingly though EVs have the advantage. I think it will be my last ever ICE vehicle.
Currently EVs are 3% of the UK car fleet, but by Dec 22 had 30% of new sales. This is being driven by demand, and is only heading one way. The manufacturers see this too, which is why so much of the new design and engineering is centered on them, with ICE vehicle increasingly neglected.
There is an issue with any technological change of when to jump to the new tech, but as EV prices drop, practicality increases, and psychological barriers drop, it is only going one way.
I largely agree. My reservation is how much the prices of EVs will drop. It's one of those things I've been waiting for for some time and doesn't appear to be happening...
Largely because demand greatly exceeds supply, so manufacturers have no incentive to make cheaper models. That will change in the next 3-5 years, looking at the number of factories being built now and in planning.
And both batteries and motors are steadily getting cheaper to make, alongside the increase in capacity.
I will never have an electric car until they solve the charging issue ie having to wait to get to a charging point and. Then 40 mins for a half charge....I suspect I will have met my maker by then.
You can do 10-80% in about 25 min on the latest chargers. To get to half should be a fraction of that - the charging is faster on an empty battery.
Not what my pal tells me. They have had nightmares queuing and it's 40.mins min to charge his ev f pace
Tbf that's about the same time I spend queuing at my local Costco yesterday for diesel.
There's no way any EV charging station will be able to match the sheer throughput of energy that a 12 pump Costco can get into vehicles in a day though.
No, which is why the model for EV charging will be a charger at every parking place, so that you can charge when you park to go shopping, or the cinema, or whatever, rather than a dedicated charging station.
All those fuel stations will disappear.
So... why aren't supermarkets doing this already? Seems like an opportunity to get ahead of the competition.
They are, aren't they? Or if not at every space, at enough so that if you rock up with an EV and need a charging space one is available.
Maybe I've just not seen them. I guess round where I live there won't be as much demand for charging at Sainsbury's as a lot of people have off-street parking.
Buying ICE vehicles now is like buying analog film cameras 20 years ago. Soon the ICE for personal transport will be as obsolete as cassette tapes or CDs.
Analog (sic) film cameras are trendy right now, and CDs are still viable.
Cassette tapes are more niche
Not the mass market by a long way, despite the hipster interest in vinyl.
Sure, ICE vehicles have some advantages still, particularly for rural areas. We have an ICE hybrid as well as an EV. Increasingly though EVs have the advantage. I think it will be my last ever ICE vehicle.
Currently EVs are 3% of the UK car fleet, but by Dec 22 had 30% of new sales. This is being driven by demand, and is only heading one way. The manufacturers see this too, which is why so much of the new design and engineering is centered on them, with ICE vehicle increasingly neglected.
There is an issue with any technological change of when to jump to the new tech, but as EV prices drop, practicality increases, and psychological barriers drop, it is only going one way.
I largely agree. My reservation is how much the prices of EVs will drop. It's one of those things I've been waiting for for some time and doesn't appear to be happening...
Largely because demand greatly exceeds supply, so manufacturers have no incentive to make cheaper models. That will change in the next 3-5 years, looking at the number of factories being built now and in planning.
And both batteries and motors are steadily getting cheaper to make, alongside the increase in capacity.
I will never have an electric car until they solve the charging issue ie having to wait to get to a charging point and. Then 40 mins for a half charge....I suspect I will have met my maker by then.
You can do 10-80% in about 25 min on the latest chargers. To get to half should be a fraction of that - the charging is faster on an empty battery.
Not what my pal tells me. They have had nightmares queuing and it's 40.mins min to charge his ev f pace
Tbf that's about the same time I spend queuing at my local Costco yesterday for diesel.
There's no way any EV charging station will be able to match the sheer throughput of energy that a 12 pump Costco can get into vehicles in a day though.
No, which is why the model for EV charging will be a charger at every parking place, so that you can charge when you park to go shopping, or the cinema, or whatever, rather than a dedicated charging station.
All those fuel stations will disappear.
So... why aren't supermarkets doing this already? Seems like an opportunity to get ahead of the competition.
I've seen numerous articles about them doing so in recent years. For example there's this one from a few years ago.
Part of the problem is that a lot of the early adopters of electric cars are easily able to charge their cars at home - we've heard from some on this thread who have only used public chargers once or twice - so oddly there doesn't seem to be as much demand for public charging points as you might think.
It's possible this might still create a roadblock to EVs following an ideal S-curve rate of adoption, so it's a shame that governments generally haven't followed through on previous promises to expand the charging network.
Buying ICE vehicles now is like buying analog film cameras 20 years ago. Soon the ICE for personal transport will be as obsolete as cassette tapes or CDs.
Analog (sic) film cameras are trendy right now, and CDs are still viable.
Cassette tapes are more niche
Not the mass market by a long way, despite the hipster interest in vinyl.
Sure, ICE vehicles have some advantages still, particularly for rural areas. We have an ICE hybrid as well as an EV. Increasingly though EVs have the advantage. I think it will be my last ever ICE vehicle.
Currently EVs are 3% of the UK car fleet, but by Dec 22 had 30% of new sales. This is being driven by demand, and is only heading one way. The manufacturers see this too, which is why so much of the new design and engineering is centered on them, with ICE vehicle increasingly neglected.
There is an issue with any technological change of when to jump to the new tech, but as EV prices drop, practicality increases, and psychological barriers drop, it is only going one way.
I largely agree. My reservation is how much the prices of EVs will drop. It's one of those things I've been waiting for for some time and doesn't appear to be happening.
I do also wonder if there is a future in which the most common model is owning small EVs for the 90% of our journeys which are local and renting large ICEs or other type for longer journeys. My understanding is that EVs are much more cost effective as small, relatively low range vehicles, and I wonder whether by trying to make EVs do what ICEs do we are solving the wrong problem.
As a personal example, in my family we have two cars: a 14 year old Ford Focus and a rather newer MPV. We initially bought an MPV because we had three children under 5, and needed something which could fit three car seats in - but we're through that stage now. Now the reason for having an MPV is that a few times a year, all five of us plus luggage will go on a journey of more than 200 miles. I think many people are the same - we have the car we need for the extreme example of the journeys we make, rather than the typical example. 90% of the time, though, there is at least one car parked outside our house. And weeks, months can go by without ever going much more than 50 miles from home. It feels like a much more resource-efficient solution would be to own a small EV, and on the rare occasion we needed two cars at once, or that we needed a bigger car, rent one.
An EV works well as a second car, for most people who have a private driveway and a regular job. It does the daily commute, runs errands around town, and goes on charge every night. That covers 90% of journeys.
I can definitely see the last of the MPV and SUV petrol cars being snapped up by rental companies, they’re going to hold up in value and everyone’s going to want one at Christmas.
The worry for those buying an EV today, is that the technology moves so quickly that a five-year-old car is as popular as a five-year-old phone. When the new one does 500 miles and charges in 5 minutes, who will want an old one? What if the charging standard changes to enable faster speeds, and you’re stuck with the old one? I’d always lease an EV rather than buy it, which gives some random bank the risk of prices imploding. There are EV taxis that have done huge mileages (500,000+), but the concern is that the battery has a life measured mostly in time rather than usage.
There’s also concerns around the connectivity of EVs in particular, especially with Tesla who own the chargers. There’s stories from the US, of cars repaired outside the dealer network being banned from the charging network for “safety” reasons. Even if you own the car, do you really actually *own* the car?
Man living in petrostate not a fan of EVs.
Just playing the devil’s advocate. There’s actually a few EVs out here, but electricity is expensive and petrol is cheap.
At least there’s the infrastructure though, which isn’t the case in large parts of the world outside the West. There’s not going to be a huge rise in EV use in large parts of Asia or Africa any time soon.
Buying ICE vehicles now is like buying analog film cameras 20 years ago. Soon the ICE for personal transport will be as obsolete as cassette tapes or CDs.
Analog (sic) film cameras are trendy right now, and CDs are still viable.
Cassette tapes are more niche
Not the mass market by a long way, despite the hipster interest in vinyl.
Sure, ICE vehicles have some advantages still, particularly for rural areas. We have an ICE hybrid as well as an EV. Increasingly though EVs have the advantage. I think it will be my last ever ICE vehicle.
Currently EVs are 3% of the UK car fleet, but by Dec 22 had 30% of new sales. This is being driven by demand, and is only heading one way. The manufacturers see this too, which is why so much of the new design and engineering is centered on them, with ICE vehicle increasingly neglected.
There is an issue with any technological change of when to jump to the new tech, but as EV prices drop, practicality increases, and psychological barriers drop, it is only going one way.
I largely agree. My reservation is how much the prices of EVs will drop. It's one of those things I've been waiting for for some time and doesn't appear to be happening...
Largely because demand greatly exceeds supply, so manufacturers have no incentive to make cheaper models. That will change in the next 3-5 years, looking at the number of factories being built now and in planning.
And both batteries and motors are steadily getting cheaper to make, alongside the increase in capacity.
I will never have an electric car until they solve the charging issue ie having to wait to get to a charging point and. Then 40 mins for a half charge....I suspect I will have met my maker by then.
In 3 years of EV ownership, I have only had to use a public charger twice, and neither time did I have to wait. It is not often that I drive more than 280 miles in a day, and charging overnight on cheap electricity is better.
Indeed, because you have a driveway and a regular job, it’s a good fit. The concerns are around the edge cases, especially poorer people living in apartment blocks, who will have to pay a lot more to charge their car on the public network, then you would on cheap overnight home power.
Not just tower blocks. Any home without off-street parking is screwed as you cannot safely run power cables across the pavement.
I've always wondered whether the way electric vehicles are charged is suboptimal. I wonder whether there is a solution whereby you could charge a battery in your house and then take it out and put it into your car and charge battery to battery? This might also make for a better model for roadside charging - drop off a low charge battery and swap it for a high charge battery. I'm aware this is a half-thought through solution with lots of impracticalities (like batteries with sufficient charge being bloody heavy) - but I'd argue that we've arrived at the current solution for EV charging a little arbitrarily. It feels like a better solution ought to exist.
Battery swapping is being considered for lorries, but it won’t work in cars for packaging reasons, making the battery a standard size and removable being too difficult, and you’d need to lease battery supply. A 100kWh battery weighs around 600kg!
Maybe whatever they call the electric version of Formula One can devise an efficient way of battery-swapping or otherwise recharging.
Buying ICE vehicles now is like buying analog film cameras 20 years ago. Soon the ICE for personal transport will be as obsolete as cassette tapes or CDs.
Analog (sic) film cameras are trendy right now, and CDs are still viable.
Cassette tapes are more niche
Not the mass market by a long way, despite the hipster interest in vinyl.
Sure, ICE vehicles have some advantages still, particularly for rural areas. We have an ICE hybrid as well as an EV. Increasingly though EVs have the advantage. I think it will be my last ever ICE vehicle.
Currently EVs are 3% of the UK car fleet, but by Dec 22 had 30% of new sales. This is being driven by demand, and is only heading one way. The manufacturers see this too, which is why so much of the new design and engineering is centered on them, with ICE vehicle increasingly neglected.
There is an issue with any technological change of when to jump to the new tech, but as EV prices drop, practicality increases, and psychological barriers drop, it is only going one way.
I largely agree. My reservation is how much the prices of EVs will drop. It's one of those things I've been waiting for for some time and doesn't appear to be happening...
Largely because demand greatly exceeds supply, so manufacturers have no incentive to make cheaper models. That will change in the next 3-5 years, looking at the number of factories being built now and in planning.
And both batteries and motors are steadily getting cheaper to make, alongside the increase in capacity.
I will never have an electric car until they solve the charging issue ie having to wait to get to a charging point and. Then 40 mins for a half charge....I suspect I will have met my maker by then.
You can do 10-80% in about 25 min on the latest chargers. To get to half should be a fraction of that - the charging is faster on an empty battery.
Not what my pal tells me. They have had nightmares queuing and it's 40.mins min to charge his ev f pace
Tbf that's about the same time I spend queuing at my local Costco yesterday for diesel.
There's no way any EV charging station will be able to match the sheer throughput of energy that a 12 pump Costco can get into vehicles in a day though.
No, which is why the model for EV charging will be a charger at every parking place, so that you can charge when you park to go shopping, or the cinema, or whatever, rather than a dedicated charging station.
All those fuel stations will disappear.
So... why aren't supermarkets doing this already? Seems like an opportunity to get ahead of the competition.
I've seen numerous articles about them doing so in recent years. For example there's this one from a few years ago.
Part of the problem is that a lot of the early adopters of electric cars are easily able to charge their cars at home - we've heard from some on this thread who have only used public chargers once or twice - so oddly there doesn't seem to be as much demand for public charging points as you might think.
It's possible this might still create a roadblock to EVs following an ideal S-curve rate of adoption, so it's a shame that governments generally haven't followed through on previous promises to expand the charging network.
Just noticed EV chargers heing installed in the local high street - short stay shopper parking area.
Real time notification on the web too. No idea if this is common.
Buying ICE vehicles now is like buying analog film cameras 20 years ago. Soon the ICE for personal transport will be as obsolete as cassette tapes or CDs.
Analog (sic) film cameras are trendy right now, and CDs are still viable.
Cassette tapes are more niche
Not the mass market by a long way, despite the hipster interest in vinyl.
Sure, ICE vehicles have some advantages still, particularly for rural areas. We have an ICE hybrid as well as an EV. Increasingly though EVs have the advantage. I think it will be my last ever ICE vehicle.
Currently EVs are 3% of the UK car fleet, but by Dec 22 had 30% of new sales. This is being driven by demand, and is only heading one way. The manufacturers see this too, which is why so much of the new design and engineering is centered on them, with ICE vehicle increasingly neglected.
There is an issue with any technological change of when to jump to the new tech, but as EV prices drop, practicality increases, and psychological barriers drop, it is only going one way.
I largely agree. My reservation is how much the prices of EVs will drop. It's one of those things I've been waiting for for some time and doesn't appear to be happening.
I do also wonder if there is a future in which the most common model is owning small EVs for the 90% of our journeys which are local and renting large ICEs or other type for longer journeys. My understanding is that EVs are much more cost effective as small, relatively low range vehicles, and I wonder whether by trying to make EVs do what ICEs do we are solving the wrong problem.
As a personal example, in my family we have two cars: a 14 year old Ford Focus and a rather newer MPV. We initially bought an MPV because we had three children under 5, and needed something which could fit three car seats in - but we're through that stage now. Now the reason for having an MPV is that a few times a year, all five of us plus luggage will go on a journey of more than 200 miles. I think many people are the same - we have the car we need for the extreme example of the journeys we make, rather than the typical example. 90% of the time, though, there is at least one car parked outside our house. And weeks, months can go by without ever going much more than 50 miles from home. It feels like a much more resource-efficient solution would be to own a small EV, and on the rare occasion we needed two cars at once, or that we needed a bigger car, rent one.
An EV works well as a second car, for most people who have a private driveway and a regular job. It does the daily commute, runs errands around town, and goes on charge every night. That covers 90% of journeys.
I can definitely see the last of the MPV and SUV petrol cars being snapped up by rental companies, they’re going to hold up in value and everyone’s going to want one at Christmas.
The worry for those buying an EV today, is that the technology moves so quickly that a five-year-old car is as popular as a five-year-old phone. When the new one does 500 miles and charges in 5 minutes, who will want an old one? What if the charging standard changes to enable faster speeds, and you’re stuck with the old one? I’d always lease an EV rather than buy it, which gives some random bank the risk of prices imploding. There are EV taxis that have done huge mileages (500,000+), but the concern is that the battery has a life measured mostly in time rather than usage.
There’s also concerns around the connectivity of EVs in particular, especially with Tesla who own the chargers. There’s stories from the US, of cars repaired outside the dealer network being banned from the charging network for “safety” reasons. Even if you own the car, do you really actually *own* the car?
Man living in petrostate not a fan of EVs.
Just playing the devil’s advocate. There’s actually a few EVs out here, but electricity is expensive and petrol is cheap.
At least there’s the infrastructure though, which isn’t the case in large parts of the world outside the West. There’s not going to be a huge rise in EV use in large parts of Asia or Africa any time soon.
Buying ICE vehicles now is like buying analog film cameras 20 years ago. Soon the ICE for personal transport will be as obsolete as cassette tapes or CDs.
Analog (sic) film cameras are trendy right now, and CDs are still viable.
Cassette tapes are more niche
Not the mass market by a long way, despite the hipster interest in vinyl.
Sure, ICE vehicles have some advantages still, particularly for rural areas. We have an ICE hybrid as well as an EV. Increasingly though EVs have the advantage. I think it will be my last ever ICE vehicle.
Currently EVs are 3% of the UK car fleet, but by Dec 22 had 30% of new sales. This is being driven by demand, and is only heading one way. The manufacturers see this too, which is why so much of the new design and engineering is centered on them, with ICE vehicle increasingly neglected.
There is an issue with any technological change of when to jump to the new tech, but as EV prices drop, practicality increases, and psychological barriers drop, it is only going one way.
I largely agree. My reservation is how much the prices of EVs will drop. It's one of those things I've been waiting for for some time and doesn't appear to be happening...
Largely because demand greatly exceeds supply, so manufacturers have no incentive to make cheaper models. That will change in the next 3-5 years, looking at the number of factories being built now and in planning.
And both batteries and motors are steadily getting cheaper to make, alongside the increase in capacity.
I will never have an electric car until they solve the charging issue ie having to wait to get to a charging point and. Then 40 mins for a half charge....I suspect I will have met my maker by then.
In 3 years of EV ownership, I have only had to use a public charger twice, and neither time did I have to wait. It is not often that I drive more than 280 miles in a day, and charging overnight on cheap electricity is better.
Indeed, because you have a driveway and a regular job, it’s a good fit. The concerns are around the edge cases, especially poorer people living in apartment blocks, who will have to pay a lot more to charge their car on the public network, then you would on cheap overnight home power.
Not just tower blocks. Any home without off-street parking is screwed as you cannot safely run power cables across the pavement.
I've always wondered whether the way electric vehicles are charged is suboptimal. I wonder whether there is a solution whereby you could charge a battery in your house and then take it out and put it into your car and charge battery to battery? This might also make for a better model for roadside charging - drop off a low charge battery and swap it for a high charge battery. I'm aware this is a half-thought through solution with lots of impracticalities (like batteries with sufficient charge being bloody heavy) - but I'd argue that we've arrived at the current solution for EV charging a little arbitrarily. It feels like a better solution ought to exist.
The battery in a Tesla model Y apparently weighs 2 tonnes!
Another big problem for battery-swapping is that you'd hardly want to swap out your new battery for a battery that's been through 1,000 charge and discharge cycles.
I love the dashboard of my 2009 Ford Focus. It is just about perfection.
Reading these two sentences gave my eyes AIDS and caused me to have a mini-stroke. Thanks.
I thought you were a driver, Dura_Ace, not some pampered fop who needs to be able to specify the temperature of his seat and that his air temperature needs to be two degrees lower than that of his passenger and who needs a computer to tell him the way home.
And another thing: complicated climate control doesn't work. Or it doesn't work particularly effectively. Certainly less effectively than 'I am a bit cold - I will turn the dial a bit from blue to red - ah, that's better'.
I'm not saying that a 2009 Ford Focus is the best driving experience ever. It's perfectly adequate - you can keep up with the traffic, it doesn't veer off to the left. I daresay if you were racing you would want something a bit more exciting. But my point is that nothing which has happened since then - new buttons, flashing lights, push button ignition, electric handbrakes - makes life any better at all.
Electric handbrakes are shit and mean you can't use the handbrake to control the car on a steep hill. All they do is stop the car rolling away when you park. A brick in front of a tyre, or behind it, would achieve the same thing.
Climate control is rubbish and is far inferior to the old Ford model of one dial for heat and another for whoosh.
GPS is for girly men who can't read maps and who like being told "turn left", "turn right", etc. - ideal for the Covid generation. Lock yourself up. You came within 3 metres of someone who missed his vaccine appointment. Do not pass Go. Do not enjoy solving problems. That's your tool's job. There is technology to do that for you. Do not get ideas above your station.
Automatic transmission is also shit and for drivers who don't enjoy being in control of a car and the feeling of brrrm, brrrrrrrrrm.
Teslas are like pornosex for those with microscopic testicles who can't even manage a proper J Arthur.
I am not sure I agree with "What is very clear is that any hopes labour have of returning to power rely on a very strong performance in Scotland".
Unless the Tories + DUP have majority after the next GE Labour will return to power imo. Clearly, success for Labour in Scotland makes that easier but it's not a prerequisite.
I do think that a dozen or so Scottish seats could easily be the difference between largest party and overall majority as the polls tighten a bit.
As the election draws closer, if we are to see massive swingback to the Conservatives as highlighted and expected on these very pages, I don't see why that wouldn't also be the case for the incumbent SNP.
As it stands Labour are 10 to 15 points ahead of the Conservatives nationally (and we are expecting that to mostly drift back by election day). In Scotland Labour are 10 to 15 points adrift of the SNP (why are we not expecting that to return to its usual 20 to 25 point margin?).
Labour are doomed, doomed I say!
Swingback, if it helps Yousless at all, would come in the Scottish Parliamentary elections, not the General.
You’ve all set the bar so low for him that he’s going to clear it and look like a success.
Not a chance. He will fail in ways we can't even imagine yet. Starting with the appointment of Shona Robinson, Nicola's best mate, as deputy. I searched for her achievements on Wiki: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shona_Robison Unfortunately, achievements was a missing word!
Surely then the time is ripe for the high achievers of your party of choice to sweep to power?
Not for three years, though ...
If the predictions of Humza’s tenure not outlasting a Trussian lettuce don’t come to pass, that’s just three more years for Ross & co to put their obvious qualities on display.
That reminds me - is Mr Ross leaving Holyrood at the next election, or is my memory failing me? I am sure I recall some announcement, but can't confirm it. So I may be quite wrong, in which case apols.
He announced he was leaving Westminster at the next GE.
Thanks - that's it.
That means a new candidate for Moray presumably? Luckily a large pool of achievers to choose from.
Hmm, fisherfolk and farmers not too happy with Brexit either. But the latter not exactly SKS voters, and it was the previous leader of the LDs who liked to be filmed in front of farm animals. Not sure that Mr C-H has quite the same knack.
"Fisherfolk"? This conjures an image of olde worlde types for whom the 19th century is dangerously modern. Nice alliteration though.
Non-gendered*. Also means the family members, comer to think of it, so works well in political terms.
Edit: like e.g. convenor instead of chairperson.
Also: avoids confusion with the people with rod and line.
Do you get many (any?) women on trawlers? Your points about family and anglers are good though (though again in my mind conjures up images of 18th century communities). I don't have a better word, mind.
EDIT: I rather like 'convenor', though. 'Chairperson' always sounded horribly clunky. (And irritation with Chairman/Chair/Chairperson goes back at least to the 70s. I can remember my grandfather, somewhat implausibly, claiming that the 'man' in chairman referred not to a male human but was short for 'manifesto'. I was sceptical then and remain so now.)
"Convenor" does smack of 70s socialism.
The local Tories of the 1970s would be very surprised to hear that!
Not to mention the red in tooth and claw Church of Scotland.
Buying ICE vehicles now is like buying analog film cameras 20 years ago. Soon the ICE for personal transport will be as obsolete as cassette tapes or CDs.
Analog (sic) film cameras are trendy right now, and CDs are still viable.
Cassette tapes are more niche
Not the mass market by a long way, despite the hipster interest in vinyl.
Sure, ICE vehicles have some advantages still, particularly for rural areas. We have an ICE hybrid as well as an EV. Increasingly though EVs have the advantage. I think it will be my last ever ICE vehicle.
Currently EVs are 3% of the UK car fleet, but by Dec 22 had 30% of new sales. This is being driven by demand, and is only heading one way. The manufacturers see this too, which is why so much of the new design and engineering is centered on them, with ICE vehicle increasingly neglected.
There is an issue with any technological change of when to jump to the new tech, but as EV prices drop, practicality increases, and psychological barriers drop, it is only going one way.
I largely agree. My reservation is how much the prices of EVs will drop. It's one of those things I've been waiting for for some time and doesn't appear to be happening...
Largely because demand greatly exceeds supply, so manufacturers have no incentive to make cheaper models. That will change in the next 3-5 years, looking at the number of factories being built now and in planning.
And both batteries and motors are steadily getting cheaper to make, alongside the increase in capacity.
I will never have an electric car until they solve the charging issue ie having to wait to get to a charging point and. Then 40 mins for a half charge....I suspect I will have met my maker by then.
You can do 10-80% in about 25 min on the latest chargers. To get to half should be a fraction of that - the charging is faster on an empty battery.
Not what my pal tells me. They have had nightmares queuing and it's 40.mins min to charge his ev f pace
Tbf that's about the same time I spend queuing at my local Costco yesterday for diesel.
There's no way any EV charging station will be able to match the sheer throughput of energy that a 12 pump Costco can get into vehicles in a day though.
No, which is why the model for EV charging will be a charger at every parking place, so that you can charge when you park to go shopping, or the cinema, or whatever, rather than a dedicated charging station.
All those fuel stations will disappear.
Exactly; it takes time for a paradigm shift to bed in. Until then, people can't help but imagine new things as newfangled versions of old things. I'm sure people had the same difficulties as cars replaced horse-drawn carriages.
"people can't help but imagine new things as newfangled versions of old things" - That goes back to my earlier point about ICEs and EVs being good for different things. It's quite possible that owning an EV is not a replacement for owning an ICE but a replacement for 90% of what you do in an ICE, with the other 10% of journeys being achieved by some other means.
Buying ICE vehicles now is like buying analog film cameras 20 years ago. Soon the ICE for personal transport will be as obsolete as cassette tapes or CDs.
Analog (sic) film cameras are trendy right now, and CDs are still viable.
Cassette tapes are more niche
Not the mass market by a long way, despite the hipster interest in vinyl.
Sure, ICE vehicles have some advantages still, particularly for rural areas. We have an ICE hybrid as well as an EV. Increasingly though EVs have the advantage. I think it will be my last ever ICE vehicle.
Currently EVs are 3% of the UK car fleet, but by Dec 22 had 30% of new sales. This is being driven by demand, and is only heading one way. The manufacturers see this too, which is why so much of the new design and engineering is centered on them, with ICE vehicle increasingly neglected.
There is an issue with any technological change of when to jump to the new tech, but as EV prices drop, practicality increases, and psychological barriers drop, it is only going one way.
I largely agree. My reservation is how much the prices of EVs will drop. It's one of those things I've been waiting for for some time and doesn't appear to be happening.
I do also wonder if there is a future in which the most common model is owning small EVs for the 90% of our journeys which are local and renting large ICEs or other type for longer journeys. My understanding is that EVs are much more cost effective as small, relatively low range vehicles, and I wonder whether by trying to make EVs do what ICEs do we are solving the wrong problem.
As a personal example, in my family we have two cars: a 14 year old Ford Focus and a rather newer MPV. We initially bought an MPV because we had three children under 5, and needed something which could fit three car seats in - but we're through that stage now. Now the reason for having an MPV is that a few times a year, all five of us plus luggage will go on a journey of more than 200 miles. I think many people are the same - we have the car we need for the extreme example of the journeys we make, rather than the typical example. 90% of the time, though, there is at least one car parked outside our house. And weeks, months can go by without ever going much more than 50 miles from home. It feels like a much more resource-efficient solution would be to own a small EV, and on the rare occasion we needed two cars at once, or that we needed a bigger car, rent one.
An EV works well as a second car, for most people who have a private driveway and a regular job. It does the daily commute, runs errands around town, and goes on charge every night. That covers 90% of journeys.
I can definitely see the last of the MPV and SUV petrol cars being snapped up by rental companies, they’re going to hold up in value and everyone’s going to want one at Christmas.
The worry for those buying an EV today, is that the technology moves so quickly that a five-year-old car is as popular as a five-year-old phone. When the new one does 500 miles and charges in 5 minutes, who will want an old one? What if the charging standard changes to enable faster speeds, and you’re stuck with the old one? I’d always lease an EV rather than buy it, which gives some random bank the risk of prices imploding. There are EV taxis that have done huge mileages (500,000+), but the concern is that the battery has a life measured mostly in time rather than usage.
There’s also concerns around the connectivity of EVs in particular, especially with Tesla who own the chargers. There’s stories from the US, of cars repaired outside the dealer network being banned from the charging network for “safety” reasons. Even if you own the car, do you really actually *own* the car?
Man living in petrostate not a fan of EVs.
Just playing the devil’s advocate. There’s actually a few EVs out here, but electricity is expensive and petrol is cheap.
At least there’s the infrastructure though, which isn’t the case in large parts of the world outside the West. There’s not going to be a huge rise in EV use in large parts of Asia or Africa any time soon.
Buying ICE vehicles now is like buying analog film cameras 20 years ago. Soon the ICE for personal transport will be as obsolete as cassette tapes or CDs.
Analog (sic) film cameras are trendy right now, and CDs are still viable.
Cassette tapes are more niche
Not the mass market by a long way, despite the hipster interest in vinyl.
Sure, ICE vehicles have some advantages still, particularly for rural areas. We have an ICE hybrid as well as an EV. Increasingly though EVs have the advantage. I think it will be my last ever ICE vehicle.
Currently EVs are 3% of the UK car fleet, but by Dec 22 had 30% of new sales. This is being driven by demand, and is only heading one way. The manufacturers see this too, which is why so much of the new design and engineering is centered on them, with ICE vehicle increasingly neglected.
There is an issue with any technological change of when to jump to the new tech, but as EV prices drop, practicality increases, and psychological barriers drop, it is only going one way.
I largely agree. My reservation is how much the prices of EVs will drop. It's one of those things I've been waiting for for some time and doesn't appear to be happening...
Largely because demand greatly exceeds supply, so manufacturers have no incentive to make cheaper models. That will change in the next 3-5 years, looking at the number of factories being built now and in planning.
And both batteries and motors are steadily getting cheaper to make, alongside the increase in capacity.
I will never have an electric car until they solve the charging issue ie having to wait to get to a charging point and. Then 40 mins for a half charge....I suspect I will have met my maker by then.
In 3 years of EV ownership, I have only had to use a public charger twice, and neither time did I have to wait. It is not often that I drive more than 280 miles in a day, and charging overnight on cheap electricity is better.
Indeed, because you have a driveway and a regular job, it’s a good fit. The concerns are around the edge cases, especially poorer people living in apartment blocks, who will have to pay a lot more to charge their car on the public network, then you would on cheap overnight home power.
Not just tower blocks. Any home without off-street parking is screwed as you cannot safely run power cables across the pavement.
I've always wondered whether the way electric vehicles are charged is suboptimal. I wonder whether there is a solution whereby you could charge a battery in your house and then take it out and put it into your car and charge battery to battery? This might also make for a better model for roadside charging - drop off a low charge battery and swap it for a high charge battery. I'm aware this is a half-thought through solution with lots of impracticalities (like batteries with sufficient charge being bloody heavy) - but I'd argue that we've arrived at the current solution for EV charging a little arbitrarily. It feels like a better solution ought to exist.
Battery swapping is being considered for lorries, but it won’t work in cars for packaging reasons, making the battery a standard size and removable being too difficult, and you’d need to lease battery supply. A 100kWh battery weighs around 600kg!
Maybe whatever they call the electric version of Formula One can devise an efficient way of battery-swapping or otherwise recharging.
I love the dashboard of my 2009 Ford Focus. It is just about perfection.
Reading these two sentences gave my eyes AIDS and caused me to have a mini-stroke. Thanks.
I thought you were a driver, Dura_Ace, not some pampered fop who needs to be able to specify the temperature of his seat and that his air temperature needs to be two degrees lower than that of his passenger and who needs a computer to tell him the way home.
And another thing: complicated climate control doesn't work. Or it doesn't work particularly effectively. Certainly less effectively than 'I am a bit cold - I will turn the dial a bit from blue to red - ah, that's better'.
I'm not saying that a 2009 Ford Focus is the best driving experience ever. It's perfectly adequate - you can keep up with the traffic, it doesn't veer off to the left. I daresay if you were racing you would want something a bit more exciting. But my point is that nothing which has happened since then - new buttons, flashing lights, push button ignition, electric handbrakes - makes life any better at all.
Electric handbrakes are shit and mean you can't use the handbrake to control the car on a steep hill. All they do is stop the car rolling away when you park.
Climate control is rubbish and is far inferior to the old Ford model of one dial for heat and another for whoosh.
GPS is for girly men who can't read maps and who like being told "turn left", "turn right", etc. - ideal for the Covid generation. Lock yourself up. You came within 3 metres of someone who missed his vaccine appointment. Do not pass Go. Do not enjoy solving problems. That's your tool's job.
Automatic transmission is also shit and for drivers who don't enjoy being in control of a car or the feeling of brrrm, brrrrrrrrrm.
Teslas are like pornosex for those who can't even manage a proper J Arthur.
Buying ICE vehicles now is like buying analog film cameras 20 years ago. Soon the ICE for personal transport will be as obsolete as cassette tapes or CDs.
Analog (sic) film cameras are trendy right now, and CDs are still viable.
Cassette tapes are more niche
Not the mass market by a long way, despite the hipster interest in vinyl.
Sure, ICE vehicles have some advantages still, particularly for rural areas. We have an ICE hybrid as well as an EV. Increasingly though EVs have the advantage. I think it will be my last ever ICE vehicle.
Currently EVs are 3% of the UK car fleet, but by Dec 22 had 30% of new sales. This is being driven by demand, and is only heading one way. The manufacturers see this too, which is why so much of the new design and engineering is centered on them, with ICE vehicle increasingly neglected.
There is an issue with any technological change of when to jump to the new tech, but as EV prices drop, practicality increases, and psychological barriers drop, it is only going one way.
I largely agree. My reservation is how much the prices of EVs will drop. It's one of those things I've been waiting for for some time and doesn't appear to be happening...
Largely because demand greatly exceeds supply, so manufacturers have no incentive to make cheaper models. That will change in the next 3-5 years, looking at the number of factories being built now and in planning.
And both batteries and motors are steadily getting cheaper to make, alongside the increase in capacity.
I will never have an electric car until they solve the charging issue ie having to wait to get to a charging point and. Then 40 mins for a half charge....I suspect I will have met my maker by then.
You can do 10-80% in about 25 min on the latest chargers. To get to half should be a fraction of that - the charging is faster on an empty battery.
Not what my pal tells me. They have had nightmares queuing and it's 40.mins min to charge his ev f pace
Tbf that's about the same time I spend queuing at my local Costco yesterday for diesel.
There's no way any EV charging station will be able to match the sheer throughput of energy that a 12 pump Costco can get into vehicles in a day though.
No, which is why the model for EV charging will be a charger at every parking place, so that you can charge when you park to go shopping, or the cinema, or whatever, rather than a dedicated charging station.
All those fuel stations will disappear.
Exactly; it takes time for a paradigm shift to bed in. Until then, people can't help but imagine new things as newfangled versions of old things. I'm sure people had the same difficulties as cars replaced horse-drawn carriages.
For a while the horse drawn carriage was probably still better but eventually became obsolete.
The government of the time didn't put an arbitrary deadline on it though.
When the car was better and cheaper, people started using them.
When electric is better and cheaper (it is already better for some uses, although not cheaper) then everyone will be keen to swap.
I am not sure I agree with "What is very clear is that any hopes labour have of returning to power rely on a very strong performance in Scotland".
Unless the Tories + DUP have majority after the next GE Labour will return to power imo. Clearly, success for Labour in Scotland makes that easier but it's not a prerequisite.
I do think that a dozen or so Scottish seats could easily be the difference between largest party and overall majority as the polls tighten a bit.
As the election draws closer, if we are to see massive swingback to the Conservatives as highlighted and expected on these very pages, I don't see why that wouldn't also be the case for the incumbent SNP.
As it stands Labour are 10 to 15 points ahead of the Conservatives nationally (and we are expecting that to mostly drift back by election day). In Scotland Labour are 10 to 15 points adrift of the SNP (why are we not expecting that to return to its usual 20 to 25 point margin?).
Labour are doomed, doomed I say!
Swingback, if it helps Yousless at all, would come in the Scottish Parliamentary elections, not the General.
You’ve all set the bar so low for him that he’s going to clear it and look like a success.
Not a chance. He will fail in ways we can't even imagine yet. Starting with the appointment of Shona Robinson, Nicola's best mate, as deputy. I searched for her achievements on Wiki: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shona_Robison Unfortunately, achievements was a missing word!
Surely then the time is ripe for the high achievers of your party of choice to sweep to power?
Not for three years, though ...
If the predictions of Humza’s tenure not outlasting a Trussian lettuce don’t come to pass, that’s just three more years for Ross & co to put their obvious qualities on display.
That reminds me - is Mr Ross leaving Holyrood at the next election, or is my memory failing me? I am sure I recall some announcement, but can't confirm it. So I may be quite wrong, in which case apols.
He announced he was leaving Westminster at the next GE.
Thanks - that's it.
That means a new candidate for Moray presumably? Luckily a large pool of achievers to choose from.
Hmm, fisherfolk and farmers not too happy with Brexit either. But the latter not exactly SKS voters, and it was the previous leader of the LDs who liked to be filmed in front of farm animals. Not sure that Mr C-H has quite the same knack.
"Fisherfolk"? This conjures an image of olde worlde types for whom the 19th century is dangerously modern. Nice alliteration though.
Non-gendered*. Also means the family members, comer to think of it, so works well in political terms.
Edit: like e.g. convenor instead of chairperson.
Also: avoids confusion with the people with rod and line.
Do you get many (any?) women on trawlers? Your points about family and anglers are good though (though again in my mind conjures up images of 18th century communities). I don't have a better word, mind.
EDIT: I rather like 'convenor', though. 'Chairperson' always sounded horribly clunky. (And irritation with Chairman/Chair/Chairperson goes back at least to the 70s. I can remember my grandfather, somewhat implausibly, claiming that the 'man' in chairman referred not to a male human but was short for 'manifesto'. I was sceptical then and remain so now.)
"Convenor" does smack of 70s socialism.
The local Tories of the 1970s would be very surprised to hear that!
Not to mention the red in tooth and claw Church of Scotland.
Well, they are a bunch of commies, all that Calvinist stuff about funding a proper education network and cheap unis, and earning a living from education and hard work, and camels and needles. Pulled out of Establishment a century ago, too.
Buying ICE vehicles now is like buying analog film cameras 20 years ago. Soon the ICE for personal transport will be as obsolete as cassette tapes or CDs.
Analog (sic) film cameras are trendy right now, and CDs are still viable.
Cassette tapes are more niche
Not the mass market by a long way, despite the hipster interest in vinyl.
Sure, ICE vehicles have some advantages still, particularly for rural areas. We have an ICE hybrid as well as an EV. Increasingly though EVs have the advantage. I think it will be my last ever ICE vehicle.
Currently EVs are 3% of the UK car fleet, but by Dec 22 had 30% of new sales. This is being driven by demand, and is only heading one way. The manufacturers see this too, which is why so much of the new design and engineering is centered on them, with ICE vehicle increasingly neglected.
There is an issue with any technological change of when to jump to the new tech, but as EV prices drop, practicality increases, and psychological barriers drop, it is only going one way.
I largely agree. My reservation is how much the prices of EVs will drop. It's one of those things I've been waiting for for some time and doesn't appear to be happening...
Largely because demand greatly exceeds supply, so manufacturers have no incentive to make cheaper models. That will change in the next 3-5 years, looking at the number of factories being built now and in planning.
And both batteries and motors are steadily getting cheaper to make, alongside the increase in capacity.
I will never have an electric car until they solve the charging issue ie having to wait to get to a charging point and. Then 40 mins for a half charge....I suspect I will have met my maker by then.
You can do 10-80% in about 25 min on the latest chargers. To get to half should be a fraction of that - the charging is faster on an empty battery.
Not what my pal tells me. They have had nightmares queuing and it's 40.mins min to charge his ev f pace
Tbf that's about the same time I spend queuing at my local Costco yesterday for diesel.
There's no way any EV charging station will be able to match the sheer throughput of energy that a 12 pump Costco can get into vehicles in a day though.
No, which is why the model for EV charging will be a charger at every parking place, so that you can charge when you park to go shopping, or the cinema, or whatever, rather than a dedicated charging station.
All those fuel stations will disappear.
Exactly; it takes time for a paradigm shift to bed in. Until then, people can't help but imagine new things as newfangled versions of old things. I'm sure people had the same difficulties as cars replaced horse-drawn carriages.
I have no difficulty in thinking that EVs will take off. But I don't want to go through the teething pains so will wait until some of the well publicised issues have been dealt with.
I love the dashboard of my 2009 Ford Focus. It is just about perfection.
Reading these two sentences gave my eyes AIDS and caused me to have a mini-stroke. Thanks.
I thought you were a driver, Dura_Ace, not some pampered fop who needs to be able to specify the temperature of his seat and that his air temperature needs to be two degrees lower than that of his passenger and who needs a computer to tell him the way home.
And another thing: complicated climate control doesn't work. Or it doesn't work particularly effectively. Certainly less effectively than 'I am a bit cold - I will turn the dial a bit from blue to red - ah, that's better'.
I'm not saying that a 2009 Ford Focus is the best driving experience ever. It's perfectly adequate - you can keep up with the traffic, it doesn't veer off to the left. I daresay if you were racing you would want something a bit more exciting. But my point is that nothing which has happened since then - new buttons, flashing lights, push button ignition, electric handbrakes - makes life any better at all.
Electric handbrakes are shit and mean you can't use the handbrake to control the car on a steep hill. All they do is stop the car rolling away when you park. A brick in front of a tyre, or behind it, would achieve the same thing.
Climate control is rubbish and is far inferior to the old Ford model of one dial for heat and another for whoosh.
GPS is for girly men who can't read maps and who like being told "turn left", "turn right", etc. - ideal for the Covid generation. Lock yourself up. You came within 3 metres of someone who missed his vaccine appointment. Do not pass Go. Do not enjoy solving problems. That's your tool's job.
Automatic transmission is also shit and for drivers who don't enjoy being in control of a car or the feeling of brrrm, brrrrrrrrrm.
Teslas are like pornosex for those with microscopic testicles who can't even manage a proper J Arthur.
Spot on.
I got a lift from someone in a Tesla recently. It was clearly a very good car. He was very pleased in demonstrating how well it accelerated. It wasn't a particularly pleasant journey however as there were lots of sudden small changes of speed. I don't know whether to blame the driver or the car for this (I suspect the former). He also INSISTED on following his satnav rather than my directions, making the journey much longer. He couldn't conceive that the satnav wouldn't be the perfect answer. He was also baffled when I tried to direct him to a location close to a station - a reasonably well-known location on a main road less than a mile from where he had lived for over five years - because being totally reliant on satnavs he was as ignorant as a baby about his local geography.
Buying ICE vehicles now is like buying analog film cameras 20 years ago. Soon the ICE for personal transport will be as obsolete as cassette tapes or CDs.
Analog (sic) film cameras are trendy right now, and CDs are still viable.
Cassette tapes are more niche
Not the mass market by a long way, despite the hipster interest in vinyl.
Sure, ICE vehicles have some advantages still, particularly for rural areas. We have an ICE hybrid as well as an EV. Increasingly though EVs have the advantage. I think it will be my last ever ICE vehicle.
Currently EVs are 3% of the UK car fleet, but by Dec 22 had 30% of new sales. This is being driven by demand, and is only heading one way. The manufacturers see this too, which is why so much of the new design and engineering is centered on them, with ICE vehicle increasingly neglected.
There is an issue with any technological change of when to jump to the new tech, but as EV prices drop, practicality increases, and psychological barriers drop, it is only going one way.
I largely agree. My reservation is how much the prices of EVs will drop. It's one of those things I've been waiting for for some time and doesn't appear to be happening...
Largely because demand greatly exceeds supply, so manufacturers have no incentive to make cheaper models. That will change in the next 3-5 years, looking at the number of factories being built now and in planning.
And both batteries and motors are steadily getting cheaper to make, alongside the increase in capacity.
I will never have an electric car until they solve the charging issue ie having to wait to get to a charging point and. Then 40 mins for a half charge....I suspect I will have met my maker by then.
You can do 10-80% in about 25 min on the latest chargers. To get to half should be a fraction of that - the charging is faster on an empty battery.
Not what my pal tells me. They have had nightmares queuing and it's 40.mins min to charge his ev f pace
Tbf that's about the same time I spend queuing at my local Costco yesterday for diesel.
There's no way any EV charging station will be able to match the sheer throughput of energy that a 12 pump Costco can get into vehicles in a day though.
No, which is why the model for EV charging will be a charger at every parking place, so that you can charge when you park to go shopping, or the cinema, or whatever, rather than a dedicated charging station.
All those fuel stations will disappear.
So... why aren't supermarkets doing this already? Seems like an opportunity to get ahead of the competition.
They are, aren't they? Or if not at every space, at enough so that if you rock up with an EV and need a charging space one is available.
Maybe I've just not seen them. I guess round where I live there won't be as much demand for charging at Sainsbury's as a lot of people have off-street parking.
That's a good point. There are none at the Sainsbury's near me, but there are some at the Lidl over the road from it. Perhaps the supermarkets know their customers?
Comments
In recent days I’ve heard “vax skeptical” opinions, in different forms, from a few sources I’d regard as definitely sane 🤷♂️
The worry with an older EV, is that it needs a battery replacement one day that basically writes it off. Owning one outside the warranty is going to be like owning a Range Rover with no warranty, potentially very painful.
Perhaps there will be a cottage industry of battery repair shops, or perhaps it will be impossible to do anything outside the dealer network who will sell you a whole new pack? There is a cottage industry around the old Nissan Leaf, which seems to be simple enough that batteries can be swapped out and even upgraded. It remains to be seen, whether that is possible with other EVs in the future.
ULEZs however may be.
i) Longer firing range
ii) Much better armour
iii) GPS
iv) Night vision
In the original Gulf War a single battalion of Abrams, which are comparable to Challengers, destroyed an entire Iraqi division.
Also, like then, the Ukrainians will have much better live time intelligence info.
Which is why we are seeing older and older tanks on the frontline.
The T54/55 we say a while back in transport might well be going to be converted into recovery vehicles etc, rather than as front line MBT. On the other hand…
Repairs outside the dealer network are fine and Tesla subcontract out most of the maintenance and repairs to 3rd parties now.
Apparently.
Ken Murphy, chief executive of Tesco, said the scheme championed by Nicola Sturgeon was "not fit for purpose, and worse, it risks driving up prices and undermining consumer confidence".
https://archive.ph/2023.03.28-184110/https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2023/03/28/tesco-boss-hits-snps-confusing-bottle-recycling-scheme/
If the cold war had turned hot, sans nuclear, it would have been very one sided.
The forces that ejected Iraq out of Kuwait were the ones that would have pulverised the Soviets.
Also, you'll be very lucky to see a Russian tank as the 100% truth telling Ukrainians now claim to have destroyed every tank in the Russian army.
The idea is that the heavy tanks kill the enemy tanks exposed by your lighter tanks moving forward - making them move in turn. The heavy tanks do this at long range.
///lableak.necklace.AI
I can see - especially with cars - the attractiveness of waiting for more efficient models. But aside from that, how good can a car or a phone be?
I love the dashboard of my 2009 Ford Focus. It is just about perfection. You have three dials for the heater (how hard do you blow, which direction do you blow, and how hot do you blow); two buttons (heat the front window, heat the back window), hazard warning lights, a radio, a jack into which you can plug an ipod, and that's it. (It also has some sticks by which you can see stats for average speed on your journey, etc, but while I like stats I could live without those).
Anything beyond this - and I include satnavs in this - is just frippery. New for new's sake. My newer MPV has all sorts of buttons and functions and I don't know what they do and I can't be bothered to learn and in any case I can't actually see what they are without my reading glasses, and I don't wear those for driving.
(One exception, actually, is that my MPV has a digital radio. I quite like that.)
to charge his ev f pace
Ironically, this meant losing the European referendum and chucking Cameron and Osborne out of Downing Street. Karma's a bitch.
There's no way any EV charging station will be able to match the sheer throughput of energy that a 12 pump Costco can get into vehicles in a day though.
The threat from EVs for manufacturers is that servicing isn't needed, not really. My Tesla has no maintenance schedule, its all as required.
Text to video. You prompt it with a suggestion and it produces a video out of your words
"Will Smith eating spaghetti" generated by Modelscope text2video
credit: u/chaindrop from r/StableDiffusion
https://twitter.com/maguswazir/status/1640555696750993415?s=46&t=bulOICNH15U6kB0MwE6Lfw
As is obvious, it is deep in Uncanny Valley. The likeness is good enough to be provoking, but bad enough to be obviously wrong in weird ways: the combination of these reactions is often a sense of deep unease
On present trends these videos will be perfect in a year or two, just like the still images now. Then what?
It's an interesting policy idea that would work well in densely populated parts of the country like the central belt of Scotland. Lots of positive externalities - congestion, emissions, obesity, noise pollution.
It would need to be paired with better public transport provision (on the Lothian Buses model), car club rollout, cycle infrastructure etc.
But Scotland has a severe rural/urban divide, so policy makers need to be very careful to keep those who need to drive on side.
“Elon Musk and over 1,100 tech experts have signed an open letter to stop AI training beyond GPT-4.
AI is getting too powerful too quickly, and they want at least a 6-month pause on AI training 😬”
https://twitter.com/garymarcus/status/1640884040835428357?s=46&t=bulOICNH15U6kB0MwE6Lfw
I don’t believe it will work. Whoever gets the best AGI first will become enormously powerful and enormously rich. When have humans ever resisted that?
Plus, the Chinese, Koreans, Taiwanese, Japanese, Russians etc will be working on their own versions, they won’t stop because the military capabilities of AGI will be monumental, and if you’re enemy has them and you don’t you’re screwed
Edit: like e.g. convenor instead of chairperson.
Also: avoids confusion with the people with rod and line.
https://youtu.be/7623BJ6ETDU?t=345
But IER isn't why Cameron lost the EU referendum. The Remain campaign being utterly shit did that.
Yes, an EV needs a lot less servicing than an ICE car. Orders of magnitude fewer moving parts, and technology such as regenerative braking. The cooling system for the battery is the only thing that requires regular service, and your car will quickly tell you if it’s overheating! The franchise dealer model generates a lot of its revenue from servicing though, so many EVs still tell you to get a ‘service’ every 10,000 miles.
All those fuel stations will disappear.
And another thing: complicated climate control doesn't work. Or it doesn't work particularly effectively. Certainly less effectively than 'I am a bit cold - I will turn the dial a bit from blue to red - ah, that's better'.
I'm not saying that a 2009 Ford Focus is the best driving experience ever. It's perfectly adequate - you can keep up with the traffic, it doesn't veer off to the left. I daresay if you were racing you would want something a bit more exciting.
But my point is that nothing which has happened since then - new buttons, flashing lights, push button ignition, electric handbrakes - makes life any better at all.
Where Ford Foci do fall down is that after about 70000 miles - for reasons I cannot begin to imagine - some element of watertightness is lost and throughout the winter they are very damp to get into, with condensation or ice on the inside of the windscreen.
There clearly needs to be investment in the charging network for everyone else. Cheap solar panels will be the answer for Asia and Africa. There are big solar developments in lots of countries there.
I don't have a better word, mind.
EDIT: I rather like 'convenor', though. 'Chairperson' always sounded horribly clunky. (And irritation with Chairman/Chair/Chairperson goes back at least to the 70s. I can remember my grandfather, somewhat implausibly, claiming that the 'man' in chairman referred not to a male human but was short for 'manifesto'. I was sceptical then and remain so now.)
Sounds a lot more reasonable a figure.
No driveway: remain
Driveway: leave
So those on the right wing side of the culture wars probably also better placed to own an EV. Which helps to make it less of a partisan issue (a bit like Covid lockdowns - those most negatively affected by lockdown and least at risk of Covid were also more likely to be on the left).
Driveways start to appear in numbers around here just beyond the Shooter’s Hill line of demarcation.
I'm aware this is a half-thought through solution with lots of impracticalities (like batteries with sufficient charge being bloody heavy) - but I'd argue that we've arrived at the current solution for EV charging a little arbitrarily. It feels like a better solution ought to exist.
Plenty of small towns used to have a "fishertown" wit distinct architecture and location - Berwick, Nairn, Cromarty spring to mind (and Wick, but that was specially developed - a fine sight to visit).
https://tescoireland.ie/news/2019/tesco-and-esb-announce-nationwide-roll-out-of-charge-points-for-electric-vehicles-at-52-locations-across-the-country/
Part of the problem is that a lot of the early adopters of electric cars are easily able to charge their cars at home - we've heard from some on this thread who have only used public chargers once or twice - so oddly there doesn't seem to be as much demand for public charging points as you might think.
It's possible this might still create a roadblock to EVs following an ideal S-curve rate of adoption, so it's a shame that governments generally haven't followed through on previous promises to expand the charging network.
Hard to understand what prompts people to do this kind of stuff.
My 6-Year-Old Son Died. Then the Anti-vaxxers Found Out.
Opponents of COVID vaccines terrorize grieving families on social media.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/03/covid-vaccine-misinformation-social-media-harassment/673537/
Real time notification on the web too. No idea if this is common.
https://chargeplacescotland.org/
Another big problem for battery-swapping is that you'd hardly want to swap out your new battery for a battery that's been through 1,000 charge and discharge cycles.
Climate control is rubbish and is far inferior to the old Ford model of one dial for heat and another for whoosh.
GPS is for girly men who can't read maps and who like being told "turn left", "turn right", etc. - ideal for the Covid generation. Lock yourself up. You came within 3 metres of someone who missed his vaccine appointment. Do not pass Go. Do not enjoy solving problems. That's your tool's job. There is technology to do that for you. Do not get ideas above your station.
Automatic transmission is also shit and for drivers who don't enjoy being in control of a car and the feeling of brrrm, brrrrrrrrrm.
Teslas are like pornosex for those with microscopic testicles who can't even manage a proper J Arthur.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=9DC8orqtUqU
Nowadays, the batteries are big enough and the races short enough, that it’s no longer required.
The government of the time didn't put an arbitrary deadline on it though.
When the car was better and cheaper, people started using them.
When electric is better and cheaper (it is already better for some uses, although not cheaper) then everyone will be keen to swap.
I'm not convinced that will be by 2030 though.
I got a lift from someone in a Tesla recently.
It was clearly a very good car. He was very pleased in demonstrating how well it accelerated.
It wasn't a particularly pleasant journey however as there were lots of sudden small changes of speed. I don't know whether to blame the driver or the car for this (I suspect the former).
He also INSISTED on following his satnav rather than my directions, making the journey much longer. He couldn't conceive that the satnav wouldn't be the perfect answer.
He was also baffled when I tried to direct him to a location close to a station - a reasonably well-known location on a main road less than a mile from where he had lived for over five years - because being totally reliant on satnavs he was as ignorant as a baby about his local geography.