There are tantalising rumours on TwitterX that we are alarmingly close to AGI - true Artificial Intelligence - or, that OpenAI have actually achieved it already
It’s bizarre that more people aren’t talking about this; if it is true it is one of the biggest news stories in human history
The market is deciding. The hysteria about the announcement last week was partly synthetic and partly misplaced. Just because people can sell something doesn’t mean they will.
Auto makers work on cycle times of years on products and platforms. They’d not be likely to chop and change at the govts whim.
But this can't be true. It was Keir Starmer forcing Nissan et al to ditch petrol. Sunak saved people from having to buy an electric car, it was in all the right newspapers and TV news shows. Thanks to Rishi making Long-Term Decisions for a Brighter Future, the dread threat of all EV by 2030 was removed.
Nissan must be mistaken .
Nissan don't make new cars at the £13k entry level range of the market like the Kia Picanto etc
By 2030 it seems entirely plausible that an electric juke will be as cheap as a petrol Juke, but it does not look likely that an electric Picanto would be available as cheap as a petrol Picanto.
So again, if in 6 years time if you could get a cheap petrol vehicle like the Picanto for £13k in real terms, but if the cheapest electric is in real terms £21k (currently £27k is cheapest) then should the Picanto be outlawed and people who want to buy it be forced to pay eight grand more?
We need to continue with what the market has been doing from Tesla onwards which is to start at the top of the market and work down with electrification, not the other way around. If in 2030 the only petrol vehicles the market still offers is 1.0 litre runarounds like the Picanto simply because electrification of them isn't affordably ready yet, then what's the harm in that?
We shouldn't really go by capital price but by the cost paid per month by the purchaser. Given that only a very small fraction of people buying new cars pay cash on the full price for them, and 80-80% get PCP (we can debate the wisdom of going the PCP route, but for this, we simply recognise that such is the default route to new car purchase at the moment and therefore what the market will be following), we need to look at the main monthly expenditure of the purchaser.
Which is PCP monthly payment plus petrol or electricity costs.
Petrol comes in at c. £1.50 per litre at the moment.
The majority of those buying electric cars will be recharging at home overnight (70%+: there's a need to address the needs of those who cannot do this, but, again, the overall market is driven by those who can do this. And the core need would be to fill in the gap for those who can't). At the moment, an EV tariff from Octopus gives £0.075 per kWh overnight.
The Picanto does c. 13 miles per litre. Assuming the default given by Kia on their finance calculator of 10,000 miles per year, that costs £1,155 per year in petrol, or £96.30 per month. The finance calculator for the Picanto gives (at 10% down payment of £1,350) a cost of £206.58 per month on PCP. This leads to a cost on PCP plus fuel of £302.88 per month to the purchaser.
The Ceed comes in at £21k, so the finance for a putative £21k Kia EV can be looked at on the same site (which helps) and comes out at £342.02 per month (using the same £1350 deposit, which is under 10% this time and probably incurs a slightly higher interest rate, but we need it to be comparable for the purchaser). If the EV has an efficiency similar to the MGZ4 (3.8 miles/kWh), it would cost £197.37 per year in electricity, or £16.45 per month). Cost is then £358.37 per month to the purchaser for PCP plus electricity.
The difference is therefore 18% more expensive to the purchaser for the 21k EV over the 13k ICE rather than the 61% of the sticker price. You only need the price to fall to about £18k to be the same affordability as a £13k ICE to the purchaser, to all intents and purposes.
The market is deciding. The hysteria about the announcement last week was partly synthetic and partly misplaced. Just because people can sell something doesn’t mean they will.
Auto makers work on cycle times of years on products and platforms. They’d not be likely to chop and change at the govts whim.
But this can't be true. It was Keir Starmer forcing Nissan et al to ditch petrol. Sunak saved people from having to buy an electric car, it was in all the right newspapers and TV news shows. Thanks to Rishi making Long-Term Decisions for a Brighter Future, the dread threat of all EV by 2030 was removed.
Nissan must be mistaken .
Nissan don't make new cars at the £13k entry level range of the market like the Kia Picanto etc
By 2030 it seems entirely plausible that an electric juke will be as cheap as a petrol Juke, but it does not look likely that an electric Picanto would be available as cheap as a petrol Picanto...
On the contrary, it's very likely indeed. Nor in the next couple of years, but certainly by 2030. The cost of providing a 70kWh battery pack - which would be sufficient for 95% of Picanto owners, and is 50% more than current entry level EVs - will plummet.
Kia is already selling an EV for $20k in their home market.
And if it happens, then the market will take care of that.
But if it hasn't?
If in 2030 a 1.0 litre Picanto would cost £13k petrol while the cheapest EV is £21k [which is still a six grand plummet in costs from today] then would you criminalise the 1.0 litre Picanto?
If its going to take until 2034 for EV affordability and production to scale up until the point that £13k EVs become available, then what should happen between 2030 and that point?
Nobody who is skint buys a new car anyway, surely? I'm quite well off, and I wouldn't buy a new car. I'm sure there will be second hand EVs available to suit every budget.
That's a rather ignorant attitude.
Actually yes plenty of people on a budget do buy a new car. If you have eg a £3k deposit then getting £10k in finance to make it £13k is a lot more affordable than getting a £24k deposit to get a £27k car like the MG4.
A new Kia Picanto costs less than a 3 year old used MG4. A new vehicle also comes with a full warranty etc too.
For the record my first new car I ever bought was a Kia Picanto, in 2005. It was what I could afford at the time and it was enough for my needs.
When you bought a new Kia Picanto in 2005, what was the sticker price?
This is my point. £13k - if that is the current price - is not the floor for cheap new cars. It is double what it used to be. And prices continue to rise. So whether there is an EV mandate or not we would see the base prices continue to lift.
Are you not familiar with the term "inflation"?
They started at £6k but went upto £9,515 in 2004. I'm pretty sure I bought my own for £7k (with a sticker price of £7,500) in 2005 which is well within that range.
That range of £6k - £9.5k that you linked to in 2004 is in real terms £10k - £16.3k today.
So a £13k car today is smack bang in the middle of that range you linked to, in real terms. Its absolutely not doubled in real terms.
There's been very little real terms uplift in cost in the past 18 years. The main bit that did occur was due to the supply chain shortages with chips etc due to Covid lockdowns, so if anything that could be reversed in coming years not expected to continue.
Picanto. Was £5,995 base when you bought it in 2005. Its now £13,665 base. Inflation would have £5,995 as being £9,851. But it isn't. Its 39% more expensive than that.
Why? Two reasons. Its illegal to sell cars with 2005 safety and emissions. So a lot of money has been spent developing cars in the few generations since and the same with engines. And the market has moved, so that the austerity base models have gone and what would have been mid range is now the base.
There's also the fact that in 2004 Kia was a cheap upstart which took a few years to gain a reputation for quality, which it now has.
The 2010 model was £8995 (as shown in your link) which in real terms is now £13,211.96
New Picantos are available from Carwow from £12,634
So there's been no uplift whatsoever in cost in real terms since 2010, despite the fact that Covid etc has seen an uplift in costs due to temporary supply chain shortages. Actually prices have fallen since 2010, since I was already rounding up to 13k and in real terms it was more than 13k in 2010.
Why have you arbitrarily chosen 2010 when you bought years before that?
I expect them to scrap the link to Manchester and instead say they’ll improve west to east links . The public have never really got behind HS2 and the Tories want some cash to spend on other projects that are more voter friendly .
Not sure if anyone saw Newsnight but the comparison between cost per mile of building track in the UK compared to other major country’s was shocking.
Jaw dropping in fact .
Is it caused by the huge cost of compensation in this country compared to elsewhere? Maybe it's because we're more densely populated than nearly every other European country, so whereas in places like Spain and France it's relatively easy to route a new train line through mostly empty areas, it's much more difficult to do that here. I was using the Spanish high speed trains in February/March this year and I was surprised to see how utterly empty a lot of the countryside was.
Also, on the subject of cancelling the line to M'chester, what some people don't seem to realise is that they've already spent a huge amount of money on some of the infrastructure for the B'ham to M'chester route, so if they cancel it all of that will be wasted, and also all the disruption they've already caused in that area will have been for nothing. I hope Starmer decides to go ahead with it when he becomes PM (which seems very likely to happen now).
The Times have a very good article on it today, if you can get behind the paywall.
I have a theory that the more political a project is (like Palace of Westminster Restoration and Renewal, which is absolutely political and could fall or burn down at any time), or HS2, which simply crosses far too many constituencies for it not to be, the worse its governance will be because politicians simply can't help making kneejerk uninformed decisions and that's death to big infrastructure.
I think we really need a dedicated national infrastructure council that is at one remove from day to day political machinations that can make these kinds of long term decisions, ideally creating a pipeline of projects so that expertise in planning and contracting is not lost from one project to the next. On Westminster I think the building is too expensive to renovate as a working Parliament. They should simply pay to preserve it as an important national monument and move the parliament elsewhere. Maybe put them in tunnels under Euston until they complete HS2 to Manchester and Leeds. That might concentrate minds s bit.
I would tour parliament around the country, spending 6 months in each place.
Send them to Barnsley. Then erect a perimeter wall around the town for the protection of everyone else.
There are tantalising rumours on TwitterX that we are alarmingly close to AGI - true Artificial Intelligence - or, that OpenAI have actually achieved it already
It’s bizarre that more people aren’t talking about this; if it is true it is one of the biggest news stories in human history
There are tantalising rumours on TwitterX that we have met aliens who can travel across space to visit us.
It's bizarre that more people aren't talking about this; if it is true* it is one of the biggest news stories in human history.
There are tantalising rumours on TwitterX that we are alarmingly close to AGI - true Artificial Intelligence - or, that OpenAI have actually achieved it already
It’s bizarre that more people aren’t talking about this; if it is true it is one of the biggest news stories in human history
What does that mean? edit- p.s. good article on woke HS2 by the way
There are tantalising rumours on TwitterX that we are alarmingly close to AGI - true Artificial Intelligence - or, that OpenAI have actually achieved it already
It’s bizarre that more people aren’t talking about this; if it is true it is one of the biggest news stories in human history
The market is deciding. The hysteria about the announcement last week was partly synthetic and partly misplaced. Just because people can sell something doesn’t mean they will.
Auto makers work on cycle times of years on products and platforms. They’d not be likely to chop and change at the govts whim.
But this can't be true. It was Keir Starmer forcing Nissan et al to ditch petrol. Sunak saved people from having to buy an electric car, it was in all the right newspapers and TV news shows. Thanks to Rishi making Long-Term Decisions for a Brighter Future, the dread threat of all EV by 2030 was removed.
Nissan must be mistaken .
Nissan don't make new cars at the £13k entry level range of the market like the Kia Picanto etc
By 2030 it seems entirely plausible that an electric juke will be as cheap as a petrol Juke, but it does not look likely that an electric Picanto would be available as cheap as a petrol Picanto...
On the contrary, it's very likely indeed. Nor in the next couple of years, but certainly by 2030. The cost of providing a 70kWh battery pack - which would be sufficient for 95% of Picanto owners, and is 50% more than current entry level EVs - will plummet.
Kia is already selling an EV for $20k in their home market.
And if it happens, then the market will take care of that.
But if it hasn't?
If in 2030 a 1.0 litre Picanto would cost £13k petrol while the cheapest EV is £21k [which is still a six grand plummet in costs from today] then would you criminalise the 1.0 litre Picanto?
If its going to take until 2034 for EV affordability and production to scale up until the point that £13k EVs become available, then what should happen between 2030 and that point?
Nobody who is skint buys a new car anyway, surely? I'm quite well off, and I wouldn't buy a new car. I'm sure there will be second hand EVs available to suit every budget.
That's a rather ignorant attitude.
Actually yes plenty of people on a budget do buy a new car. If you have eg a £3k deposit then getting £10k in finance to make it £13k is a lot more affordable than getting a £24k deposit to get a £27k car like the MG4.
A new Kia Picanto costs less than a 3 year old used MG4. A new vehicle also comes with a full warranty etc too.
For the record my first new car I ever bought was a Kia Picanto, in 2005. It was what I could afford at the time and it was enough for my needs.
When you bought a new Kia Picanto in 2005, what was the sticker price?
This is my point. £13k - if that is the current price - is not the floor for cheap new cars. It is double what it used to be. And prices continue to rise. So whether there is an EV mandate or not we would see the base prices continue to lift.
Are you not familiar with the term "inflation"?
They started at £6k but went upto £9,515 in 2004. I'm pretty sure I bought my own for £7k (with a sticker price of £7,500) in 2005 which is well within that range.
That range of £6k - £9.5k that you linked to in 2004 is in real terms £10k - £16.3k today.
So a £13k car today is smack bang in the middle of that range you linked to, in real terms. Its absolutely not doubled in real terms.
There's been very little real terms uplift in cost in the past 18 years. The main bit that did occur was due to the supply chain shortages with chips etc due to Covid lockdowns, so if anything that could be reversed in coming years not expected to continue.
Picanto. Was £5,995 base when you bought it in 2005. Its now £13,665 base. Inflation would have £5,995 as being £9,851. But it isn't. Its 39% more expensive than that.
Why? Two reasons. Its illegal to sell cars with 2005 safety and emissions. So a lot of money has been spent developing cars in the few generations since and the same with engines. And the market has moved, so that the austerity base models have gone and what would have been mid range is now the base.
There's also the fact that in 2004 Kia was a cheap upstart which took a few years to gain a reputation for quality, which it now has.
The 2010 model was £8995 (as shown in your link) which in real terms is now £13,211.96
New Picantos are available from Carwow from £12,634
So there's been no uplift whatsoever in cost in real terms since 2010, despite the fact that Covid etc has seen an uplift in costs due to temporary supply chain shortages. Actually prices have fallen since 2010, since I was already rounding up to 13k and in real terms it was more than 13k in 2010.
Why have you arbitrarily chosen 2010 when you bought years before that?
2005 was when I bought my first Kia. When I bought it, nobody had ever heard of the brand, it was a great unknown.
2010 was when I bought my current Kia that I still drive to this day. When I bought that, Kia had established their reputation rather than being considered cheap shit, and started to offer 7 year warranties which they were the first to do.
Anyone buying today isn't buying an unheard of brand with a 3 year warranty, they're buying a known brand with a longer warranty like I did in 2010.
I expect them to scrap the link to Manchester and instead say they’ll improve west to east links . The public have never really got behind HS2 and the Tories want some cash to spend on other projects that are more voter friendly .
Not sure if anyone saw Newsnight but the comparison between cost per mile of building track in the UK compared to other major country’s was shocking.
Jaw dropping in fact .
Is it caused by the huge cost of compensation in this country compared to elsewhere? Maybe it's because we're more densely populated than nearly every other European country, so whereas in places like Spain and France it's relatively easy to route a new train line through mostly empty areas, it's much more difficult to do that here. I was using the Spanish high speed trains in February/March this year and I was surprised to see how utterly empty a lot of the countryside was.
Also, on the subject of cancelling the line to M'chester, what some people don't seem to realise is that they've already spent a huge amount of money on some of the infrastructure for the B'ham to M'chester route, so if they cancel it all of that will be wasted, and also all the disruption they've already caused in that area will have been for nothing. I hope Starmer decides to go ahead with it when he becomes PM (which seems very likely to happen now).
The Times have a very good article on it today, if you can get behind the paywall.
I have a theory that the more political a project is (like Palace of Westminster Restoration and Renewal, which is absolutely political and could fall or burn down at any time), or HS2, which simply crosses far too many constituencies for it not to be, the worse its governance will be because politicians simply can't help making kneejerk uninformed decisions and that's death to big infrastructure.
I think we really need a dedicated national infrastructure council that is at one remove from day to day political machinations that can make these kinds of long term decisions, ideally creating a pipeline of projects so that expertise in planning and contracting is not lost from one project to the next. On Westminster I think the building is too expensive to renovate as a working Parliament. They should simply pay to preserve it as an important national monument and move the parliament elsewhere. Maybe put them in tunnels under Euston until they complete HS2 to Manchester and Leeds. That might concentrate minds s bit.
I would tour parliament around the country, spending 6 months in each place.
The population-weighted centre of the UK lies inside the triangle created by Birmingham, Leicester and Derby (specifically, Swadlincote). They should put parliament somewhere around there.
About private schools: it's much, much easier to just pick a private school than to move house.
Just because you can still see an avenue towards inequality or opportunity doesn't mean the avenue is as wide and accessible than the other one.
Good policy doesn't always have to be watertight
School policy is basically a canard in my opinion.
The thing in common that all of my Oxbridge pals had? Not wealth, education or class.
But a relatively stable family life and lots of books at home.
So private schools are a waste of money and nobody will object to banning them then...
If we banned things that are a waste of money there wouldn't be much of the economy left.
Clearly the argument for banning private schools isn't about their ineffectiveness. My response was absurd because the thing I was responding was absurd. Trying to imply that family class, wealth and education aren't main drivers is really quite silly.
And it's such a cakeist argument. You want this thing to be available because it IS beneficial for those who can get in, not because it's some abstract but useless freedom.
..the thing I was responding _to_ was absurd...
The original is entirely logically consistent:
'my response was absurd because the thing I was responding was absurd'
The market is deciding. The hysteria about the announcement last week was partly synthetic and partly misplaced. Just because people can sell something doesn’t mean they will.
Auto makers work on cycle times of years on products and platforms. They’d not be likely to chop and change at the govts whim.
But this can't be true. It was Keir Starmer forcing Nissan et al to ditch petrol. Sunak saved people from having to buy an electric car, it was in all the right newspapers and TV news shows. Thanks to Rishi making Long-Term Decisions for a Brighter Future, the dread threat of all EV by 2030 was removed.
Nissan must be mistaken .
Nissan don't make new cars at the £13k entry level range of the market like the Kia Picanto etc
By 2030 it seems entirely plausible that an electric juke will be as cheap as a petrol Juke, but it does not look likely that an electric Picanto would be available as cheap as a petrol Picanto...
On the contrary, it's very likely indeed. Nor in the next couple of years, but certainly by 2030. The cost of providing a 70kWh battery pack - which would be sufficient for 95% of Picanto owners, and is 50% more than current entry level EVs - will plummet.
Kia is already selling an EV for $20k in their home market.
And if it happens, then the market will take care of that.
But if it hasn't?
If in 2030 a 1.0 litre Picanto would cost £13k petrol while the cheapest EV is £21k [which is still a six grand plummet in costs from today] then would you criminalise the 1.0 litre Picanto?
If its going to take until 2034 for EV affordability and production to scale up until the point that £13k EVs become available, then what should happen between 2030 and that point?
Nobody who is skint buys a new car anyway, surely? I'm quite well off, and I wouldn't buy a new car. I'm sure there will be second hand EVs available to suit every budget.
That's a rather ignorant attitude.
Actually yes plenty of people on a budget do buy a new car. If you have eg a £3k deposit then getting £10k in finance to make it £13k is a lot more affordable than getting a £24k deposit to get a £27k car like the MG4.
A new Kia Picanto costs less than a 3 year old used MG4. A new vehicle also comes with a full warranty etc too.
For the record my first new car I ever bought was a Kia Picanto, in 2005. It was what I could afford at the time and it was enough for my needs.
Why is it ignorant? A high percentage of people in this country don't own a car, and the main reason for that is because they can't afford one, not because they don't want one.
Or they don't need one because of the excellent public transport available. Weirdly, these tend to be the areas of the UK with the highest GVA per capita.
I expect them to scrap the link to Manchester and instead say they’ll improve west to east links . The public have never really got behind HS2 and the Tories want some cash to spend on other projects that are more voter friendly .
Not sure if anyone saw Newsnight but the comparison between cost per mile of building track in the UK compared to other major country’s was shocking.
Jaw dropping in fact .
Is it caused by the huge cost of compensation in this country compared to elsewhere? Maybe it's because we're more densely populated than nearly every other European country, so whereas in places like Spain and France it's relatively easy to route a new train line through mostly empty areas, it's much more difficult to do that here. I was using the Spanish high speed trains in February/March this year and I was surprised to see how utterly empty a lot of the countryside was.
Also, on the subject of cancelling the line to M'chester, what some people don't seem to realise is that they've already spent a huge amount of money on some of the infrastructure for the B'ham to M'chester route, so if they cancel it all of that will be wasted, and also all the disruption they've already caused in that area will have been for nothing. I hope Starmer decides to go ahead with it when he becomes PM (which seems very likely to happen now).
The Times have a very good article on it today, if you can get behind the paywall.
I have a theory that the more political a project is (like Palace of Westminster Restoration and Renewal, which is absolutely political and could fall or burn down at any time), or HS2, which simply crosses far too many constituencies for it not to be, the worse its governance will be because politicians simply can't help making kneejerk uninformed decisions and that's death to big infrastructure.
I think we really need a dedicated national infrastructure council that is at one remove from day to day political machinations that can make these kinds of long term decisions, ideally creating a pipeline of projects so that expertise in planning and contracting is not lost from one project to the next. On Westminster I think the building is too expensive to renovate as a working Parliament. They should simply pay to preserve it as an important national monument and move the parliament elsewhere. Maybe put them in tunnels under Euston until they complete HS2 to Manchester and Leeds. That might concentrate minds s bit.
I would tour parliament around the country, spending 6 months in each place.
What on earth would be the point of that? The expense and trouble of shifting 650 MPs and vastly more staff all over the country every six months, with accommodation and the enormous security challenges involved would be absolutely absurd, before you even get to the practical benefit of having the seat of Government physically close to the legislature.
I started this on previous thread and think it needs some discussion.
The current odds for the 4 favourite teams (SA, IRE, FRA, NZ) are all 3-1 to 4-1. Probably a fair reflection with no value to be seen. England are then at 10/1, with Wales 22/1. England looks about right but not in comparison to Wales - not because of any perception in strength - but because of the run in of both teams. England have not qualified yet and still need to beat Samoa to do so (not a foregone conclusion). England will then probably play Fiji (who beat them recently) while Wales probably play Argentina (who have not impressed). After that Wales and England have a similar route through SF & F. My point is that the odds are overpriced for England in comparison to Wales - there is definitely value in the Welsh odds - not in England.
You point out that Fiji have beaten England recently in a warm up whilst England were doing fitness cycles to prep for the WC but not that Wales could be considered to have been lucky to beat Fiji due to a lot of terrible reffing decisions in the match.
Your big win was v Australia who lost in the recent Rugby Championship at home to Argentina who England managed to make mugs out of. Argentina also only lost by one point to SA in the same Rugby Championship.
I think Wales are looking good but maybe not been tested as hard as you think and England have been tested harder than you think so the odds could be correct.
I accept your points regarding recent playing record - but this does not get away from fact that England have two tough matches to play compared to Wales one to reach SF (Wales have already qualified and can lose to Georgia without changing anything).
Surely by your calculations though Samoa is not a difficult game, Samoa lost to Argentina who apparently haven’t impressed, and according to a lot of commentary after England beat them they are crap, so England have to play a team that is worse than and lost to a team that hasn’t impressed and who were given a beating by England.
I'd say Wales are good value compared to England. But I think it is more a case of England being overvalued than Wales being undervalued.
I'd give the chances roughly as follows:
Fr: 30% Ire: 24% NZ: 18% SAF: 16% (I am much more negative on SAF since I saw their lack of specialist hookers and flyhalves) Wal: 6% Eng: 4% Fiji: 2% Arg: 1% Anyone else: < 1%
I take the point that the big four have all got to play each other so only two of those will get to the semis. But at the moment I'd say the chances of one of the top four NOT winning it are only about one in ten.
Possibly the most most reasonable and impartial debate on the US government budget shutdown issue, from Krystal and Saagar at Breaking Points. https://youtube.com/watch?v=MOFS3PD2RWM
TL:DR it’s a massive bleeping mess, which has been going on for ages and was always going to come to a head at some point.
The market is deciding. The hysteria about the announcement last week was partly synthetic and partly misplaced. Just because people can sell something doesn’t mean they will.
Auto makers work on cycle times of years on products and platforms. They’d not be likely to chop and change at the govts whim.
But this can't be true. It was Keir Starmer forcing Nissan et al to ditch petrol. Sunak saved people from having to buy an electric car, it was in all the right newspapers and TV news shows. Thanks to Rishi making Long-Term Decisions for a Brighter Future, the dread threat of all EV by 2030 was removed.
Nissan must be mistaken .
Nissan don't make new cars at the £13k entry level range of the market like the Kia Picanto etc
By 2030 it seems entirely plausible that an electric juke will be as cheap as a petrol Juke, but it does not look likely that an electric Picanto would be available as cheap as a petrol Picanto.
So again, if in 6 years time if you could get a cheap petrol vehicle like the Picanto for £13k in real terms, but if the cheapest electric is in real terms £21k (currently £27k is cheapest) then should the Picanto be outlawed and people who want to buy it be forced to pay eight grand more?
We need to continue with what the market has been doing from Tesla onwards which is to start at the top of the market and work down with electrification, not the other way around. If in 2030 the only petrol vehicles the market still offers is 1.0 litre runarounds like the Picanto simply because electrification of them isn't affordably ready yet, then what's the harm in that?
We shouldn't really go by capital price but by the cost paid per month by the purchaser. Given that only a very small fraction of people buying new cars pay cash on the full price for them, and 80-80% get PCP (we can debate the wisdom of going the PCP route, but for this, we simply recognise that such is the default route to new car purchase at the moment and therefore what the market will be following), we need to look at the main monthly expenditure of the purchaser.
Which is PCP monthly payment plus petrol or electricity costs.
Petrol comes in at c. £1.50 per litre at the moment.
The majority of those buying electric cars will be recharging at home overnight (70%+: there's a need to address the needs of those who cannot do this, but, again, the overall market is driven by those who can do this. And the core need would be to fill in the gap for those who can't). At the moment, an EV tariff from Octopus gives £0.075 per kWh overnight.
The Picanto does c. 13 miles per litre. Assuming the default given by Kia on their finance calculator of 10,000 miles per year, that costs £1,155 per year in petrol, or £96.30 per month. The finance calculator for the Picanto gives (at 10% down payment of £1,350) a cost of £206.58 per month on PCP. This leads to a cost on PCP plus fuel of £302.88 per month to the purchaser.
The Ceed comes in at £21k, so the finance for a putative £21k Kia EV can be looked at on the same site (which helps) and comes out at £342.02 per month (using the same £1350 deposit, which is under 10% this time and probably incurs a slightly higher interest rate, but we need it to be comparable for the purchaser). If the EV has an efficiency similar to the MGZ4 (3.8 miles/kWh), it would cost £197.37 per year in electricity, or £16.45 per month). Cost is then £358.37 per month to the purchaser for PCP plus electricity.
The difference is therefore 18% more expensive to the purchaser for the 21k EV over the 13k ICE rather than the 61% of the sticker price. You only need the price to fall to about £18k to be the same affordability as a £13k ICE to the purchaser, to all intents and purposes.
A large portion of people buying cheap small cars are parking on the street not off road. I certainly was.
Even based on your average that 30% will not be recharging at home overnight that needs to be included in the maths, but I strongly suspect that 30% is disproportionately those buying smaller, cheaper vehicles.
Compare like-for-like by comparing recharging rates at commercial charging stations and redo your maths.
Want to fix electric for everyone? Addressing the charging issue is the biggest issue to tackle, not quibble over a year or two for the transition to electric.
I expect them to scrap the link to Manchester and instead say they’ll improve west to east links . The public have never really got behind HS2 and the Tories want some cash to spend on other projects that are more voter friendly .
Not sure if anyone saw Newsnight but the comparison between cost per mile of building track in the UK compared to other major country’s was shocking.
Jaw dropping in fact .
Is it caused by the huge cost of compensation in this country compared to elsewhere? Maybe it's because we're more densely populated than nearly every other European country, so whereas in places like Spain and France it's relatively easy to route a new train line through mostly empty areas, it's much more difficult to do that here. I was using the Spanish high speed trains in February/March this year and I was surprised to see how utterly empty a lot of the countryside was.
Also, on the subject of cancelling the line to M'chester, what some people don't seem to realise is that they've already spent a huge amount of money on some of the infrastructure for the B'ham to M'chester route, so if they cancel it all of that will be wasted, and also all the disruption they've already caused in that area will have been for nothing. I hope Starmer decides to go ahead with it when he becomes PM (which seems very likely to happen now).
The Times have a very good article on it today, if you can get behind the paywall.
I have a theory that the more political a project is (like Palace of Westminster Restoration and Renewal, which is absolutely political and could fall or burn down at any time), or HS2, which simply crosses far too many constituencies for it not to be, the worse its governance will be because politicians simply can't help making kneejerk uninformed decisions and that's death to big infrastructure.
I think we really need a dedicated national infrastructure council that is at one remove from day to day political machinations that can make these kinds of long term decisions, ideally creating a pipeline of projects so that expertise in planning and contracting is not lost from one project to the next. On Westminster I think the building is too expensive to renovate as a working Parliament. They should simply pay to preserve it as an important national monument and move the parliament elsewhere. Maybe put them in tunnels under Euston until they complete HS2 to Manchester and Leeds. That might concentrate minds s bit.
I would tour parliament around the country, spending 6 months in each place.
The population-weighted centre of the UK lies inside the triangle created by Birmingham, Leicester and Derby (specifically, Swadlincote). They should put parliament somewhere around there.
But if you move parliament and all the hangers on, then your population centre moves too - and then you have to move it again to the new population centre and then...
I expect them to scrap the link to Manchester and instead say they’ll improve west to east links . The public have never really got behind HS2 and the Tories want some cash to spend on other projects that are more voter friendly .
Not sure if anyone saw Newsnight but the comparison between cost per mile of building track in the UK compared to other major country’s was shocking.
Jaw dropping in fact .
Is it caused by the huge cost of compensation in this country compared to elsewhere? Maybe it's because we're more densely populated than nearly every other European country, so whereas in places like Spain and France it's relatively easy to route a new train line through mostly empty areas, it's much more difficult to do that here. I was using the Spanish high speed trains in February/March this year and I was surprised to see how utterly empty a lot of the countryside was.
Also, on the subject of cancelling the line to M'chester, what some people don't seem to realise is that they've already spent a huge amount of money on some of the infrastructure for the B'ham to M'chester route, so if they cancel it all of that will be wasted, and also all the disruption they've already caused in that area will have been for nothing. I hope Starmer decides to go ahead with it when he becomes PM (which seems very likely to happen now).
The Times have a very good article on it today, if you can get behind the paywall.
I have a theory that the more political a project is (like Palace of Westminster Restoration and Renewal, which is absolutely political and could fall or burn down at any time), or HS2, which simply crosses far too many constituencies for it not to be, the worse its governance will be because politicians simply can't help making kneejerk uninformed decisions and that's death to big infrastructure.
I think we really need a dedicated national infrastructure council that is at one remove from day to day political machinations that can make these kinds of long term decisions, ideally creating a pipeline of projects so that expertise in planning and contracting is not lost from one project to the next. On Westminster I think the building is too expensive to renovate as a working Parliament. They should simply pay to preserve it as an important national monument and move the parliament elsewhere. Maybe put them in tunnels under Euston until they complete HS2 to Manchester and Leeds. That might concentrate minds s bit.
I would tour parliament around the country, spending 6 months in each place.
There are tantalising rumours on TwitterX that we are alarmingly close to AGI - true Artificial Intelligence - or, that OpenAI have actually achieved it already
It’s bizarre that more people aren’t talking about this; if it is true it is one of the biggest news stories in human history
The market is deciding. The hysteria about the announcement last week was partly synthetic and partly misplaced. Just because people can sell something doesn’t mean they will.
Auto makers work on cycle times of years on products and platforms. They’d not be likely to chop and change at the govts whim.
But this can't be true. It was Keir Starmer forcing Nissan et al to ditch petrol. Sunak saved people from having to buy an electric car, it was in all the right newspapers and TV news shows. Thanks to Rishi making Long-Term Decisions for a Brighter Future, the dread threat of all EV by 2030 was removed.
Nissan must be mistaken .
Nissan don't make new cars at the £13k entry level range of the market like the Kia Picanto etc
By 2030 it seems entirely plausible that an electric juke will be as cheap as a petrol Juke, but it does not look likely that an electric Picanto would be available as cheap as a petrol Picanto...
On the contrary, it's very likely indeed. Nor in the next couple of years, but certainly by 2030. The cost of providing a 70kWh battery pack - which would be sufficient for 95% of Picanto owners, and is 50% more than current entry level EVs - will plummet.
Kia is already selling an EV for $20k in their home market.
And if it happens, then the market will take care of that.
But if it hasn't?
If in 2030 a 1.0 litre Picanto would cost £13k petrol while the cheapest EV is £21k [which is still a six grand plummet in costs from today] then would you criminalise the 1.0 litre Picanto?
If its going to take until 2034 for EV affordability and production to scale up until the point that £13k EVs become available, then what should happen between 2030 and that point?
Nobody who is skint buys a new car anyway, surely? I'm quite well off, and I wouldn't buy a new car. I'm sure there will be second hand EVs available to suit every budget.
That's a rather ignorant attitude.
Actually yes plenty of people on a budget do buy a new car. If you have eg a £3k deposit then getting £10k in finance to make it £13k is a lot more affordable than getting a £24k deposit to get a £27k car like the MG4.
A new Kia Picanto costs less than a 3 year old used MG4. A new vehicle also comes with a full warranty etc too.
For the record my first new car I ever bought was a Kia Picanto, in 2005. It was what I could afford at the time and it was enough for my needs.
When you bought a new Kia Picanto in 2005, what was the sticker price?
This is my point. £13k - if that is the current price - is not the floor for cheap new cars. It is double what it used to be. And prices continue to rise. So whether there is an EV mandate or not we would see the base prices continue to lift.
Are you not familiar with the term "inflation"?
They started at £6k but went upto £9,515 in 2004. I'm pretty sure I bought my own for £7k (with a sticker price of £7,500) in 2005 which is well within that range.
That range of £6k - £9.5k that you linked to in 2004 is in real terms £10k - £16.3k today.
So a £13k car today is smack bang in the middle of that range you linked to, in real terms. Its absolutely not doubled in real terms.
There's been very little real terms uplift in cost in the past 18 years. The main bit that did occur was due to the supply chain shortages with chips etc due to Covid lockdowns, so if anything that could be reversed in coming years not expected to continue.
Picanto. Was £5,995 base when you bought it in 2005. Its now £13,665 base. Inflation would have £5,995 as being £9,851. But it isn't. Its 39% more expensive than that.
Why? Two reasons. Its illegal to sell cars with 2005 safety and emissions. So a lot of money has been spent developing cars in the few generations since and the same with engines. And the market has moved, so that the austerity base models have gone and what would have been mid range is now the base.
There's also the fact that in 2004 Kia was a cheap upstart which took a few years to gain a reputation for quality, which it now has.
The 2010 model was £8995 (as shown in your link) which in real terms is now £13,211.96
New Picantos are available from Carwow from £12,634
So there's been no uplift whatsoever in cost in real terms since 2010, despite the fact that Covid etc has seen an uplift in costs due to temporary supply chain shortages. Actually prices have fallen since 2010, since I was already rounding up to 13k and in real terms it was more than 13k in 2010.
Aspirational Johnny and Jenny Tory Punter would much prefer a used 2016 Evoque or X3, or a new Ford Kuga on a personal lease plan than spend £13k on a tiny Korean motor that their neighbours will laugh at.
The market is deciding. The hysteria about the announcement last week was partly synthetic and partly misplaced. Just because people can sell something doesn’t mean they will.
Auto makers work on cycle times of years on products and platforms. They’d not be likely to chop and change at the govts whim.
But this can't be true. It was Keir Starmer forcing Nissan et al to ditch petrol. Sunak saved people from having to buy an electric car, it was in all the right newspapers and TV news shows. Thanks to Rishi making Long-Term Decisions for a Brighter Future, the dread threat of all EV by 2030 was removed.
Nissan must be mistaken .
Nissan don't make new cars at the £13k entry level range of the market like the Kia Picanto etc
By 2030 it seems entirely plausible that an electric juke will be as cheap as a petrol Juke, but it does not look likely that an electric Picanto would be available as cheap as a petrol Picanto.
So again, if in 6 years time if you could get a cheap petrol vehicle like the Picanto for £13k in real terms, but if the cheapest electric is in real terms £21k (currently £27k is cheapest) then should the Picanto be outlawed and people who want to buy it be forced to pay eight grand more?
We need to continue with what the market has been doing from Tesla onwards which is to start at the top of the market and work down with electrification, not the other way around. If in 2030 the only petrol vehicles the market still offers is 1.0 litre runarounds like the Picanto simply because electrification of them isn't affordably ready yet, then what's the harm in that?
We shouldn't really go by capital price but by the cost paid per month by the purchaser. Given that only a very small fraction of people buying new cars pay cash on the full price for them, and 80-80% get PCP (we can debate the wisdom of going the PCP route, but for this, we simply recognise that such is the default route to new car purchase at the moment and therefore what the market will be following), we need to look at the main monthly expenditure of the purchaser.
Which is PCP monthly payment plus petrol or electricity costs.
Petrol comes in at c. £1.50 per litre at the moment.
The majority of those buying electric cars will be recharging at home overnight (70%+: there's a need to address the needs of those who cannot do this, but, again, the overall market is driven by those who can do this. And the core need would be to fill in the gap for those who can't). At the moment, an EV tariff from Octopus gives £0.075 per kWh overnight.
The Picanto does c. 13 miles per litre. Assuming the default given by Kia on their finance calculator of 10,000 miles per year, that costs £1,155 per year in petrol, or £96.30 per month. The finance calculator for the Picanto gives (at 10% down payment of £1,350) a cost of £206.58 per month on PCP. This leads to a cost on PCP plus fuel of £302.88 per month to the purchaser.
The Ceed comes in at £21k, so the finance for a putative £21k Kia EV can be looked at on the same site (which helps) and comes out at £342.02 per month (using the same £1350 deposit, which is under 10% this time and probably incurs a slightly higher interest rate, but we need it to be comparable for the purchaser). If the EV has an efficiency similar to the MGZ4 (3.8 miles/kWh), it would cost £197.37 per year in electricity, or £16.45 per month). Cost is then £358.37 per month to the purchaser for PCP plus electricity.
The difference is therefore 18% more expensive to the purchaser for the 21k EV over the 13k ICE rather than the 61% of the sticker price. You only need the price to fall to about £18k to be the same affordability as a £13k ICE to the purchaser, to all intents and purposes.
A large portion of people buying cheap small cars are parking on the street not off road. I certainly was.
Even based on your average that 30% will not be recharging at home overnight that needs to be included in the maths, but I strongly suspect that 30% is disproportionately those buying smaller, cheaper vehicles.
Compare like-for-like by comparing recharging rates at commercial charging stations and redo your maths.
Want to fix electric for everyone? Addressing the charging issue is the biggest issue to tackle, not quibble over a year or two for the transition to electric.
Perhaps we should ban on-road parking, like the Japanese?
Possibly the most most reasonable and impartial debate on the US government budget shutdown issue, from Krystal and Saagar at Breaking Points. https://youtube.com/watch?v=MOFS3PD2RWM
TL:DR it’s a massive bleeping mess, which has been going on for ages and was always going to come to a head at some point.
The US seems to have one of the most crazy and complicated forms of government anywhere. It is remarkable that they have not imploded beforehand.
The market is deciding. The hysteria about the announcement last week was partly synthetic and partly misplaced. Just because people can sell something doesn’t mean they will.
Auto makers work on cycle times of years on products and platforms. They’d not be likely to chop and change at the govts whim.
But this can't be true. It was Keir Starmer forcing Nissan et al to ditch petrol. Sunak saved people from having to buy an electric car, it was in all the right newspapers and TV news shows. Thanks to Rishi making Long-Term Decisions for a Brighter Future, the dread threat of all EV by 2030 was removed.
Nissan must be mistaken .
Nissan don't make new cars at the £13k entry level range of the market like the Kia Picanto etc
By 2030 it seems entirely plausible that an electric juke will be as cheap as a petrol Juke, but it does not look likely that an electric Picanto would be available as cheap as a petrol Picanto.
So again, if in 6 years time if you could get a cheap petrol vehicle like the Picanto for £13k in real terms, but if the cheapest electric is in real terms £21k (currently £27k is cheapest) then should the Picanto be outlawed and people who want to buy it be forced to pay eight grand more?
We need to continue with what the market has been doing from Tesla onwards which is to start at the top of the market and work down with electrification, not the other way around. If in 2030 the only petrol vehicles the market still offers is 1.0 litre runarounds like the Picanto simply because electrification of them isn't affordably ready yet, then what's the harm in that?
We shouldn't really go by capital price but by the cost paid per month by the purchaser. Given that only a very small fraction of people buying new cars pay cash on the full price for them, and 80-80% get PCP (we can debate the wisdom of going the PCP route, but for this, we simply recognise that such is the default route to new car purchase at the moment and therefore what the market will be following), we need to look at the main monthly expenditure of the purchaser.
Which is PCP monthly payment plus petrol or electricity costs.
Petrol comes in at c. £1.50 per litre at the moment.
The majority of those buying electric cars will be recharging at home overnight (70%+: there's a need to address the needs of those who cannot do this, but, again, the overall market is driven by those who can do this. And the core need would be to fill in the gap for those who can't). At the moment, an EV tariff from Octopus gives £0.075 per kWh overnight.
The Picanto does c. 13 miles per litre. Assuming the default given by Kia on their finance calculator of 10,000 miles per year, that costs £1,155 per year in petrol, or £96.30 per month. The finance calculator for the Picanto gives (at 10% down payment of £1,350) a cost of £206.58 per month on PCP. This leads to a cost on PCP plus fuel of £302.88 per month to the purchaser.
The Ceed comes in at £21k, so the finance for a putative £21k Kia EV can be looked at on the same site (which helps) and comes out at £342.02 per month (using the same £1350 deposit, which is under 10% this time and probably incurs a slightly higher interest rate, but we need it to be comparable for the purchaser). If the EV has an efficiency similar to the MGZ4 (3.8 miles/kWh), it would cost £197.37 per year in electricity, or £16.45 per month). Cost is then £358.37 per month to the purchaser for PCP plus electricity.
The difference is therefore 18% more expensive to the purchaser for the 21k EV over the 13k ICE rather than the 61% of the sticker price. You only need the price to fall to about £18k to be the same affordability as a £13k ICE to the purchaser, to all intents and purposes.
A large portion of people buying cheap small cars are parking on the street not off road. I certainly was.
Even based on your average that 30% will not be recharging at home overnight that needs to be included in the maths, but I strongly suspect that 30% is disproportionately those buying smaller, cheaper vehicles.
Compare like-for-like by comparing recharging rates at commercial charging stations and redo your maths.
Want to fix electric for everyone? Addressing the charging issue is the biggest issue to tackle, not quibble over a year or two for the transition to electric.
Perhaps we should ban on-road parking, like the Japanese?
Would free up space equivalent to 16 motorways.
I've previously said that 2 off road parking spaces per house and appropriate parking facilities for businesses should be standard for new builds. How you convert the old properties is a bigger problem, but absolutely we should be doing all we can to encourage off-road parking.
Remarkably some Councils deliberately do the polar opposite. Nottingham for instance taxes firms that provide off road parking to their employees. Total insanity - if their employees park on the road, no tax paid. 🤦♂️
The market is deciding. The hysteria about the announcement last week was partly synthetic and partly misplaced. Just because people can sell something doesn’t mean they will.
Auto makers work on cycle times of years on products and platforms. They’d not be likely to chop and change at the govts whim.
But this can't be true. It was Keir Starmer forcing Nissan et al to ditch petrol. Sunak saved people from having to buy an electric car, it was in all the right newspapers and TV news shows. Thanks to Rishi making Long-Term Decisions for a Brighter Future, the dread threat of all EV by 2030 was removed.
Nissan must be mistaken .
Nissan don't make new cars at the £13k entry level range of the market like the Kia Picanto etc
By 2030 it seems entirely plausible that an electric juke will be as cheap as a petrol Juke, but it does not look likely that an electric Picanto would be available as cheap as a petrol Picanto...
On the contrary, it's very likely indeed. Nor in the next couple of years, but certainly by 2030. The cost of providing a 70kWh battery pack - which would be sufficient for 95% of Picanto owners, and is 50% more than current entry level EVs - will plummet.
Kia is already selling an EV for $20k in their home market.
And if it happens, then the market will take care of that.
But if it hasn't?
If in 2030 a 1.0 litre Picanto would cost £13k petrol while the cheapest EV is £21k [which is still a six grand plummet in costs from today] then would you criminalise the 1.0 litre Picanto?
If its going to take until 2034 for EV affordability and production to scale up until the point that £13k EVs become available, then what should happen between 2030 and that point?
Nobody who is skint buys a new car anyway, surely? I'm quite well off, and I wouldn't buy a new car. I'm sure there will be second hand EVs available to suit every budget.
That's a rather ignorant attitude.
Actually yes plenty of people on a budget do buy a new car. If you have eg a £3k deposit then getting £10k in finance to make it £13k is a lot more affordable than getting a £24k deposit to get a £27k car like the MG4.
A new Kia Picanto costs less than a 3 year old used MG4. A new vehicle also comes with a full warranty etc too.
For the record my first new car I ever bought was a Kia Picanto, in 2005. It was what I could afford at the time and it was enough for my needs.
When you bought a new Kia Picanto in 2005, what was the sticker price?
This is my point. £13k - if that is the current price - is not the floor for cheap new cars. It is double what it used to be. And prices continue to rise. So whether there is an EV mandate or not we would see the base prices continue to lift.
Are you not familiar with the term "inflation"?
They started at £6k but went upto £9,515 in 2004. I'm pretty sure I bought my own for £7k (with a sticker price of £7,500) in 2005 which is well within that range.
That range of £6k - £9.5k that you linked to in 2004 is in real terms £10k - £16.3k today.
So a £13k car today is smack bang in the middle of that range you linked to, in real terms. Its absolutely not doubled in real terms.
There's been very little real terms uplift in cost in the past 18 years. The main bit that did occur was due to the supply chain shortages with chips etc due to Covid lockdowns, so if anything that could be reversed in coming years not expected to continue.
Picanto. Was £5,995 base when you bought it in 2005. Its now £13,665 base. Inflation would have £5,995 as being £9,851. But it isn't. Its 39% more expensive than that.
Why? Two reasons. Its illegal to sell cars with 2005 safety and emissions. So a lot of money has been spent developing cars in the few generations since and the same with engines. And the market has moved, so that the austerity base models have gone and what would have been mid range is now the base.
There's also the fact that in 2004 Kia was a cheap upstart which took a few years to gain a reputation for quality, which it now has.
The 2010 model was £8995 (as shown in your link) which in real terms is now £13,211.96
New Picantos are available from Carwow from £12,634
So there's been no uplift whatsoever in cost in real terms since 2010, despite the fact that Covid etc has seen an uplift in costs due to temporary supply chain shortages. Actually prices have fallen since 2010, since I was already rounding up to 13k and in real terms it was more than 13k in 2010.
Aspirational Johnny and Jenny Tory Punter would much prefer a used 2016 Evoque or X3, or a new Ford Kuga on a personal lease plan than spend £13k on a tiny Korean motor that their neighbours will laugh at.
And there is Good News! The aspirational brands have a neat trick. Jack up the price. Offer brilliant finance deals. Get a competitive monthly price. Get Johnny traded up from a Kia because why drive a Kia Cee'd when you can afford* a BMW 1-series?
Anyway, its an academic debate. This is already in play. The industry is switching back to electric after a century tarting around with internal combustion. And there is nothing the Tories can do to stop the terrible creep of modernity.
It will be interesting to see if this gets any pick up internationally.
That might be a valid question but Braverman is not the one to be discussing it as she’s a psychopath without a shred of humanity . She wants to stop all asylum seekers from entering the UK as her simplistic argument re safe countries makes clear. The UK will never have to accept any asylum seekers from mainland Europe and the problem will just be dumped on them.
Then to go after gay people and women shows how clueless she is . And then her apparent comments about modern slavery when the IMB makes it easier for traffickers as those trafficked lose any government support .
If this kind of thing is intended to consolidate the Tories' base, it's interesting to ponder just how narrow people like Braverman think that base is.
The market is deciding. The hysteria about the announcement last week was partly synthetic and partly misplaced. Just because people can sell something doesn’t mean they will.
Auto makers work on cycle times of years on products and platforms. They’d not be likely to chop and change at the govts whim.
But this can't be true. It was Keir Starmer forcing Nissan et al to ditch petrol. Sunak saved people from having to buy an electric car, it was in all the right newspapers and TV news shows. Thanks to Rishi making Long-Term Decisions for a Brighter Future, the dread threat of all EV by 2030 was removed.
Nissan must be mistaken .
Nissan don't make new cars at the £13k entry level range of the market like the Kia Picanto etc
By 2030 it seems entirely plausible that an electric juke will be as cheap as a petrol Juke, but it does not look likely that an electric Picanto would be available as cheap as a petrol Picanto...
On the contrary, it's very likely indeed. Nor in the next couple of years, but certainly by 2030. The cost of providing a 70kWh battery pack - which would be sufficient for 95% of Picanto owners, and is 50% more than current entry level EVs - will plummet.
Kia is already selling an EV for $20k in their home market.
And if it happens, then the market will take care of that.
But if it hasn't?
If in 2030 a 1.0 litre Picanto would cost £13k petrol while the cheapest EV is £21k [which is still a six grand plummet in costs from today] then would you criminalise the 1.0 litre Picanto?
If its going to take until 2034 for EV affordability and production to scale up until the point that £13k EVs become available, then what should happen between 2030 and that point?
Nobody who is skint buys a new car anyway, surely? I'm quite well off, and I wouldn't buy a new car. I'm sure there will be second hand EVs available to suit every budget.
That's a rather ignorant attitude.
Actually yes plenty of people on a budget do buy a new car. If you have eg a £3k deposit then getting £10k in finance to make it £13k is a lot more affordable than getting a £24k deposit to get a £27k car like the MG4.
A new Kia Picanto costs less than a 3 year old used MG4. A new vehicle also comes with a full warranty etc too.
For the record my first new car I ever bought was a Kia Picanto, in 2005. It was what I could afford at the time and it was enough for my needs.
When you bought a new Kia Picanto in 2005, what was the sticker price?
This is my point. £13k - if that is the current price - is not the floor for cheap new cars. It is double what it used to be. And prices continue to rise. So whether there is an EV mandate or not we would see the base prices continue to lift.
Are you not familiar with the term "inflation"?
They started at £6k but went upto £9,515 in 2004. I'm pretty sure I bought my own for £7k (with a sticker price of £7,500) in 2005 which is well within that range.
That range of £6k - £9.5k that you linked to in 2004 is in real terms £10k - £16.3k today.
So a £13k car today is smack bang in the middle of that range you linked to, in real terms. Its absolutely not doubled in real terms.
There's been very little real terms uplift in cost in the past 18 years. The main bit that did occur was due to the supply chain shortages with chips etc due to Covid lockdowns, so if anything that could be reversed in coming years not expected to continue.
Picanto. Was £5,995 base when you bought it in 2005. Its now £13,665 base. Inflation would have £5,995 as being £9,851. But it isn't. Its 39% more expensive than that.
Why? Two reasons. Its illegal to sell cars with 2005 safety and emissions. So a lot of money has been spent developing cars in the few generations since and the same with engines. And the market has moved, so that the austerity base models have gone and what would have been mid range is now the base.
There's also the fact that in 2004 Kia was a cheap upstart which took a few years to gain a reputation for quality, which it now has.
The 2010 model was £8995 (as shown in your link) which in real terms is now £13,211.96
New Picantos are available from Carwow from £12,634
So there's been no uplift whatsoever in cost in real terms since 2010, despite the fact that Covid etc has seen an uplift in costs due to temporary supply chain shortages. Actually prices have fallen since 2010, since I was already rounding up to 13k and in real terms it was more than 13k in 2010.
Aspirational Johnny and Jenny Tory Punter would much prefer a used 2016 Evoque or X3, or a new Ford Kuga on a personal lease plan than spend £13k on a tiny Korean motor that their neighbours will laugh at.
And there is Good News! The aspirational brands have a neat trick. Jack up the price. Offer brilliant finance deals. Get a competitive monthly price. Get Johnny traded up from a Kia because why drive a Kia Cee'd when you can afford* a BMW 1-series?
Anyway, its an academic debate. This is already in play. The industry is switching back to electric after a century tarting around with internal combustion. And there is nothing the Tories can do to stop the terrible creep of modernity.
The industry is and that is good news.
Whether the industry takes six or twelve years to finish that transition is moot.
What's not moot is providing charging facilities to those without off road parking. That is where all political discussion should be aimed at, anything else is just nonsense.
The market is deciding. The hysteria about the announcement last week was partly synthetic and partly misplaced. Just because people can sell something doesn’t mean they will.
Auto makers work on cycle times of years on products and platforms. They’d not be likely to chop and change at the govts whim.
But this can't be true. It was Keir Starmer forcing Nissan et al to ditch petrol. Sunak saved people from having to buy an electric car, it was in all the right newspapers and TV news shows. Thanks to Rishi making Long-Term Decisions for a Brighter Future, the dread threat of all EV by 2030 was removed.
Nissan must be mistaken .
Nissan don't make new cars at the £13k entry level range of the market like the Kia Picanto etc
By 2030 it seems entirely plausible that an electric juke will be as cheap as a petrol Juke, but it does not look likely that an electric Picanto would be available as cheap as a petrol Picanto.
So again, if in 6 years time if you could get a cheap petrol vehicle like the Picanto for £13k in real terms, but if the cheapest electric is in real terms £21k (currently £27k is cheapest) then should the Picanto be outlawed and people who want to buy it be forced to pay eight grand more?
We need to continue with what the market has been doing from Tesla onwards which is to start at the top of the market and work down with electrification, not the other way around. If in 2030 the only petrol vehicles the market still offers is 1.0 litre runarounds like the Picanto simply because electrification of them isn't affordably ready yet, then what's the harm in that?
We shouldn't really go by capital price but by the cost paid per month by the purchaser. Given that only a very small fraction of people buying new cars pay cash on the full price for them, and 80-80% get PCP (we can debate the wisdom of going the PCP route, but for this, we simply recognise that such is the default route to new car purchase at the moment and therefore what the market will be following), we need to look at the main monthly expenditure of the purchaser.
Which is PCP monthly payment plus petrol or electricity costs.
Petrol comes in at c. £1.50 per litre at the moment.
The majority of those buying electric cars will be recharging at home overnight (70%+: there's a need to address the needs of those who cannot do this, but, again, the overall market is driven by those who can do this. And the core need would be to fill in the gap for those who can't). At the moment, an EV tariff from Octopus gives £0.075 per kWh overnight.
The Picanto does c. 13 miles per litre. Assuming the default given by Kia on their finance calculator of 10,000 miles per year, that costs £1,155 per year in petrol, or £96.30 per month. The finance calculator for the Picanto gives (at 10% down payment of £1,350) a cost of £206.58 per month on PCP. This leads to a cost on PCP plus fuel of £302.88 per month to the purchaser.
The Ceed comes in at £21k, so the finance for a putative £21k Kia EV can be looked at on the same site (which helps) and comes out at £342.02 per month (using the same £1350 deposit, which is under 10% this time and probably incurs a slightly higher interest rate, but we need it to be comparable for the purchaser). If the EV has an efficiency similar to the MGZ4 (3.8 miles/kWh), it would cost £197.37 per year in electricity, or £16.45 per month). Cost is then £358.37 per month to the purchaser for PCP plus electricity.
The difference is therefore 18% more expensive to the purchaser for the 21k EV over the 13k ICE rather than the 61% of the sticker price. You only need the price to fall to about £18k to be the same affordability as a £13k ICE to the purchaser, to all intents and purposes.
A large portion of people buying cheap small cars are parking on the street not off road. I certainly was.
Even based on your average that 30% will not be recharging at home overnight that needs to be included in the maths, but I strongly suspect that 30% is disproportionately those buying smaller, cheaper vehicles.
Compare like-for-like by comparing recharging rates at commercial charging stations and redo your maths.
Want to fix electric for everyone? Addressing the charging issue is the biggest issue to tackle, not quibble over a year or two for the transition to electric.
Perhaps we should ban on-road parking, like the Japanese?
Would free up space equivalent to 16 motorways.
My Spanish Father-in-Law doesn't understand why the UK doesn't build underground carparks as all the towns in Spain seem to have. Simples - because we are incompetent and corrupt. And they are not.
Hang on - I hear right wing voices say - the Spanish ARE corrupt. And that is true. And yet they can stick underground car parks into their towns and we can't afford to...
The market is deciding. The hysteria about the announcement last week was partly synthetic and partly misplaced. Just because people can sell something doesn’t mean they will.
Auto makers work on cycle times of years on products and platforms. They’d not be likely to chop and change at the govts whim.
But this can't be true. It was Keir Starmer forcing Nissan et al to ditch petrol. Sunak saved people from having to buy an electric car, it was in all the right newspapers and TV news shows. Thanks to Rishi making Long-Term Decisions for a Brighter Future, the dread threat of all EV by 2030 was removed.
Nissan must be mistaken .
Nissan don't make new cars at the £13k entry level range of the market like the Kia Picanto etc
By 2030 it seems entirely plausible that an electric juke will be as cheap as a petrol Juke, but it does not look likely that an electric Picanto would be available as cheap as a petrol Picanto.
So again, if in 6 years time if you could get a cheap petrol vehicle like the Picanto for £13k in real terms, but if the cheapest electric is in real terms £21k (currently £27k is cheapest) then should the Picanto be outlawed and people who want to buy it be forced to pay eight grand more?
We need to continue with what the market has been doing from Tesla onwards which is to start at the top of the market and work down with electrification, not the other way around. If in 2030 the only petrol vehicles the market still offers is 1.0 litre runarounds like the Picanto simply because electrification of them isn't affordably ready yet, then what's the harm in that?
We shouldn't really go by capital price but by the cost paid per month by the purchaser. Given that only a very small fraction of people buying new cars pay cash on the full price for them, and 80-80% get PCP (we can debate the wisdom of going the PCP route, but for this, we simply recognise that such is the default route to new car purchase at the moment and therefore what the market will be following), we need to look at the main monthly expenditure of the purchaser.
Which is PCP monthly payment plus petrol or electricity costs.
Petrol comes in at c. £1.50 per litre at the moment.
The majority of those buying electric cars will be recharging at home overnight (70%+: there's a need to address the needs of those who cannot do this, but, again, the overall market is driven by those who can do this. And the core need would be to fill in the gap for those who can't). At the moment, an EV tariff from Octopus gives £0.075 per kWh overnight.
The Picanto does c. 13 miles per litre. Assuming the default given by Kia on their finance calculator of 10,000 miles per year, that costs £1,155 per year in petrol, or £96.30 per month. The finance calculator for the Picanto gives (at 10% down payment of £1,350) a cost of £206.58 per month on PCP. This leads to a cost on PCP plus fuel of £302.88 per month to the purchaser.
The Ceed comes in at £21k, so the finance for a putative £21k Kia EV can be looked at on the same site (which helps) and comes out at £342.02 per month (using the same £1350 deposit, which is under 10% this time and probably incurs a slightly higher interest rate, but we need it to be comparable for the purchaser). If the EV has an efficiency similar to the MGZ4 (3.8 miles/kWh), it would cost £197.37 per year in electricity, or £16.45 per month). Cost is then £358.37 per month to the purchaser for PCP plus electricity.
The difference is therefore 18% more expensive to the purchaser for the 21k EV over the 13k ICE rather than the 61% of the sticker price. You only need the price to fall to about £18k to be the same affordability as a £13k ICE to the purchaser, to all intents and purposes.
A large portion of people buying cheap small cars are parking on the street not off road. I certainly was.
Even based on your average that 30% will not be recharging at home overnight that needs to be included in the maths, but I strongly suspect that 30% is disproportionately those buying smaller, cheaper vehicles.
Compare like-for-like by comparing recharging rates at commercial charging stations and redo your maths.
Want to fix electric for everyone? Addressing the charging issue is the biggest issue to tackle, not quibble over a year or two for the transition to electric.
The key there is, as I said, that "there's a need to address the needs of those who cannot do this." It will certainly not be 30% unable to charge cheaply overnight by 2030. There are a whole swathe of options being looked at for this (lamp post chargers, pop-up charge points, etc), and that's crucial. Especially as many or even all companies will cease offering ICE cars by then, anyway. Removing one entire supply chain gives significant savings; keeping ICE capability when it's a tiny (and non-subisdised) segment of the market becomes unworkable.
Kia, for example, are going in heavily on EVs. And they've done pretty well on that so far - their EVs are highly rated. I can see them getting down to the £20k level fairly easily (especially as battery pack prices plummet) and the £15k-£18k level is vey plausible.
Mandating a switchover date removes some risk to companies making investments and increases the prospects of getting those lower prices, as they therefore make those investments with the foreknowledge that this will be the state of things in the UK at that time.
The market is deciding. The hysteria about the announcement last week was partly synthetic and partly misplaced. Just because people can sell something doesn’t mean they will.
Auto makers work on cycle times of years on products and platforms. They’d not be likely to chop and change at the govts whim.
But this can't be true. It was Keir Starmer forcing Nissan et al to ditch petrol. Sunak saved people from having to buy an electric car, it was in all the right newspapers and TV news shows. Thanks to Rishi making Long-Term Decisions for a Brighter Future, the dread threat of all EV by 2030 was removed.
Nissan must be mistaken .
Nissan don't make new cars at the £13k entry level range of the market like the Kia Picanto etc
By 2030 it seems entirely plausible that an electric juke will be as cheap as a petrol Juke, but it does not look likely that an electric Picanto would be available as cheap as a petrol Picanto.
So again, if in 6 years time if you could get a cheap petrol vehicle like the Picanto for £13k in real terms, but if the cheapest electric is in real terms £21k (currently £27k is cheapest) then should the Picanto be outlawed and people who want to buy it be forced to pay eight grand more?
We need to continue with what the market has been doing from Tesla onwards which is to start at the top of the market and work down with electrification, not the other way around. If in 2030 the only petrol vehicles the market still offers is 1.0 litre runarounds like the Picanto simply because electrification of them isn't affordably ready yet, then what's the harm in that?
We shouldn't really go by capital price but by the cost paid per month by the purchaser. Given that only a very small fraction of people buying new cars pay cash on the full price for them, and 80-80% get PCP (we can debate the wisdom of going the PCP route, but for this, we simply recognise that such is the default route to new car purchase at the moment and therefore what the market will be following), we need to look at the main monthly expenditure of the purchaser.
Which is PCP monthly payment plus petrol or electricity costs.
Petrol comes in at c. £1.50 per litre at the moment.
The majority of those buying electric cars will be recharging at home overnight (70%+: there's a need to address the needs of those who cannot do this, but, again, the overall market is driven by those who can do this. And the core need would be to fill in the gap for those who can't). At the moment, an EV tariff from Octopus gives £0.075 per kWh overnight.
The Picanto does c. 13 miles per litre. Assuming the default given by Kia on their finance calculator of 10,000 miles per year, that costs £1,155 per year in petrol, or £96.30 per month. The finance calculator for the Picanto gives (at 10% down payment of £1,350) a cost of £206.58 per month on PCP. This leads to a cost on PCP plus fuel of £302.88 per month to the purchaser.
The Ceed comes in at £21k, so the finance for a putative £21k Kia EV can be looked at on the same site (which helps) and comes out at £342.02 per month (using the same £1350 deposit, which is under 10% this time and probably incurs a slightly higher interest rate, but we need it to be comparable for the purchaser). If the EV has an efficiency similar to the MGZ4 (3.8 miles/kWh), it would cost £197.37 per year in electricity, or £16.45 per month). Cost is then £358.37 per month to the purchaser for PCP plus electricity.
The difference is therefore 18% more expensive to the purchaser for the 21k EV over the 13k ICE rather than the 61% of the sticker price. You only need the price to fall to about £18k to be the same affordability as a £13k ICE to the purchaser, to all intents and purposes.
A large portion of people buying cheap small cars are parking on the street not off road. I certainly was.
Even based on your average that 30% will not be recharging at home overnight that needs to be included in the maths, but I strongly suspect that 30% is disproportionately those buying smaller, cheaper vehicles.
Compare like-for-like by comparing recharging rates at commercial charging stations and redo your maths.
Want to fix electric for everyone? Addressing the charging issue is the biggest issue to tackle, not quibble over a year or two for the transition to electric.
Perhaps we should ban on-road parking, like the Japanese?
Would free up space equivalent to 16 motorways.
My Spanish Father-in-Law doesn't understand why the UK doesn't build underground carparks as all the towns in Spain seem to have. Simples - because we are incompetent and corrupt. And they are not.
Hang on - I hear right wing voices say - the Spanish ARE corrupt. And that is true. And yet they can stick underground car parks into their towns and we can't afford to...
Here we are on the same page too, I've been saying underground parking should be standard.
Workplaces and living rooms need natural light, they're not well suited to being underground. Parking spaces don't. Secure underground parking takes no real estate at all, it should be completely encouraged - instead we discourage it.
The market is deciding. The hysteria about the announcement last week was partly synthetic and partly misplaced. Just because people can sell something doesn’t mean they will.
Auto makers work on cycle times of years on products and platforms. They’d not be likely to chop and change at the govts whim.
But this can't be true. It was Keir Starmer forcing Nissan et al to ditch petrol. Sunak saved people from having to buy an electric car, it was in all the right newspapers and TV news shows. Thanks to Rishi making Long-Term Decisions for a Brighter Future, the dread threat of all EV by 2030 was removed.
Nissan must be mistaken .
Nissan don't make new cars at the £13k entry level range of the market like the Kia Picanto etc
By 2030 it seems entirely plausible that an electric juke will be as cheap as a petrol Juke, but it does not look likely that an electric Picanto would be available as cheap as a petrol Picanto.
So again, if in 6 years time if you could get a cheap petrol vehicle like the Picanto for £13k in real terms, but if the cheapest electric is in real terms £21k (currently £27k is cheapest) then should the Picanto be outlawed and people who want to buy it be forced to pay eight grand more?
We need to continue with what the market has been doing from Tesla onwards which is to start at the top of the market and work down with electrification, not the other way around. If in 2030 the only petrol vehicles the market still offers is 1.0 litre runarounds like the Picanto simply because electrification of them isn't affordably ready yet, then what's the harm in that?
We shouldn't really go by capital price but by the cost paid per month by the purchaser. Given that only a very small fraction of people buying new cars pay cash on the full price for them, and 80-80% get PCP (we can debate the wisdom of going the PCP route, but for this, we simply recognise that such is the default route to new car purchase at the moment and therefore what the market will be following), we need to look at the main monthly expenditure of the purchaser.
Which is PCP monthly payment plus petrol or electricity costs.
Petrol comes in at c. £1.50 per litre at the moment.
The majority of those buying electric cars will be recharging at home overnight (70%+: there's a need to address the needs of those who cannot do this, but, again, the overall market is driven by those who can do this. And the core need would be to fill in the gap for those who can't). At the moment, an EV tariff from Octopus gives £0.075 per kWh overnight.
The Picanto does c. 13 miles per litre. Assuming the default given by Kia on their finance calculator of 10,000 miles per year, that costs £1,155 per year in petrol, or £96.30 per month. The finance calculator for the Picanto gives (at 10% down payment of £1,350) a cost of £206.58 per month on PCP. This leads to a cost on PCP plus fuel of £302.88 per month to the purchaser.
The Ceed comes in at £21k, so the finance for a putative £21k Kia EV can be looked at on the same site (which helps) and comes out at £342.02 per month (using the same £1350 deposit, which is under 10% this time and probably incurs a slightly higher interest rate, but we need it to be comparable for the purchaser). If the EV has an efficiency similar to the MGZ4 (3.8 miles/kWh), it would cost £197.37 per year in electricity, or £16.45 per month). Cost is then £358.37 per month to the purchaser for PCP plus electricity.
The difference is therefore 18% more expensive to the purchaser for the 21k EV over the 13k ICE rather than the 61% of the sticker price. You only need the price to fall to about £18k to be the same affordability as a £13k ICE to the purchaser, to all intents and purposes.
A large portion of people buying cheap small cars are parking on the street not off road. I certainly was.
Even based on your average that 30% will not be recharging at home overnight that needs to be included in the maths, but I strongly suspect that 30% is disproportionately those buying smaller, cheaper vehicles.
Compare like-for-like by comparing recharging rates at commercial charging stations and redo your maths.
Want to fix electric for everyone? Addressing the charging issue is the biggest issue to tackle, not quibble over a year or two for the transition to electric.
Perhaps we should ban on-road parking, like the Japanese?
Would free up space equivalent to 16 motorways.
My Spanish Father-in-Law doesn't understand why the UK doesn't build underground carparks as all the towns in Spain seem to have. Simples - because we are incompetent and corrupt. And they are not.
Hang on - I hear right wing voices say - the Spanish ARE corrupt. And that is true. And yet they can stick underground car parks into their towns and we can't afford to...
I haven't heard of this before - can we have examples of these underground car parks in all the towns in Spain?
The market is deciding. The hysteria about the announcement last week was partly synthetic and partly misplaced. Just because people can sell something doesn’t mean they will.
Auto makers work on cycle times of years on products and platforms. They’d not be likely to chop and change at the govts whim.
But this can't be true. It was Keir Starmer forcing Nissan et al to ditch petrol. Sunak saved people from having to buy an electric car, it was in all the right newspapers and TV news shows. Thanks to Rishi making Long-Term Decisions for a Brighter Future, the dread threat of all EV by 2030 was removed.
Nissan must be mistaken .
Nissan don't make new cars at the £13k entry level range of the market like the Kia Picanto etc
By 2030 it seems entirely plausible that an electric juke will be as cheap as a petrol Juke, but it does not look likely that an electric Picanto would be available as cheap as a petrol Picanto.
So again, if in 6 years time if you could get a cheap petrol vehicle like the Picanto for £13k in real terms, but if the cheapest electric is in real terms £21k (currently £27k is cheapest) then should the Picanto be outlawed and people who want to buy it be forced to pay eight grand more?
We need to continue with what the market has been doing from Tesla onwards which is to start at the top of the market and work down with electrification, not the other way around. If in 2030 the only petrol vehicles the market still offers is 1.0 litre runarounds like the Picanto simply because electrification of them isn't affordably ready yet, then what's the harm in that?
We shouldn't really go by capital price but by the cost paid per month by the purchaser. Given that only a very small fraction of people buying new cars pay cash on the full price for them, and 80-80% get PCP (we can debate the wisdom of going the PCP route, but for this, we simply recognise that such is the default route to new car purchase at the moment and therefore what the market will be following), we need to look at the main monthly expenditure of the purchaser.
Which is PCP monthly payment plus petrol or electricity costs.
Petrol comes in at c. £1.50 per litre at the moment.
The majority of those buying electric cars will be recharging at home overnight (70%+: there's a need to address the needs of those who cannot do this, but, again, the overall market is driven by those who can do this. And the core need would be to fill in the gap for those who can't). At the moment, an EV tariff from Octopus gives £0.075 per kWh overnight.
The Picanto does c. 13 miles per litre. Assuming the default given by Kia on their finance calculator of 10,000 miles per year, that costs £1,155 per year in petrol, or £96.30 per month. The finance calculator for the Picanto gives (at 10% down payment of £1,350) a cost of £206.58 per month on PCP. This leads to a cost on PCP plus fuel of £302.88 per month to the purchaser.
The Ceed comes in at £21k, so the finance for a putative £21k Kia EV can be looked at on the same site (which helps) and comes out at £342.02 per month (using the same £1350 deposit, which is under 10% this time and probably incurs a slightly higher interest rate, but we need it to be comparable for the purchaser). If the EV has an efficiency similar to the MGZ4 (3.8 miles/kWh), it would cost £197.37 per year in electricity, or £16.45 per month). Cost is then £358.37 per month to the purchaser for PCP plus electricity.
The difference is therefore 18% more expensive to the purchaser for the 21k EV over the 13k ICE rather than the 61% of the sticker price. You only need the price to fall to about £18k to be the same affordability as a £13k ICE to the purchaser, to all intents and purposes.
A large portion of people buying cheap small cars are parking on the street not off road. I certainly was.
Even based on your average that 30% will not be recharging at home overnight that needs to be included in the maths, but I strongly suspect that 30% is disproportionately those buying smaller, cheaper vehicles.
Compare like-for-like by comparing recharging rates at commercial charging stations and redo your maths.
Want to fix electric for everyone? Addressing the charging issue is the biggest issue to tackle, not quibble over a year or two for the transition to electric.
Perhaps we should ban on-road parking, like the Japanese?
Would free up space equivalent to 16 motorways.
My Spanish Father-in-Law doesn't understand why the UK doesn't build underground carparks as all the towns in Spain seem to have. Simples - because we are incompetent and corrupt. And they are not.
Hang on - I hear right wing voices say - the Spanish ARE corrupt. And that is true. And yet they can stick underground car parks into their towns and we can't afford to...
Underground projects are easy in societies that tolerate the underground economy
The market is deciding. The hysteria about the announcement last week was partly synthetic and partly misplaced. Just because people can sell something doesn’t mean they will.
Auto makers work on cycle times of years on products and platforms. They’d not be likely to chop and change at the govts whim.
But this can't be true. It was Keir Starmer forcing Nissan et al to ditch petrol. Sunak saved people from having to buy an electric car, it was in all the right newspapers and TV news shows. Thanks to Rishi making Long-Term Decisions for a Brighter Future, the dread threat of all EV by 2030 was removed.
Nissan must be mistaken .
Nissan don't make new cars at the £13k entry level range of the market like the Kia Picanto etc
By 2030 it seems entirely plausible that an electric juke will be as cheap as a petrol Juke, but it does not look likely that an electric Picanto would be available as cheap as a petrol Picanto...
On the contrary, it's very likely indeed. Nor in the next couple of years, but certainly by 2030. The cost of providing a 70kWh battery pack - which would be sufficient for 95% of Picanto owners, and is 50% more than current entry level EVs - will plummet.
Kia is already selling an EV for $20k in their home market.
And if it happens, then the market will take care of that.
But if it hasn't?
If in 2030 a 1.0 litre Picanto would cost £13k petrol while the cheapest EV is £21k [which is still a six grand plummet in costs from today] then would you criminalise the 1.0 litre Picanto?
If its going to take until 2034 for EV affordability and production to scale up until the point that £13k EVs become available, then what should happen between 2030 and that point?
Nobody who is skint buys a new car anyway, surely? I'm quite well off, and I wouldn't buy a new car. I'm sure there will be second hand EVs available to suit every budget.
That's a rather ignorant attitude.
Actually yes plenty of people on a budget do buy a new car. If you have eg a £3k deposit then getting £10k in finance to make it £13k is a lot more affordable than getting a £24k deposit to get a £27k car like the MG4.
A new Kia Picanto costs less than a 3 year old used MG4. A new vehicle also comes with a full warranty etc too.
For the record my first new car I ever bought was a Kia Picanto, in 2005. It was what I could afford at the time and it was enough for my needs.
When you bought a new Kia Picanto in 2005, what was the sticker price?
This is my point. £13k - if that is the current price - is not the floor for cheap new cars. It is double what it used to be. And prices continue to rise. So whether there is an EV mandate or not we would see the base prices continue to lift.
Are you not familiar with the term "inflation"?
They started at £6k but went upto £9,515 in 2004. I'm pretty sure I bought my own for £7k (with a sticker price of £7,500) in 2005 which is well within that range.
That range of £6k - £9.5k that you linked to in 2004 is in real terms £10k - £16.3k today.
So a £13k car today is smack bang in the middle of that range you linked to, in real terms. Its absolutely not doubled in real terms.
There's been very little real terms uplift in cost in the past 18 years. The main bit that did occur was due to the supply chain shortages with chips etc due to Covid lockdowns, so if anything that could be reversed in coming years not expected to continue.
Picanto. Was £5,995 base when you bought it in 2005. Its now £13,665 base. Inflation would have £5,995 as being £9,851. But it isn't. Its 39% more expensive than that.
Why? Two reasons. Its illegal to sell cars with 2005 safety and emissions. So a lot of money has been spent developing cars in the few generations since and the same with engines. And the market has moved, so that the austerity base models have gone and what would have been mid range is now the base.
There's also the fact that in 2004 Kia was a cheap upstart which took a few years to gain a reputation for quality, which it now has.
The 2010 model was £8995 (as shown in your link) which in real terms is now £13,211.96
New Picantos are available from Carwow from £12,634
So there's been no uplift whatsoever in cost in real terms since 2010, despite the fact that Covid etc has seen an uplift in costs due to temporary supply chain shortages. Actually prices have fallen since 2010, since I was already rounding up to 13k and in real terms it was more than 13k in 2010.
Aspirational Johnny and Jenny Tory Punter would much prefer a used 2016 Evoque or X3, or a new Ford Kuga on a personal lease plan than spend £13k on a tiny Korean motor that their neighbours will laugh at.
And there is Good News! The aspirational brands have a neat trick. Jack up the price. Offer brilliant finance deals. Get a competitive monthly price. Get Johnny traded up from a Kia because why drive a Kia Cee'd when you can afford* a BMW 1-series?
Anyway, its an academic debate. This is already in play. The industry is switching back to electric after a century tarting around with internal combustion. And there is nothing the Tories can do to stop the terrible creep of modernity.
The industry is and that is good news.
Whether the industry takes six or twelve years to finish that transition is moot.
What's not moot is providing charging facilities to those without off road parking. That is where all political discussion should be aimed at, anything else is just nonsense.
So we need to be doing a few very basic things: 1. Invest in power generation. We don't make enough electricity and have to import it more than we export it. 2. Invest in power transmission. We still have the stupidity of a network which doesn't invest in transmission capacity and charges so much for what it has that building green power in the places it is windy isn't cost-effective once delivered 3. Copy the 1922 Railway Grouping Act for EV charging companies. Go from 40 shit ones to 4 good ones. Having charging infrastructure which is actually maintained and usable is critical, as opposed to the wild west have now 4. Install a generic simple charging post every time you dig up the road. Mass produce something simple enough to be reliable, which means not being at the whim of compatibility with 40 different operators.
The market is deciding. The hysteria about the announcement last week was partly synthetic and partly misplaced. Just because people can sell something doesn’t mean they will.
Auto makers work on cycle times of years on products and platforms. They’d not be likely to chop and change at the govts whim.
But this can't be true. It was Keir Starmer forcing Nissan et al to ditch petrol. Sunak saved people from having to buy an electric car, it was in all the right newspapers and TV news shows. Thanks to Rishi making Long-Term Decisions for a Brighter Future, the dread threat of all EV by 2030 was removed.
Nissan must be mistaken .
Nissan don't make new cars at the £13k entry level range of the market like the Kia Picanto etc
By 2030 it seems entirely plausible that an electric juke will be as cheap as a petrol Juke, but it does not look likely that an electric Picanto would be available as cheap as a petrol Picanto.
So again, if in 6 years time if you could get a cheap petrol vehicle like the Picanto for £13k in real terms, but if the cheapest electric is in real terms £21k (currently £27k is cheapest) then should the Picanto be outlawed and people who want to buy it be forced to pay eight grand more?
We need to continue with what the market has been doing from Tesla onwards which is to start at the top of the market and work down with electrification, not the other way around. If in 2030 the only petrol vehicles the market still offers is 1.0 litre runarounds like the Picanto simply because electrification of them isn't affordably ready yet, then what's the harm in that?
We shouldn't really go by capital price but by the cost paid per month by the purchaser. Given that only a very small fraction of people buying new cars pay cash on the full price for them, and 80-80% get PCP (we can debate the wisdom of going the PCP route, but for this, we simply recognise that such is the default route to new car purchase at the moment and therefore what the market will be following), we need to look at the main monthly expenditure of the purchaser.
Which is PCP monthly payment plus petrol or electricity costs.
Petrol comes in at c. £1.50 per litre at the moment.
The majority of those buying electric cars will be recharging at home overnight (70%+: there's a need to address the needs of those who cannot do this, but, again, the overall market is driven by those who can do this. And the core need would be to fill in the gap for those who can't). At the moment, an EV tariff from Octopus gives £0.075 per kWh overnight.
The Picanto does c. 13 miles per litre. Assuming the default given by Kia on their finance calculator of 10,000 miles per year, that costs £1,155 per year in petrol, or £96.30 per month. The finance calculator for the Picanto gives (at 10% down payment of £1,350) a cost of £206.58 per month on PCP. This leads to a cost on PCP plus fuel of £302.88 per month to the purchaser.
The Ceed comes in at £21k, so the finance for a putative £21k Kia EV can be looked at on the same site (which helps) and comes out at £342.02 per month (using the same £1350 deposit, which is under 10% this time and probably incurs a slightly higher interest rate, but we need it to be comparable for the purchaser). If the EV has an efficiency similar to the MGZ4 (3.8 miles/kWh), it would cost £197.37 per year in electricity, or £16.45 per month). Cost is then £358.37 per month to the purchaser for PCP plus electricity.
The difference is therefore 18% more expensive to the purchaser for the 21k EV over the 13k ICE rather than the 61% of the sticker price. You only need the price to fall to about £18k to be the same affordability as a £13k ICE to the purchaser, to all intents and purposes.
A large portion of people buying cheap small cars are parking on the street not off road. I certainly was.
Even based on your average that 30% will not be recharging at home overnight that needs to be included in the maths, but I strongly suspect that 30% is disproportionately those buying smaller, cheaper vehicles.
Compare like-for-like by comparing recharging rates at commercial charging stations and redo your maths.
Want to fix electric for everyone? Addressing the charging issue is the biggest issue to tackle, not quibble over a year or two for the transition to electric.
Perhaps we should ban on-road parking, like the Japanese?
Would free up space equivalent to 16 motorways.
Do it, it's so great. Combine it with a land tax so that any temporarily empty plot gets a car park on it to pay the tax.
There are tantalising rumours on TwitterX that we are alarmingly close to AGI - true Artificial Intelligence - or, that OpenAI have actually achieved it already
It’s bizarre that more people aren’t talking about this; if it is true it is one of the biggest news stories in human history
There are tantalising rumours on TwitterX that we have met aliens who can travel across space to visit us.
It's bizarre that more people aren't talking about this; if it is true* it is one of the biggest news stories in human history.
* It is not true
It really might be true
When I bang on about AI, @Benpointer always says “get back to me when a robot can stack my dishwasher”. And it’s a fair point
Well, now a robot can easily stack a dishwasher, and what’s more it can learn this simply by watching you do it first
“With enough strength and dexterity, Tesla's Bot could handle almost all physical tasks by simply looking at video clips of people doing said tasks.
Picking up a vacuum and running it through the house. Sorting and folding laundry. Tidying up the house. Moving material from point A to point B. Picking up trash and placing it in a bin. Pushing a lawnmower. Monitor an area for safety-related concerns. Laying bricks. Hammering nails. Using power tools. Clean dishes... etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.”
There are tantalising rumours on TwitterX that we are alarmingly close to AGI - true Artificial Intelligence - or, that OpenAI have actually achieved it already
It’s bizarre that more people aren’t talking about this; if it is true it is one of the biggest news stories in human history
You mean one of the AI companies is going for another funding round.
I expect them to scrap the link to Manchester and instead say they’ll improve west to east links . The public have never really got behind HS2 and the Tories want some cash to spend on other projects that are more voter friendly .
Not sure if anyone saw Newsnight but the comparison between cost per mile of building track in the UK compared to other major country’s was shocking.
Jaw dropping in fact .
Is it caused by the huge cost of compensation in this country compared to elsewhere? Maybe it's because we're more densely populated than nearly every other European country, so whereas in places like Spain and France it's relatively easy to route a new train line through mostly empty areas, it's much more difficult to do that here. I was using the Spanish high speed trains in February/March this year and I was surprised to see how utterly empty a lot of the countryside was.
Also, on the subject of cancelling the line to M'chester, what some people don't seem to realise is that they've already spent a huge amount of money on some of the infrastructure for the B'ham to M'chester route, so if they cancel it all of that will be wasted, and also all the disruption they've already caused in that area will have been for nothing. I hope Starmer decides to go ahead with it when he becomes PM (which seems very likely to happen now).
The Times have a very good article on it today, if you can get behind the paywall.
I have a theory that the more political a project is (like Palace of Westminster Restoration and Renewal, which is absolutely political and could fall or burn down at any time), or HS2, which simply crosses far too many constituencies for it not to be, the worse its governance will be because politicians simply can't help making kneejerk uninformed decisions and that's death to big infrastructure.
I think we really need a dedicated national infrastructure council that is at one remove from day to day political machinations that can make these kinds of long term decisions, ideally creating a pipeline of projects so that expertise in planning and contracting is not lost from one project to the next. On Westminster I think the building is too expensive to renovate as a working Parliament. They should simply pay to preserve it as an important national monument and move the parliament elsewhere. Maybe put them in tunnels under Euston until they complete HS2 to Manchester and Leeds. That might concentrate minds s bit.
Make Westminster a museum absolutely!
Move Parliament and the Civil Service out of London and into a new build city.
Looking at a map, North of York, East of Hull there seems to be quite a bit of land that's neither well developed nor in an AONB. Or between Grimsby and Scunthorpe could be another good location, though that's getting close to Lincolnshire Wolds AONB.
Build a new capital city for Parliament and the Civil Service there, in the form of Washington DC or Canberra, then see how quickly infrastructure gets developed.
Do you mean west of Hull? (Noth)East of Hull you'd have parliament on sea. Good luck taking on th NIMBYs in the Yorkshire Wolds (rolling countryside, less spectacular than moors or dales, but still popular). Proposed to my wife on a walk in the Wolds.
I'd tend to pop if somewhere Leeds/Bradford or further north to Darlington/Northallerton area to be more central for a UK parliament (Shetland can bugger off and join Norway if they don't consider that central-enough )
Sorry I wrote it backwards, I meant North of Hull, East of York.
Approximately where the small town of Driffield (never heard of it) is, or around that area, but its just one suggestion there's plenty of other valid suggestions.
I would suggest wherever it is, is not on an existing motorway network or high speed rail network.
Set a five year deadline maybe for construction then relocation of every single civil servant and Parliamentarian to be out of London by then. Get Parliament and the heads of the Civil Service all in that new build city and let them struggle with the infrastructure as it is, if they've not unlocked investment yet. See how quickly funding for investment becomes available.
Yeah, they'll have your balls on toasting fork in Driffield for suggesting flooding it with parliamentarians and roads and outsiders
It isn't the worst idea in the world. It would fix so many issues that are outstanding from when I first lived in Yorkshire. The Ouse Bridge would be fixed replaced as they'd upgrade the A63 to motorway all the way into Hull. Stamford Bridge would finally get a bypass. You'd have the restoration of the train line between Hull and York (Beverley is cut adrift at the moment thanks to Dr Beeching). Full fibre everywhere (not tied to KCOM). High-end retailers. Soaring property prices.
Great Driffield. The legislative capital of a post-Brexit United Kingdom. Those sunlit uplands (or Wolds) look marvellous.
I can just see Jacob Rees-Mogg in Boyes or Yorkshire Trading Company...
There are tantalising rumours on TwitterX that we are alarmingly close to AGI - true Artificial Intelligence - or, that OpenAI have actually achieved it already
It’s bizarre that more people aren’t talking about this; if it is true it is one of the biggest news stories in human history
You mean one of the AI companies is going for another funding round.
No, not that. OpenAI has all the money it needs, and more
There are tantalising rumours on TwitterX that we are alarmingly close to AGI - true Artificial Intelligence - or, that OpenAI have actually achieved it already
It’s bizarre that more people aren’t talking about this; if it is true it is one of the biggest news stories in human history
You mean one of the AI companies is going for another funding round.
No, not that. OpenAI has all the money it needs, and more
Possibly the most most reasonable and impartial debate on the US government budget shutdown issue, from Krystal and Saagar at Breaking Points. https://youtube.com/watch?v=MOFS3PD2RWM
TL:DR it’s a massive bleeping mess, which has been going on for ages and was always going to come to a head at some point.
The US seems to have one of the most crazy and complicated forms of government anywhere. It is remarkable that they have not imploded beforehand.
One does wonder how anything ever gets done there, it’s always on the brink of deadlock over something.
Both Houses have tiny majorities and are often controlled by different parties, as is the case at the moment, hence the arguments about the budget. At some point, they either need to pass the same budget bill(s) in both Houses, or see the Federal government shut down until it’s resolved. They’ve now got five days until the shutdown starts by default.
My suspicion is that the Senate willl pass a Continuation Bill, which the House will get through with a handful of Republican rebels or abstainers - and then McCarthy will be fired as House Speaker by a different set of Republican rebels, who see him going back on his promise to them for a more granular approach to budget setting.
I started this on previous thread and think it needs some discussion.
The current odds for the 4 favourite teams (SA, IRE, FRA, NZ) are all 3-1 to 4-1. Probably a fair reflection with no value to be seen. England are then at 10/1, with Wales 22/1. England looks about right but not in comparison to Wales - not because of any perception in strength - but because of the run in of both teams. England have not qualified yet and still need to beat Samoa to do so (not a foregone conclusion). England will then probably play Fiji (who beat them recently) while Wales probably play Argentina (who have not impressed). After that Wales and England have a similar route through SF & F. My point is that the odds are overpriced for England in comparison to Wales - there is definitely value in the Welsh odds - not in England.
I think England have not absolutely technically qualified, but I cannot see how they miss out in reality. Argentina, Samoa and Japan all have two games left. England on 14 points, Argentina on 4, Samoa and Japan on 5. BUT Japan play Samoa and they can't both win. Also Japan play Argentina, and they can't both win.
So Samoa can win two games (including a 5 pointer against England) and reach 15 points. If they do Japan can only get 7 points max (and that with a win over Argentina, which would send England through).
Argentina win two games with a bonus point to get to 14? Then Samoa get to 15 points (two bonus point wins?) and this knocks out England (is it game vs the side on equals points or points difference? - If the latter Argentina have a mountain to climb).
I think it will be England vs Fiji and Wales vs Argentina. Both winnable by the 6N team so then its 180 minutes from glory.
I actually thought Wales were excellent on Sunday, and they must have a shout in any semi-final. The defence was superb.
England has two games in the greasy 8 (actually 9) pm slot, and then a game at 5 with much better ball skills, albeit against a poor Chile.
There are tantalising rumours on TwitterX that we are alarmingly close to AGI - true Artificial Intelligence - or, that OpenAI have actually achieved it already
It’s bizarre that more people aren’t talking about this; if it is true it is one of the biggest news stories in human history
There are tantalising rumours on TwitterX that we have met aliens who can travel across space to visit us.
It's bizarre that more people aren't talking about this; if it is true* it is one of the biggest news stories in human history.
* It is not true
It really might be true
When I bang on about AI, @Benpointer always says “get back to me when a robot can stack my dishwasher”. And it’s a fair point
Well, now a robot can easily stack a dishwasher, and what’s more it can learn this simply by watching you do it first
“With enough strength and dexterity, Tesla's Bot could handle almost all physical tasks by simply looking at video clips of people doing said tasks.
Picking up a vacuum and running it through the house. Sorting and folding laundry. Tidying up the house. Moving material from point A to point B. Picking up trash and placing it in a bin. Pushing a lawnmower. Monitor an area for safety-related concerns. Laying bricks. Hammering nails. Using power tools. Clean dishes... etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.”
I can find you a parrot that can recite poetry - doesn't mean it can write you any.
Are learning machines cool? Yes. But at the end of the day they're automatons that can, at a basic level, do simple tasks in relatively stable environments. Complex tasks in other scenarios are out of reach. All the hype is just sales - of course people who own stocks in AI companies would claim it would end the world or be the gadget of the future, because they'll rake the money in.
It is not coincidental that the new "AI is going to be able to do everything" line came after the "Meta is going to be the new frontier" fell through and the "NFTs and the blockchain are going to revolutionise everything" idea was proven false. Capitalism always needs a new frontier, to exploit and sell and commodify, and tech bros think they can build the next one. So far they're failing.
About private schools: it's much, much easier to just pick a private school than to move house.
Just because you can still see an avenue towards inequality or opportunity doesn't mean the avenue is as wide and accessible than the other one.
Good policy doesn't always have to be watertight
School policy is basically a canard in my opinion.
The thing in common that all of my Oxbridge pals had? Not wealth, education or class.
But a relatively stable family life and lots of books at home.
So private schools are a waste of money and nobody will object to banning them then...
If we banned things that are a waste of money there wouldn't be much of the economy left.
Clearly the argument for banning private schools isn't about their ineffectiveness. My response was absurd because the thing I was responding was absurd. Trying to imply that family class, wealth and education aren't main drivers is really quite silly.
And it's such a cakeist argument. You want this thing to be available because it IS beneficial for those who can get in, not because it's some abstract but useless freedom.
..the thing I was responding _to_ was absurd...
The original is entirely logically consistent:
'my response was absurd because the thing I was responding was absurd'
(the 'thing I was responding' == 'my response')
Not very enlightening, but consistent
Er, no.
We need to be fastidious grammatically he're on PB.
The market is deciding. The hysteria about the announcement last week was partly synthetic and partly misplaced. Just because people can sell something doesn’t mean they will.
Auto makers work on cycle times of years on products and platforms. They’d not be likely to chop and change at the govts whim.
But this can't be true. It was Keir Starmer forcing Nissan et al to ditch petrol. Sunak saved people from having to buy an electric car, it was in all the right newspapers and TV news shows. Thanks to Rishi making Long-Term Decisions for a Brighter Future, the dread threat of all EV by 2030 was removed.
Nissan must be mistaken .
Nissan don't make new cars at the £13k entry level range of the market like the Kia Picanto etc
By 2030 it seems entirely plausible that an electric juke will be as cheap as a petrol Juke, but it does not look likely that an electric Picanto would be available as cheap as a petrol Picanto.
So again, if in 6 years time if you could get a cheap petrol vehicle like the Picanto for £13k in real terms, but if the cheapest electric is in real terms £21k (currently £27k is cheapest) then should the Picanto be outlawed and people who want to buy it be forced to pay eight grand more?
We need to continue with what the market has been doing from Tesla onwards which is to start at the top of the market and work down with electrification, not the other way around. If in 2030 the only petrol vehicles the market still offers is 1.0 litre runarounds like the Picanto simply because electrification of them isn't affordably ready yet, then what's the harm in that?
We shouldn't really go by capital price but by the cost paid per month by the purchaser. Given that only a very small fraction of people buying new cars pay cash on the full price for them, and 80-80% get PCP (we can debate the wisdom of going the PCP route, but for this, we simply recognise that such is the default route to new car purchase at the moment and therefore what the market will be following), we need to look at the main monthly expenditure of the purchaser.
Which is PCP monthly payment plus petrol or electricity costs.
Petrol comes in at c. £1.50 per litre at the moment.
The majority of those buying electric cars will be recharging at home overnight (70%+: there's a need to address the needs of those who cannot do this, but, again, the overall market is driven by those who can do this. And the core need would be to fill in the gap for those who can't). At the moment, an EV tariff from Octopus gives £0.075 per kWh overnight.
The Picanto does c. 13 miles per litre. Assuming the default given by Kia on their finance calculator of 10,000 miles per year, that costs £1,155 per year in petrol, or £96.30 per month. The finance calculator for the Picanto gives (at 10% down payment of £1,350) a cost of £206.58 per month on PCP. This leads to a cost on PCP plus fuel of £302.88 per month to the purchaser.
The Ceed comes in at £21k, so the finance for a putative £21k Kia EV can be looked at on the same site (which helps) and comes out at £342.02 per month (using the same £1350 deposit, which is under 10% this time and probably incurs a slightly higher interest rate, but we need it to be comparable for the purchaser). If the EV has an efficiency similar to the MGZ4 (3.8 miles/kWh), it would cost £197.37 per year in electricity, or £16.45 per month). Cost is then £358.37 per month to the purchaser for PCP plus electricity.
The difference is therefore 18% more expensive to the purchaser for the 21k EV over the 13k ICE rather than the 61% of the sticker price. You only need the price to fall to about £18k to be the same affordability as a £13k ICE to the purchaser, to all intents and purposes.
A large portion of people buying cheap small cars are parking on the street not off road. I certainly was.
Even based on your average that 30% will not be recharging at home overnight that needs to be included in the maths, but I strongly suspect that 30% is disproportionately those buying smaller, cheaper vehicles.
Compare like-for-like by comparing recharging rates at commercial charging stations and redo your maths.
Want to fix electric for everyone? Addressing the charging issue is the biggest issue to tackle, not quibble over a year or two for the transition to electric.
Perhaps we should ban on-road parking, like the Japanese?
Would free up space equivalent to 16 motorways.
Do it, it's so great. Combine it with a land tax so that any temporarily empty plot gets a car park on it to pay the tax.
Could you get the market to do it?
From 2035, if you buy a new car, you must demonstrate that you have private parking provision (with a charger).
That would affect very few people, but give a strong steer to the market that there will be increasing demand for private parking in the next 10 years or so.
There are tantalising rumours on TwitterX that we are alarmingly close to AGI - true Artificial Intelligence - or, that OpenAI have actually achieved it already
It’s bizarre that more people aren’t talking about this; if it is true it is one of the biggest news stories in human history
You mean one of the AI companies is going for another funding round.
No, not that. OpenAI has all the money it needs, and more
It will be interesting to see if this gets any pick up internationally.
That might be a valid question but Braverman is not the one to be discussing it as she’s a psychopath without a shred of humanity . She wants to stop all asylum seekers from entering the UK as her simplistic argument re safe countries makes clear. The UK will never have to accept any asylum seekers from mainland Europe and the problem will just be dumped on them.
Then to go after gay people and women shows how clueless she is . And then her apparent comments about modern slavery when the IMB makes it easier for traffickers as those trafficked lose any government support .
If this kind of thing is intended to consolidate the Tories' base, it's interesting to ponder just how narrow people like Braverman think that base is.
To be fair to her, the base likely is pretty narrow right now. The party has been in government for 13 years. It's exhausted, clapped out, collapsing under the weight of its own contradictions and the legacy of its own past decisions.
But by talking only to the remaining base, especially now when it's at its narrowest, they risk poisoning their own future standing with everyone else.
The impression given by Braverman turning on gay people and women is backed up by the government's abandonment of the Conversion Therapy bill. Similarly, Sunak smirking about trashing HS2 is of a piece with his helicopter junkets. And the highest tax burden ever on working people sits alongside an inheritance tax bung to those who hope to benefit from unearned wealth.
These things might, just might, save them a handful of seats at the next election. But it comes at the cost of retoxifying their brand, and making it all the more likely that they'll be out of power for two or even three parliaments rather than just the one.
The market is deciding. The hysteria about the announcement last week was partly synthetic and partly misplaced. Just because people can sell something doesn’t mean they will.
Auto makers work on cycle times of years on products and platforms. They’d not be likely to chop and change at the govts whim.
But this can't be true. It was Keir Starmer forcing Nissan et al to ditch petrol. Sunak saved people from having to buy an electric car, it was in all the right newspapers and TV news shows. Thanks to Rishi making Long-Term Decisions for a Brighter Future, the dread threat of all EV by 2030 was removed.
Nissan must be mistaken .
Nissan don't make new cars at the £13k entry level range of the market like the Kia Picanto etc
By 2030 it seems entirely plausible that an electric juke will be as cheap as a petrol Juke, but it does not look likely that an electric Picanto would be available as cheap as a petrol Picanto.
So again, if in 6 years time if you could get a cheap petrol vehicle like the Picanto for £13k in real terms, but if the cheapest electric is in real terms £21k (currently £27k is cheapest) then should the Picanto be outlawed and people who want to buy it be forced to pay eight grand more?
We need to continue with what the market has been doing from Tesla onwards which is to start at the top of the market and work down with electrification, not the other way around. If in 2030 the only petrol vehicles the market still offers is 1.0 litre runarounds like the Picanto simply because electrification of them isn't affordably ready yet, then what's the harm in that?
We shouldn't really go by capital price but by the cost paid per month by the purchaser. Given that only a very small fraction of people buying new cars pay cash on the full price for them, and 80-80% get PCP (we can debate the wisdom of going the PCP route, but for this, we simply recognise that such is the default route to new car purchase at the moment and therefore what the market will be following), we need to look at the main monthly expenditure of the purchaser.
Which is PCP monthly payment plus petrol or electricity costs.
Petrol comes in at c. £1.50 per litre at the moment.
The majority of those buying electric cars will be recharging at home overnight (70%+: there's a need to address the needs of those who cannot do this, but, again, the overall market is driven by those who can do this. And the core need would be to fill in the gap for those who can't). At the moment, an EV tariff from Octopus gives £0.075 per kWh overnight.
The Picanto does c. 13 miles per litre. Assuming the default given by Kia on their finance calculator of 10,000 miles per year, that costs £1,155 per year in petrol, or £96.30 per month. The finance calculator for the Picanto gives (at 10% down payment of £1,350) a cost of £206.58 per month on PCP. This leads to a cost on PCP plus fuel of £302.88 per month to the purchaser.
The Ceed comes in at £21k, so the finance for a putative £21k Kia EV can be looked at on the same site (which helps) and comes out at £342.02 per month (using the same £1350 deposit, which is under 10% this time and probably incurs a slightly higher interest rate, but we need it to be comparable for the purchaser). If the EV has an efficiency similar to the MGZ4 (3.8 miles/kWh), it would cost £197.37 per year in electricity, or £16.45 per month). Cost is then £358.37 per month to the purchaser for PCP plus electricity.
The difference is therefore 18% more expensive to the purchaser for the 21k EV over the 13k ICE rather than the 61% of the sticker price. You only need the price to fall to about £18k to be the same affordability as a £13k ICE to the purchaser, to all intents and purposes.
A large portion of people buying cheap small cars are parking on the street not off road. I certainly was.
Even based on your average that 30% will not be recharging at home overnight that needs to be included in the maths, but I strongly suspect that 30% is disproportionately those buying smaller, cheaper vehicles.
Compare like-for-like by comparing recharging rates at commercial charging stations and redo your maths.
Want to fix electric for everyone? Addressing the charging issue is the biggest issue to tackle, not quibble over a year or two for the transition to electric.
Perhaps we should ban on-road parking, like the Japanese?
Would free up space equivalent to 16 motorways.
My Spanish Father-in-Law doesn't understand why the UK doesn't build underground carparks as all the towns in Spain seem to have. Simples - because we are incompetent and corrupt. And they are not.
Hang on - I hear right wing voices say - the Spanish ARE corrupt. And that is true. And yet they can stick underground car parks into their towns and we can't afford to...
I’m a big fan of underground car parks and was impressed when I moved to Geneva by the scale and quantity of them - even one right by where the lake joins the Rhône which must have been an engineering marvel to plan. Beautifully finished too with classical music piped out (no Vivaldi Four Seasons either). I’m not sure though whether these were private enterprises or state.
I think the last sentence is key that it is, I guess, infinitely more expensive to excavate 8 stories down than knock up a car park 8 stories up so if you are a private car park co in the UK you have a potentially exorbitant extra cost and so would need to offset it by becoming a property developer too to build flats or offices in the land above it to make it financially viable.
You would probably also face some weird laws about who owns the land underground - probably the queen’s swans - and then people would block the planning permission as the disruption to their pipes and services underground would be intolerable and they already have a car parking space in their house.
I started this on previous thread and think it needs some discussion.
The current odds for the 4 favourite teams (SA, IRE, FRA, NZ) are all 3-1 to 4-1. Probably a fair reflection with no value to be seen. England are then at 10/1, with Wales 22/1. England looks about right but not in comparison to Wales - not because of any perception in strength - but because of the run in of both teams. England have not qualified yet and still need to beat Samoa to do so (not a foregone conclusion). England will then probably play Fiji (who beat them recently) while Wales probably play Argentina (who have not impressed). After that Wales and England have a similar route through SF & F. My point is that the odds are overpriced for England in comparison to Wales - there is definitely value in the Welsh odds - not in England.
I think England have not absolutely technically qualified, but I cannot see how they miss out in reality. Argentina, Samoa and Japan all have two games left. England on 14 points, Argentina on 4, Samoa and Japan on 5. BUT Japan play Samoa and they can't both win. Also Japan play Argentina, and they can't both win.
So Samoa can win two games (including a 5 pointer against England) and reach 15 points. If they do Japan can only get 7 points max (and that with a win over Argentina, which would send England through).
Argentina win two games with a bonus point to get to 14? Then Samoa get to 15 points (two bonus point wins?) and this knocks out England (is it game vs the side on equals points or points difference? - If the latter Argentina have a mountain to climb).
I think it will be England vs Fiji and Wales vs Argentina. Both winnable by the 6N team so then its 180 minutes from glory.
I actually thought Wales were excellent on Sunday, and they must have a shout in any semi-final. The defence was superb.
England has two games in the greasy 8 (actually 9) pm slot, and then a game at 5 with much better ball skills, albeit against a poor Chile.
I expect them to scrap the link to Manchester and instead say they’ll improve west to east links . The public have never really got behind HS2 and the Tories want some cash to spend on other projects that are more voter friendly .
Not sure if anyone saw Newsnight but the comparison between cost per mile of building track in the UK compared to other major country’s was shocking.
Jaw dropping in fact .
Is it caused by the huge cost of compensation in this country compared to elsewhere? Maybe it's because we're more densely populated than nearly every other European country, so whereas in places like Spain and France it's relatively easy to route a new train line through mostly empty areas, it's much more difficult to do that here. I was using the Spanish high speed trains in February/March this year and I was surprised to see how utterly empty a lot of the countryside was.
Also, on the subject of cancelling the line to M'chester, what some people don't seem to realise is that they've already spent a huge amount of money on some of the infrastructure for the B'ham to M'chester route, so if they cancel it all of that will be wasted, and also all the disruption they've already caused in that area will have been for nothing. I hope Starmer decides to go ahead with it when he becomes PM (which seems very likely to happen now).
The Times have a very good article on it today, if you can get behind the paywall.
I have a theory that the more political a project is (like Palace of Westminster Restoration and Renewal, which is absolutely political and could fall or burn down at any time), or HS2, which simply crosses far too many constituencies for it not to be, the worse its governance will be because politicians simply can't help making kneejerk uninformed decisions and that's death to big infrastructure.
I think we really need a dedicated national infrastructure council that is at one remove from day to day political machinations that can make these kinds of long term decisions, ideally creating a pipeline of projects so that expertise in planning and contracting is not lost from one project to the next. On Westminster I think the building is too expensive to renovate as a working Parliament. They should simply pay to preserve it as an important national monument and move the parliament elsewhere. Maybe put them in tunnels under Euston until they complete HS2 to Manchester and Leeds. That might concentrate minds s bit.
Make Westminster a museum absolutely!
Move Parliament and the Civil Service out of London and into a new build city.
Looking at a map, North of York, East of Hull there seems to be quite a bit of land that's neither well developed nor in an AONB. Or between Grimsby and Scunthorpe could be another good location, though that's getting close to Lincolnshire Wolds AONB.
Build a new capital city for Parliament and the Civil Service there, in the form of Washington DC or Canberra, then see how quickly infrastructure gets developed.
Do you mean west of Hull? (Noth)East of Hull you'd have parliament on sea. Good luck taking on th NIMBYs in the Yorkshire Wolds (rolling countryside, less spectacular than moors or dales, but still popular). Proposed to my wife on a walk in the Wolds.
I'd tend to pop if somewhere Leeds/Bradford or further north to Darlington/Northallerton area to be more central for a UK parliament (Shetland can bugger off and join Norway if they don't consider that central-enough )
Sorry I wrote it backwards, I meant North of Hull, East of York.
Approximately where the small town of Driffield (never heard of it) is, or around that area, but its just one suggestion there's plenty of other valid suggestions.
I would suggest wherever it is, is not on an existing motorway network or high speed rail network.
Set a five year deadline maybe for construction then relocation of every single civil servant and Parliamentarian to be out of London by then. Get Parliament and the heads of the Civil Service all in that new build city and let them struggle with the infrastructure as it is, if they've not unlocked investment yet. See how quickly funding for investment becomes available.
Yeah, they'll have your balls on toasting fork in Driffield for suggesting flooding it with parliamentarians and roads and outsiders
It isn't the worst idea in the world. It would fix so many issues that are outstanding from when I first lived in Yorkshire. The Ouse Bridge would be fixed replaced as they'd upgrade the A63 to motorway all the way into Hull. Stamford Bridge would finally get a bypass. You'd have the restoration of the train line between Hull and York (Beverley is cut adrift at the moment thanks to Dr Beeching). Full fibre everywhere (not tied to KCOM). High-end retailers. Soaring property prices.
Great Driffield. The legislative capital of a post-Brexit United Kingdom. Those sunlit uplands (or Wolds) look marvellous.
I can just see Jacob Rees-Mogg in Boyes or Yorkshire Trading Company...
Yeah, the M62 Ouse Bridge does need replacing.
I don't know what the exact problem is but having to re-pour the concrete deck in-situ does not inspire confidence in the longevity of the structure.
Still, I suppose all motorways will have a 30mph limit soon, so the current situation is good practice for that at least.
There are tantalising rumours on TwitterX that we are alarmingly close to AGI - true Artificial Intelligence - or, that OpenAI have actually achieved it already
It’s bizarre that more people aren’t talking about this; if it is true it is one of the biggest news stories in human history
You mean one of the AI companies is going for another funding round.
No, not that. OpenAI has all the money it needs, and more
There are tantalising rumours on TwitterX that we are alarmingly close to AGI - true Artificial Intelligence - or, that OpenAI have actually achieved it already
It’s bizarre that more people aren’t talking about this; if it is true it is one of the biggest news stories in human history
You mean one of the AI companies is going for another funding round.
No, not that. OpenAI has all the money it needs, and more
I expect them to scrap the link to Manchester and instead say they’ll improve west to east links . The public have never really got behind HS2 and the Tories want some cash to spend on other projects that are more voter friendly .
Not sure if anyone saw Newsnight but the comparison between cost per mile of building track in the UK compared to other major country’s was shocking.
Jaw dropping in fact .
Is it caused by the huge cost of compensation in this country compared to elsewhere? Maybe it's because we're more densely populated than nearly every other European country, so whereas in places like Spain and France it's relatively easy to route a new train line through mostly empty areas, it's much more difficult to do that here. I was using the Spanish high speed trains in February/March this year and I was surprised to see how utterly empty a lot of the countryside was.
Also, on the subject of cancelling the line to M'chester, what some people don't seem to realise is that they've already spent a huge amount of money on some of the infrastructure for the B'ham to M'chester route, so if they cancel it all of that will be wasted, and also all the disruption they've already caused in that area will have been for nothing. I hope Starmer decides to go ahead with it when he becomes PM (which seems very likely to happen now).
The Times have a very good article on it today, if you can get behind the paywall.
I have a theory that the more political a project is (like Palace of Westminster Restoration and Renewal, which is absolutely political and could fall or burn down at any time), or HS2, which simply crosses far too many constituencies for it not to be, the worse its governance will be because politicians simply can't help making kneejerk uninformed decisions and that's death to big infrastructure.
I think we really need a dedicated national infrastructure council that is at one remove from day to day political machinations that can make these kinds of long term decisions, ideally creating a pipeline of projects so that expertise in planning and contracting is not lost from one project to the next. On Westminster I think the building is too expensive to renovate as a working Parliament. They should simply pay to preserve it as an important national monument and move the parliament elsewhere. Maybe put them in tunnels under Euston until they complete HS2 to Manchester and Leeds. That might concentrate minds s bit.
I would tour parliament around the country, spending 6 months in each place.
Like the EU parliament then?
They only use two cities IIRC. Spending 6 months in Hull or Dundee might make MPs view life in a different way.
It will be interesting to see if this gets any pick up internationally.
That might be a valid question but Braverman is not the one to be discussing it as she’s a psychopath without a shred of humanity . She wants to stop all asylum seekers from entering the UK as her simplistic argument re safe countries makes clear. The UK will never have to accept any asylum seekers from mainland Europe and the problem will just be dumped on them.
Then to go after gay people and women shows how clueless she is . And then her apparent comments about modern slavery when the IMB makes it easier for traffickers as those trafficked lose any government support .
If this kind of thing is intended to consolidate the Tories' base, it's interesting to ponder just how narrow people like Braverman think that base is.
To be fair to her, the base likely is pretty narrow right now. The party has been in government for 13 years. It's exhausted, clapped out, collapsing under the weight of its own contradictions and the legacy of its own past decisions.
But by talking only to the remaining base, especially now when it's at its narrowest, they risk poisoning their own future standing with everyone else.
The impression given by Braverman turning on gay people and women is backed up by the government's abandonment of the Conversion Therapy bill. Similarly, Sunak smirking about trashing HS2 is of a piece with his helicopter junkets. And the highest tax burden ever on working people sits alongside an inheritance tax bung to those who hope to benefit from unearned wealth.
These things might, just might, save them a handful of seats at the next election. But it comes at the cost of retoxifying their brand, and making it all the more likely that they'll be out of power for two or even three parliaments rather than just the one.
It seems so odd to single out gays and women, though. Saying trans or Muslim seems as though it would be a more effective dog whistle, in the sense that it wouldn't include more than half of Tory supporters.
The market is deciding. The hysteria about the announcement last week was partly synthetic and partly misplaced. Just because people can sell something doesn’t mean they will.
Auto makers work on cycle times of years on products and platforms. They’d not be likely to chop and change at the govts whim.
But this can't be true. It was Keir Starmer forcing Nissan et al to ditch petrol. Sunak saved people from having to buy an electric car, it was in all the right newspapers and TV news shows. Thanks to Rishi making Long-Term Decisions for a Brighter Future, the dread threat of all EV by 2030 was removed.
Nissan must be mistaken .
Nissan don't make new cars at the £13k entry level range of the market like the Kia Picanto etc
By 2030 it seems entirely plausible that an electric juke will be as cheap as a petrol Juke, but it does not look likely that an electric Picanto would be available as cheap as a petrol Picanto.
So again, if in 6 years time if you could get a cheap petrol vehicle like the Picanto for £13k in real terms, but if the cheapest electric is in real terms £21k (currently £27k is cheapest) then should the Picanto be outlawed and people who want to buy it be forced to pay eight grand more?
We need to continue with what the market has been doing from Tesla onwards which is to start at the top of the market and work down with electrification, not the other way around. If in 2030 the only petrol vehicles the market still offers is 1.0 litre runarounds like the Picanto simply because electrification of them isn't affordably ready yet, then what's the harm in that?
We shouldn't really go by capital price but by the cost paid per month by the purchaser. Given that only a very small fraction of people buying new cars pay cash on the full price for them, and 80-80% get PCP (we can debate the wisdom of going the PCP route, but for this, we simply recognise that such is the default route to new car purchase at the moment and therefore what the market will be following), we need to look at the main monthly expenditure of the purchaser.
Which is PCP monthly payment plus petrol or electricity costs.
Petrol comes in at c. £1.50 per litre at the moment.
The majority of those buying electric cars will be recharging at home overnight (70%+: there's a need to address the needs of those who cannot do this, but, again, the overall market is driven by those who can do this. And the core need would be to fill in the gap for those who can't). At the moment, an EV tariff from Octopus gives £0.075 per kWh overnight.
The Picanto does c. 13 miles per litre. Assuming the default given by Kia on their finance calculator of 10,000 miles per year, that costs £1,155 per year in petrol, or £96.30 per month. The finance calculator for the Picanto gives (at 10% down payment of £1,350) a cost of £206.58 per month on PCP. This leads to a cost on PCP plus fuel of £302.88 per month to the purchaser.
The Ceed comes in at £21k, so the finance for a putative £21k Kia EV can be looked at on the same site (which helps) and comes out at £342.02 per month (using the same £1350 deposit, which is under 10% this time and probably incurs a slightly higher interest rate, but we need it to be comparable for the purchaser). If the EV has an efficiency similar to the MGZ4 (3.8 miles/kWh), it would cost £197.37 per year in electricity, or £16.45 per month). Cost is then £358.37 per month to the purchaser for PCP plus electricity.
The difference is therefore 18% more expensive to the purchaser for the 21k EV over the 13k ICE rather than the 61% of the sticker price. You only need the price to fall to about £18k to be the same affordability as a £13k ICE to the purchaser, to all intents and purposes.
A large portion of people buying cheap small cars are parking on the street not off road. I certainly was.
Even based on your average that 30% will not be recharging at home overnight that needs to be included in the maths, but I strongly suspect that 30% is disproportionately those buying smaller, cheaper vehicles.
Compare like-for-like by comparing recharging rates at commercial charging stations and redo your maths.
Want to fix electric for everyone? Addressing the charging issue is the biggest issue to tackle, not quibble over a year or two for the transition to electric.
Perhaps we should ban on-road parking, like the Japanese?
Would free up space equivalent to 16 motorways.
My Spanish Father-in-Law doesn't understand why the UK doesn't build underground carparks as all the towns in Spain seem to have. Simples - because we are incompetent and corrupt. And they are not.
Hang on - I hear right wing voices say - the Spanish ARE corrupt. And that is true. And yet they can stick underground car parks into their towns and we can't afford to...
I haven't heard of this before - can we have examples of these underground car parks in all the towns in Spain?
Quite common in France - the classic in towns such as Fontainebleau is that they dug out the town square, and then put a nice tuned up version of the town square back on top.
I started this on previous thread and think it needs some discussion.
The current odds for the 4 favourite teams (SA, IRE, FRA, NZ) are all 3-1 to 4-1. Probably a fair reflection with no value to be seen. England are then at 10/1, with Wales 22/1. England looks about right but not in comparison to Wales - not because of any perception in strength - but because of the run in of both teams. England have not qualified yet and still need to beat Samoa to do so (not a foregone conclusion). England will then probably play Fiji (who beat them recently) while Wales probably play Argentina (who have not impressed). After that Wales and England have a similar route through SF & F. My point is that the odds are overpriced for England in comparison to Wales - there is definitely value in the Welsh odds - not in England.
I think England have not absolutely technically qualified, but I cannot see how they miss out in reality. Argentina, Samoa and Japan all have two games left. England on 14 points, Argentina on 4, Samoa and Japan on 5. BUT Japan play Samoa and they can't both win. Also Japan play Argentina, and they can't both win.
So Samoa can win two games (including a 5 pointer against England) and reach 15 points. If they do Japan can only get 7 points max (and that with a win over Argentina, which would send England through).
Argentina win two games with a bonus point to get to 14? Then Samoa get to 15 points (two bonus point wins?) and this knocks out England (is it game vs the side on equals points or points difference? - If the latter Argentina have a mountain to climb).
I think it will be England vs Fiji and Wales vs Argentina. Both winnable by the 6N team so then its 180 minutes from glory.
I actually thought Wales were excellent on Sunday, and they must have a shout in any semi-final. The defence was superb.
England has two games in the greasy 8 (actually 9) pm slot, and then a game at 5 with much better ball skills, albeit against a poor Chile.
We’ve already played Chile
Read it again (apols if not clear - our three matches have been two at 8 pm and one at 5 - the Chile game),
There are tantalising rumours on TwitterX that we are alarmingly close to AGI - true Artificial Intelligence - or, that OpenAI have actually achieved it already
It’s bizarre that more people aren’t talking about this; if it is true it is one of the biggest news stories in human history
You mean one of the AI companies is going for another funding round.
No, not that. OpenAI has all the money it needs, and more
There are tantalising rumours on TwitterX that we are alarmingly close to AGI - true Artificial Intelligence - or, that OpenAI have actually achieved it already
It’s bizarre that more people aren’t talking about this; if it is true it is one of the biggest news stories in human history
There are tantalising rumours on TwitterX that we have met aliens who can travel across space to visit us.
It's bizarre that more people aren't talking about this; if it is true* it is one of the biggest news stories in human history.
* It is not true
It really might be true
When I bang on about AI, @Benpointer always says “get back to me when a robot can stack my dishwasher”. And it’s a fair point
Well, now a robot can easily stack a dishwasher, and what’s more it can learn this simply by watching you do it first
“With enough strength and dexterity, Tesla's Bot could handle almost all physical tasks by simply looking at video clips of people doing said tasks.
Picking up a vacuum and running it through the house. Sorting and folding laundry. Tidying up the house. Moving material from point A to point B. Picking up trash and placing it in a bin. Pushing a lawnmower. Monitor an area for safety-related concerns. Laying bricks. Hammering nails. Using power tools. Clean dishes... etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.”
(I'm fairly bullish on AI, but Optimus feels more like one of Elon's toy projects than something real - if it gets to the point where it can make Boston Dynamics-style videos in 5-10 years time, I think he'll be happy)
I expect them to scrap the link to Manchester and instead say they’ll improve west to east links . The public have never really got behind HS2 and the Tories want some cash to spend on other projects that are more voter friendly .
Not sure if anyone saw Newsnight but the comparison between cost per mile of building track in the UK compared to other major country’s was shocking.
Jaw dropping in fact .
Is it caused by the huge cost of compensation in this country compared to elsewhere? Maybe it's because we're more densely populated than nearly every other European country, so whereas in places like Spain and France it's relatively easy to route a new train line through mostly empty areas, it's much more difficult to do that here. I was using the Spanish high speed trains in February/March this year and I was surprised to see how utterly empty a lot of the countryside was.
Also, on the subject of cancelling the line to M'chester, what some people don't seem to realise is that they've already spent a huge amount of money on some of the infrastructure for the B'ham to M'chester route, so if they cancel it all of that will be wasted, and also all the disruption they've already caused in that area will have been for nothing. I hope Starmer decides to go ahead with it when he becomes PM (which seems very likely to happen now).
The Times have a very good article on it today, if you can get behind the paywall.
I have a theory that the more political a project is (like Palace of Westminster Restoration and Renewal, which is absolutely political and could fall or burn down at any time), or HS2, which simply crosses far too many constituencies for it not to be, the worse its governance will be because politicians simply can't help making kneejerk uninformed decisions and that's death to big infrastructure.
I think we really need a dedicated national infrastructure council that is at one remove from day to day political machinations that can make these kinds of long term decisions, ideally creating a pipeline of projects so that expertise in planning and contracting is not lost from one project to the next. On Westminster I think the building is too expensive to renovate as a working Parliament. They should simply pay to preserve it as an important national monument and move the parliament elsewhere. Maybe put them in tunnels under Euston until they complete HS2 to Manchester and Leeds. That might concentrate minds s bit.
Make Westminster a museum absolutely!
Move Parliament and the Civil Service out of London and into a new build city.
Looking at a map, North of York, East of Hull there seems to be quite a bit of land that's neither well developed nor in an AONB. Or between Grimsby and Scunthorpe could be another good location, though that's getting close to Lincolnshire Wolds AONB.
Build a new capital city for Parliament and the Civil Service there, in the form of Washington DC or Canberra, then see how quickly infrastructure gets developed.
Do you mean west of Hull? (Noth)East of Hull you'd have parliament on sea. Good luck taking on th NIMBYs in the Yorkshire Wolds (rolling countryside, less spectacular than moors or dales, but still popular). Proposed to my wife on a walk in the Wolds.
I'd tend to pop if somewhere Leeds/Bradford or further north to Darlington/Northallerton area to be more central for a UK parliament (Shetland can bugger off and join Norway if they don't consider that central-enough )
Sorry I wrote it backwards, I meant North of Hull, East of York.
Approximately where the small town of Driffield (never heard of it) is, or around that area, but its just one suggestion there's plenty of other valid suggestions.
I would suggest wherever it is, is not on an existing motorway network or high speed rail network.
Set a five year deadline maybe for construction then relocation of every single civil servant and Parliamentarian to be out of London by then. Get Parliament and the heads of the Civil Service all in that new build city and let them struggle with the infrastructure as it is, if they've not unlocked investment yet. See how quickly funding for investment becomes available.
Yeah, they'll have your balls on toasting fork in Driffield for suggesting flooding it with parliamentarians and roads and outsiders
It isn't the worst idea in the world. It would fix so many issues that are outstanding from when I first lived in Yorkshire. The Ouse Bridge would be fixed replaced as they'd upgrade the A63 to motorway all the way into Hull. Stamford Bridge would finally get a bypass. You'd have the restoration of the train line between Hull and York (Beverley is cut adrift at the moment thanks to Dr Beeching). Full fibre everywhere (not tied to KCOM). High-end retailers. Soaring property prices.
Great Driffield. The legislative capital of a post-Brexit United Kingdom. Those sunlit uplands (or Wolds) look marvellous.
I can just see Jacob Rees-Mogg in Boyes or Yorkshire Trading Company...
Heh, I know. Seriously considered a move to Driffield around three years back, for a specific house. Stayed (near Selby) and extended due to a load of family in the immediate area and better commute options.
Should indeed be motorway to Hull. Heading that way, you feel like you must somehow have missed the Hull turn-off when the road gets smaller!
The market is deciding. The hysteria about the announcement last week was partly synthetic and partly misplaced. Just because people can sell something doesn’t mean they will.
Auto makers work on cycle times of years on products and platforms. They’d not be likely to chop and change at the govts whim.
But this can't be true. It was Keir Starmer forcing Nissan et al to ditch petrol. Sunak saved people from having to buy an electric car, it was in all the right newspapers and TV news shows. Thanks to Rishi making Long-Term Decisions for a Brighter Future, the dread threat of all EV by 2030 was removed.
Nissan must be mistaken .
Nissan don't make new cars at the £13k entry level range of the market like the Kia Picanto etc
By 2030 it seems entirely plausible that an electric juke will be as cheap as a petrol Juke, but it does not look likely that an electric Picanto would be available as cheap as a petrol Picanto.
So again, if in 6 years time if you could get a cheap petrol vehicle like the Picanto for £13k in real terms, but if the cheapest electric is in real terms £21k (currently £27k is cheapest) then should the Picanto be outlawed and people who want to buy it be forced to pay eight grand more?
We need to continue with what the market has been doing from Tesla onwards which is to start at the top of the market and work down with electrification, not the other way around. If in 2030 the only petrol vehicles the market still offers is 1.0 litre runarounds like the Picanto simply because electrification of them isn't affordably ready yet, then what's the harm in that?
We shouldn't really go by capital price but by the cost paid per month by the purchaser. Given that only a very small fraction of people buying new cars pay cash on the full price for them, and 80-80% get PCP (we can debate the wisdom of going the PCP route, but for this, we simply recognise that such is the default route to new car purchase at the moment and therefore what the market will be following), we need to look at the main monthly expenditure of the purchaser.
Which is PCP monthly payment plus petrol or electricity costs.
Petrol comes in at c. £1.50 per litre at the moment.
The majority of those buying electric cars will be recharging at home overnight (70%+: there's a need to address the needs of those who cannot do this, but, again, the overall market is driven by those who can do this. And the core need would be to fill in the gap for those who can't). At the moment, an EV tariff from Octopus gives £0.075 per kWh overnight.
The Picanto does c. 13 miles per litre. Assuming the default given by Kia on their finance calculator of 10,000 miles per year, that costs £1,155 per year in petrol, or £96.30 per month. The finance calculator for the Picanto gives (at 10% down payment of £1,350) a cost of £206.58 per month on PCP. This leads to a cost on PCP plus fuel of £302.88 per month to the purchaser.
The Ceed comes in at £21k, so the finance for a putative £21k Kia EV can be looked at on the same site (which helps) and comes out at £342.02 per month (using the same £1350 deposit, which is under 10% this time and probably incurs a slightly higher interest rate, but we need it to be comparable for the purchaser). If the EV has an efficiency similar to the MGZ4 (3.8 miles/kWh), it would cost £197.37 per year in electricity, or £16.45 per month). Cost is then £358.37 per month to the purchaser for PCP plus electricity.
The difference is therefore 18% more expensive to the purchaser for the 21k EV over the 13k ICE rather than the 61% of the sticker price. You only need the price to fall to about £18k to be the same affordability as a £13k ICE to the purchaser, to all intents and purposes.
A large portion of people buying cheap small cars are parking on the street not off road. I certainly was.
Even based on your average that 30% will not be recharging at home overnight that needs to be included in the maths, but I strongly suspect that 30% is disproportionately those buying smaller, cheaper vehicles.
Compare like-for-like by comparing recharging rates at commercial charging stations and redo your maths.
Want to fix electric for everyone? Addressing the charging issue is the biggest issue to tackle, not quibble over a year or two for the transition to electric.
Perhaps we should ban on-road parking, like the Japanese?
Would free up space equivalent to 16 motorways.
My Spanish Father-in-Law doesn't understand why the UK doesn't build underground carparks as all the towns in Spain seem to have. Simples - because we are incompetent and corrupt. And they are not.
Hang on - I hear right wing voices say - the Spanish ARE corrupt. And that is true. And yet they can stick underground car parks into their towns and we can't afford to...
I’m a big fan of underground car parks and was impressed when I moved to Geneva by the scale and quantity of them - even one right by where the lake joins the Rhône which must have been an engineering marvel to plan. Beautifully finished too with classical music piped out (no Vivaldi Four Seasons either). I’m not sure though whether these were private enterprises or state.
I think the last sentence is key that it is, I guess, infinitely more expensive to excavate 8 stories down than knock up a car park 8 stories up so if you are a private car park co in the UK you have a potentially exorbitant extra cost and so would need to offset it by becoming a property developer too to build flats or offices in the land above it to make it financially viable.
You would probably also face some weird laws about who owns the land underground - probably the queen’s swans - and then people would block the planning permission as the disruption to their pipes and services underground would be intolerable and they already have a car parking space in their house.
The key is to streamline and smarten up our ridiculously convoluted planning system and property taxes.
As well as streamlining planning to make changes easier, replace all land-based taxes with a simple land value tax.
A plot of land in an area zoned for planning permission for development should face exactly the same taxes whether 'banked' and undeveloped, or its built for detached homes with off road parking, or a block of flats with underground parking.
For flats etc having underground parking should be a value add that can be offered, but if added it shouldn't attract any tax since the tax should remain on the pure land value.
There are tantalising rumours on TwitterX that we are alarmingly close to AGI - true Artificial Intelligence - or, that OpenAI have actually achieved it already
It’s bizarre that more people aren’t talking about this; if it is true it is one of the biggest news stories in human history
You mean one of the AI companies is going for another funding round.
No, not that. OpenAI has all the money it needs, and more
Amazon, which is known for its bad business decisions, foolishly invested $4bn in AI just yesterday
Facebook, which is known for its bad business decisions, foolishly invested $13.7 billion in the Metaverse the last three years...
See - I can make true statements that could be read as sarcastic or could just be true too.
The Metaverse is a load of shite. Which is why no other tech company has followed Zuckerberg. EVERY big tech company is piling into AI
Facebook backed the wrong horse tho they are now rapidly striving to catch up
Loads of people invested in the metaverse. And in crypto and NFTs. Tech bros are trying to build a new saviour for their view of capitalism and they all end up being grifts.
AI will be able to do some things in the near future, sure; but a humanoid learning robot is not a thing we have yet. A dude wearing a green screen costume, or a CGI robot (or a bit of both) is the Occam's Razor right now until we have more than "twitter is saying"
I expect them to scrap the link to Manchester and instead say they’ll improve west to east links . The public have never really got behind HS2 and the Tories want some cash to spend on other projects that are more voter friendly .
Not sure if anyone saw Newsnight but the comparison between cost per mile of building track in the UK compared to other major country’s was shocking.
Jaw dropping in fact .
Is it caused by the huge cost of compensation in this country compared to elsewhere? Maybe it's because we're more densely populated than nearly every other European country, so whereas in places like Spain and France it's relatively easy to route a new train line through mostly empty areas, it's much more difficult to do that here. I was using the Spanish high speed trains in February/March this year and I was surprised to see how utterly empty a lot of the countryside was.
Also, on the subject of cancelling the line to M'chester, what some people don't seem to realise is that they've already spent a huge amount of money on some of the infrastructure for the B'ham to M'chester route, so if they cancel it all of that will be wasted, and also all the disruption they've already caused in that area will have been for nothing. I hope Starmer decides to go ahead with it when he becomes PM (which seems very likely to happen now).
The Times have a very good article on it today, if you can get behind the paywall.
I have a theory that the more political a project is (like Palace of Westminster Restoration and Renewal, which is absolutely political and could fall or burn down at any time), or HS2, which simply crosses far too many constituencies for it not to be, the worse its governance will be because politicians simply can't help making kneejerk uninformed decisions and that's death to big infrastructure.
I think we really need a dedicated national infrastructure council that is at one remove from day to day political machinations that can make these kinds of long term decisions, ideally creating a pipeline of projects so that expertise in planning and contracting is not lost from one project to the next. On Westminster I think the building is too expensive to renovate as a working Parliament. They should simply pay to preserve it as an important national monument and move the parliament elsewhere. Maybe put them in tunnels under Euston until they complete HS2 to Manchester and Leeds. That might concentrate minds s bit.
I would tour parliament around the country, spending 6 months in each place.
Like the EU parliament then?
They only use two cities IIRC. Spending 6 months in Hull or Dundee might make MPs view life in a different way.
Mrs May tried a Cabinet Meeting in Scotland. Booked some village hall halfway to Balmoral from Aberdeen. Not quite the spirit of the thing.
There are tantalising rumours on TwitterX that we are alarmingly close to AGI - true Artificial Intelligence - or, that OpenAI have actually achieved it already
It’s bizarre that more people aren’t talking about this; if it is true it is one of the biggest news stories in human history
There are tantalising rumours on TwitterX that we have met aliens who can travel across space to visit us.
It's bizarre that more people aren't talking about this; if it is true* it is one of the biggest news stories in human history.
* It is not true
It really might be true
When I bang on about AI, @Benpointer always says “get back to me when a robot can stack my dishwasher”. And it’s a fair point
Well, now a robot can easily stack a dishwasher, and what’s more it can learn this simply by watching you do it first
“With enough strength and dexterity, Tesla's Bot could handle almost all physical tasks by simply looking at video clips of people doing said tasks.
Picking up a vacuum and running it through the house. Sorting and folding laundry. Tidying up the house. Moving material from point A to point B. Picking up trash and placing it in a bin. Pushing a lawnmower. Monitor an area for safety-related concerns. Laying bricks. Hammering nails. Using power tools. Clean dishes... etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.”
(I'm fairly bullish on AI, but Optimus feels more like one of Elon's toy projects than something real - if it gets to the point where it can make Boston Dynamics-style videos in 5-10 years time, I think he'll be happy)
But we are clearly close to a “dishwasher stacking” AI robot, which is my original point. As that is the Turing Test proposed by @Benpointer
There are tantalising rumours on TwitterX that we are alarmingly close to AGI - true Artificial Intelligence - or, that OpenAI have actually achieved it already
It’s bizarre that more people aren’t talking about this; if it is true it is one of the biggest news stories in human history
There are tantalising rumours on TwitterX that we have met aliens who can travel across space to visit us.
It's bizarre that more people aren't talking about this; if it is true* it is one of the biggest news stories in human history.
* It is not true
It really might be true
When I bang on about AI, @Benpointer always says “get back to me when a robot can stack my dishwasher”. And it’s a fair point
Well, now a robot can easily stack a dishwasher, and what’s more it can learn this simply by watching you do it first
“With enough strength and dexterity, Tesla's Bot could handle almost all physical tasks by simply looking at video clips of people doing said tasks.
Picking up a vacuum and running it through the house. Sorting and folding laundry. Tidying up the house. Moving material from point A to point B. Picking up trash and placing it in a bin. Pushing a lawnmower. Monitor an area for safety-related concerns. Laying bricks. Hammering nails. Using power tools. Clean dishes... etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.”
See rifle. Pick up rifle. See magazine. Load magazine into rifle. Chamber first round into rifle. Locate human. Kill human. Locate next human. Kill next human. Locate...
Argument is raging on Twitter as to whether that robot video is real
What do PBers think?
The question seems to be - should we trust Elon Musk, or wait a bit and see if anyone reputable reports on this... I know where my money is going.
You don’t know, do you? And what does that tell you?
Think about it
Most of what is being sold as AI right now is just an elaborate mechanical Turk - some guy in the Philippines is teaching a computer what a bollard is by manually clicking every picture of a bollard he can until the computer gets the general idea of what a bollard is and when it isn't a post box, and that guy is going to be the future of how missiles tell the differences between civilians and soldiers.
The market is deciding. The hysteria about the announcement last week was partly synthetic and partly misplaced. Just because people can sell something doesn’t mean they will.
Auto makers work on cycle times of years on products and platforms. They’d not be likely to chop and change at the govts whim.
But this can't be true. It was Keir Starmer forcing Nissan et al to ditch petrol. Sunak saved people from having to buy an electric car, it was in all the right newspapers and TV news shows. Thanks to Rishi making Long-Term Decisions for a Brighter Future, the dread threat of all EV by 2030 was removed.
Nissan must be mistaken .
Nissan don't make new cars at the £13k entry level range of the market like the Kia Picanto etc
By 2030 it seems entirely plausible that an electric juke will be as cheap as a petrol Juke, but it does not look likely that an electric Picanto would be available as cheap as a petrol Picanto.
So again, if in 6 years time if you could get a cheap petrol vehicle like the Picanto for £13k in real terms, but if the cheapest electric is in real terms £21k (currently £27k is cheapest) then should the Picanto be outlawed and people who want to buy it be forced to pay eight grand more?
We need to continue with what the market has been doing from Tesla onwards which is to start at the top of the market and work down with electrification, not the other way around. If in 2030 the only petrol vehicles the market still offers is 1.0 litre runarounds like the Picanto simply because electrification of them isn't affordably ready yet, then what's the harm in that?
We shouldn't really go by capital price but by the cost paid per month by the purchaser. Given that only a very small fraction of people buying new cars pay cash on the full price for them, and 80-80% get PCP (we can debate the wisdom of going the PCP route, but for this, we simply recognise that such is the default route to new car purchase at the moment and therefore what the market will be following), we need to look at the main monthly expenditure of the purchaser.
Which is PCP monthly payment plus petrol or electricity costs.
Petrol comes in at c. £1.50 per litre at the moment.
The majority of those buying electric cars will be recharging at home overnight (70%+: there's a need to address the needs of those who cannot do this, but, again, the overall market is driven by those who can do this. And the core need would be to fill in the gap for those who can't). At the moment, an EV tariff from Octopus gives £0.075 per kWh overnight.
The Picanto does c. 13 miles per litre. Assuming the default given by Kia on their finance calculator of 10,000 miles per year, that costs £1,155 per year in petrol, or £96.30 per month. The finance calculator for the Picanto gives (at 10% down payment of £1,350) a cost of £206.58 per month on PCP. This leads to a cost on PCP plus fuel of £302.88 per month to the purchaser.
The Ceed comes in at £21k, so the finance for a putative £21k Kia EV can be looked at on the same site (which helps) and comes out at £342.02 per month (using the same £1350 deposit, which is under 10% this time and probably incurs a slightly higher interest rate, but we need it to be comparable for the purchaser). If the EV has an efficiency similar to the MGZ4 (3.8 miles/kWh), it would cost £197.37 per year in electricity, or £16.45 per month). Cost is then £358.37 per month to the purchaser for PCP plus electricity.
The difference is therefore 18% more expensive to the purchaser for the 21k EV over the 13k ICE rather than the 61% of the sticker price. You only need the price to fall to about £18k to be the same affordability as a £13k ICE to the purchaser, to all intents and purposes.
A large portion of people buying cheap small cars are parking on the street not off road. I certainly was.
Even based on your average that 30% will not be recharging at home overnight that needs to be included in the maths, but I strongly suspect that 30% is disproportionately those buying smaller, cheaper vehicles.
Compare like-for-like by comparing recharging rates at commercial charging stations and redo your maths.
Want to fix electric for everyone? Addressing the charging issue is the biggest issue to tackle, not quibble over a year or two for the transition to electric.
Perhaps we should ban on-road parking, like the Japanese?
Would free up space equivalent to 16 motorways.
My Spanish Father-in-Law doesn't understand why the UK doesn't build underground carparks as all the towns in Spain seem to have. Simples - because we are incompetent and corrupt. And they are not.
Hang on - I hear right wing voices say - the Spanish ARE corrupt. And that is true. And yet they can stick underground car parks into their towns and we can't afford to...
Planners don’t approve them because more parking encourages driving. Or something.
There are tantalising rumours on TwitterX that we are alarmingly close to AGI - true Artificial Intelligence - or, that OpenAI have actually achieved it already
It’s bizarre that more people aren’t talking about this; if it is true it is one of the biggest news stories in human history
There are tantalising rumours on TwitterX that we have met aliens who can travel across space to visit us.
It's bizarre that more people aren't talking about this; if it is true* it is one of the biggest news stories in human history.
* It is not true
It really might be true
When I bang on about AI, @Benpointer always says “get back to me when a robot can stack my dishwasher”. And it’s a fair point
Well, now a robot can easily stack a dishwasher, and what’s more it can learn this simply by watching you do it first
“With enough strength and dexterity, Tesla's Bot could handle almost all physical tasks by simply looking at video clips of people doing said tasks.
Picking up a vacuum and running it through the house. Sorting and folding laundry. Tidying up the house. Moving material from point A to point B. Picking up trash and placing it in a bin. Pushing a lawnmower. Monitor an area for safety-related concerns. Laying bricks. Hammering nails. Using power tools. Clean dishes... etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.”
I can find you a parrot that can recite poetry - doesn't mean it can write you any.
Are learning machines cool? Yes. But at the end of the day they're automatons that can, at a basic level, do simple tasks in relatively stable environments. Complex tasks in other scenarios are out of reach. All the hype is just sales - of course people who own stocks in AI companies would claim it would end the world or be the gadget of the future, because they'll rake the money in.
It is not coincidental that the new "AI is going to be able to do everything" line came after the "Meta is going to be the new frontier" fell through and the "NFTs and the blockchain are going to revolutionise everything" idea was proven false. Capitalism always needs a new frontier, to exploit and sell and commodify, and tech bros think they can build the next one. So far they're failing.
In my view the free chat programmes available online have written reasoning capabilities that exceed that of most graduate level professionals with over 20 years of high level report writing experience. They can write better than people who have been doing decision making and report writing for their entire career. From a management point of view they surpass most humans in knowing how to respond to situations in difficult correspondence exercises.
It is an inevitable human reaction to deny this or not look at it, but it won't help.
There are tantalising rumours on TwitterX that we are alarmingly close to AGI - true Artificial Intelligence - or, that OpenAI have actually achieved it already
It’s bizarre that more people aren’t talking about this; if it is true it is one of the biggest news stories in human history
There are tantalising rumours on TwitterX that we have met aliens who can travel across space to visit us.
It's bizarre that more people aren't talking about this; if it is true* it is one of the biggest news stories in human history.
* It is not true
It really might be true
When I bang on about AI, @Benpointer always says “get back to me when a robot can stack my dishwasher”. And it’s a fair point
Well, now a robot can easily stack a dishwasher, and what’s more it can learn this simply by watching you do it first
“With enough strength and dexterity, Tesla's Bot could handle almost all physical tasks by simply looking at video clips of people doing said tasks.
Picking up a vacuum and running it through the house. Sorting and folding laundry. Tidying up the house. Moving material from point A to point B. Picking up trash and placing it in a bin. Pushing a lawnmower. Monitor an area for safety-related concerns. Laying bricks. Hammering nails. Using power tools. Clean dishes... etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.”
(I'm fairly bullish on AI, but Optimus feels more like one of Elon's toy projects than something real - if it gets to the point where it can make Boston Dynamics-style videos in 5-10 years time, I think he'll be happy)
But we are clearly close to a “dishwasher stacking” AI robot, which is my original point. As that is the Turing Test proposed by @Benpointer
What? You're saying we're close to an AI robot that can walk into a kitchen, notice a pile of washing up, identify it needs cleaning, identify the dishwasher, go to the dishwasher, open the dishwasher, put the dirty things in the dishwasher and close the dishwasher?
On the evidence of a dodgy video of a robot looking thing picking up oversized lego blocks? On Twitter?
I would say I have a bridge to sell you, but I'm sure you already bought an NFT of one that you're sure will make you rich in the future.
The market is deciding. The hysteria about the announcement last week was partly synthetic and partly misplaced. Just because people can sell something doesn’t mean they will.
Auto makers work on cycle times of years on products and platforms. They’d not be likely to chop and change at the govts whim.
But this can't be true. It was Keir Starmer forcing Nissan et al to ditch petrol. Sunak saved people from having to buy an electric car, it was in all the right newspapers and TV news shows. Thanks to Rishi making Long-Term Decisions for a Brighter Future, the dread threat of all EV by 2030 was removed.
Nissan must be mistaken .
Nissan don't make new cars at the £13k entry level range of the market like the Kia Picanto etc
By 2030 it seems entirely plausible that an electric juke will be as cheap as a petrol Juke, but it does not look likely that an electric Picanto would be available as cheap as a petrol Picanto.
So again, if in 6 years time if you could get a cheap petrol vehicle like the Picanto for £13k in real terms, but if the cheapest electric is in real terms £21k (currently £27k is cheapest) then should the Picanto be outlawed and people who want to buy it be forced to pay eight grand more?
We need to continue with what the market has been doing from Tesla onwards which is to start at the top of the market and work down with electrification, not the other way around. If in 2030 the only petrol vehicles the market still offers is 1.0 litre runarounds like the Picanto simply because electrification of them isn't affordably ready yet, then what's the harm in that?
We shouldn't really go by capital price but by the cost paid per month by the purchaser. Given that only a very small fraction of people buying new cars pay cash on the full price for them, and 80-80% get PCP (we can debate the wisdom of going the PCP route, but for this, we simply recognise that such is the default route to new car purchase at the moment and therefore what the market will be following), we need to look at the main monthly expenditure of the purchaser.
Which is PCP monthly payment plus petrol or electricity costs.
Petrol comes in at c. £1.50 per litre at the moment.
The majority of those buying electric cars will be recharging at home overnight (70%+: there's a need to address the needs of those who cannot do this, but, again, the overall market is driven by those who can do this. And the core need would be to fill in the gap for those who can't). At the moment, an EV tariff from Octopus gives £0.075 per kWh overnight.
The Picanto does c. 13 miles per litre. Assuming the default given by Kia on their finance calculator of 10,000 miles per year, that costs £1,155 per year in petrol, or £96.30 per month. The finance calculator for the Picanto gives (at 10% down payment of £1,350) a cost of £206.58 per month on PCP. This leads to a cost on PCP plus fuel of £302.88 per month to the purchaser.
The Ceed comes in at £21k, so the finance for a putative £21k Kia EV can be looked at on the same site (which helps) and comes out at £342.02 per month (using the same £1350 deposit, which is under 10% this time and probably incurs a slightly higher interest rate, but we need it to be comparable for the purchaser). If the EV has an efficiency similar to the MGZ4 (3.8 miles/kWh), it would cost £197.37 per year in electricity, or £16.45 per month). Cost is then £358.37 per month to the purchaser for PCP plus electricity.
The difference is therefore 18% more expensive to the purchaser for the 21k EV over the 13k ICE rather than the 61% of the sticker price. You only need the price to fall to about £18k to be the same affordability as a £13k ICE to the purchaser, to all intents and purposes.
A large portion of people buying cheap small cars are parking on the street not off road. I certainly was.
Even based on your average that 30% will not be recharging at home overnight that needs to be included in the maths, but I strongly suspect that 30% is disproportionately those buying smaller, cheaper vehicles.
Compare like-for-like by comparing recharging rates at commercial charging stations and redo your maths.
Want to fix electric for everyone? Addressing the charging issue is the biggest issue to tackle, not quibble over a year or two for the transition to electric.
Perhaps we should ban on-road parking, like the Japanese?
Would free up space equivalent to 16 motorways.
My Spanish Father-in-Law doesn't understand why the UK doesn't build underground carparks as all the towns in Spain seem to have. Simples - because we are incompetent and corrupt. And they are not.
Hang on - I hear right wing voices say - the Spanish ARE corrupt. And that is true. And yet they can stick underground car parks into their towns and we can't afford to...
I haven't heard of this before - can we have examples of these underground car parks in all the towns in Spain?
Quite common in France - the classic in towns such as Fontainebleau is that they dug out the town square, and then put a nice tuned up version of the town square back on top.
I was pondering yesterday on the strange anomaly of airports. If ever there were a good place to have underground parking these are surely it:
- everyone hates going out miles on a shuttle bus to a huge car park on the perimeter, and it’s a mad waste of hectares of land - You can’t build very tall multi-storeys because of the planes, and it’s a waste to have one right by the terminal like in LHR when that could be taken by airport hotels - They dig up the land and create all sorts of ducting and subterranean units when they create airports anyway, why not bury a huge car park at the same time?
Obviously not directly under the runway but adjacent and below the terminals.
I expect them to scrap the link to Manchester and instead say they’ll improve west to east links . The public have never really got behind HS2 and the Tories want some cash to spend on other projects that are more voter friendly .
Not sure if anyone saw Newsnight but the comparison between cost per mile of building track in the UK compared to other major country’s was shocking.
Jaw dropping in fact .
Is it caused by the huge cost of compensation in this country compared to elsewhere? Maybe it's because we're more densely populated than nearly every other European country, so whereas in places like Spain and France it's relatively easy to route a new train line through mostly empty areas, it's much more difficult to do that here. I was using the Spanish high speed trains in February/March this year and I was surprised to see how utterly empty a lot of the countryside was.
Also, on the subject of cancelling the line to M'chester, what some people don't seem to realise is that they've already spent a huge amount of money on some of the infrastructure for the B'ham to M'chester route, so if they cancel it all of that will be wasted, and also all the disruption they've already caused in that area will have been for nothing. I hope Starmer decides to go ahead with it when he becomes PM (which seems very likely to happen now).
The Times have a very good article on it today, if you can get behind the paywall.
I have a theory that the more political a project is (like Palace of Westminster Restoration and Renewal, which is absolutely political and could fall or burn down at any time), or HS2, which simply crosses far too many constituencies for it not to be, the worse its governance will be because politicians simply can't help making kneejerk uninformed decisions and that's death to big infrastructure.
I think we really need a dedicated national infrastructure council that is at one remove from day to day political machinations that can make these kinds of long term decisions, ideally creating a pipeline of projects so that expertise in planning and contracting is not lost from one project to the next. On Westminster I think the building is too expensive to renovate as a working Parliament. They should simply pay to preserve it as an important national monument and move the parliament elsewhere. Maybe put them in tunnels under Euston until they complete HS2 to Manchester and Leeds. That might concentrate minds s bit.
Make Westminster a museum absolutely!
Move Parliament and the Civil Service out of London and into a new build city.
Looking at a map, North of York, East of Hull there seems to be quite a bit of land that's neither well developed nor in an AONB. Or between Grimsby and Scunthorpe could be another good location, though that's getting close to Lincolnshire Wolds AONB.
Build a new capital city for Parliament and the Civil Service there, in the form of Washington DC or Canberra, then see how quickly infrastructure gets developed.
Do you mean west of Hull? (Noth)East of Hull you'd have parliament on sea. Good luck taking on th NIMBYs in the Yorkshire Wolds (rolling countryside, less spectacular than moors or dales, but still popular). Proposed to my wife on a walk in the Wolds.
I'd tend to pop if somewhere Leeds/Bradford or further north to Darlington/Northallerton area to be more central for a UK parliament (Shetland can bugger off and join Norway if they don't consider that central-enough )
Sorry I wrote it backwards, I meant North of Hull, East of York.
Approximately where the small town of Driffield (never heard of it) is, or around that area, but its just one suggestion there's plenty of other valid suggestions.
I would suggest wherever it is, is not on an existing motorway network or high speed rail network.
Set a five year deadline maybe for construction then relocation of every single civil servant and Parliamentarian to be out of London by then. Get Parliament and the heads of the Civil Service all in that new build city and let them struggle with the infrastructure as it is, if they've not unlocked investment yet. See how quickly funding for investment becomes available.
Yeah, they'll have your balls on toasting fork in Driffield for suggesting flooding it with parliamentarians and roads and outsiders
It isn't the worst idea in the world. It would fix so many issues that are outstanding from when I first lived in Yorkshire. The Ouse Bridge would be fixed replaced as they'd upgrade the A63 to motorway all the way into Hull. Stamford Bridge would finally get a bypass. You'd have the restoration of the train line between Hull and York (Beverley is cut adrift at the moment thanks to Dr Beeching). Full fibre everywhere (not tied to KCOM). High-end retailers. Soaring property prices.
Great Driffield. The legislative capital of a post-Brexit United Kingdom. Those sunlit uplands (or Wolds) look marvellous.
I can just see Jacob Rees-Mogg in Boyes or Yorkshire Trading Company...
Heh, I know. Seriously considered a move to Driffield around three years back, for a specific house. Stayed (near Selby) and extended due to a load of family in the immediate area and better commute options.
Should indeed be motorway to Hull. Heading that way, you feel like you must somehow have missed the Hull turn-off when the road gets smaller!
Don't get me wrong. Properties are value for money. Access to good transport links (meaning you have to drive to the M62 or the A64/A1/M1 or catch the train to Hull first). Plenty of old money around. Access to the coast. Nice area.
But it takes ages to get anywhere. You feel like you've done a day's journey just to get to civilisation.
The market is deciding. The hysteria about the announcement last week was partly synthetic and partly misplaced. Just because people can sell something doesn’t mean they will.
Auto makers work on cycle times of years on products and platforms. They’d not be likely to chop and change at the govts whim.
But this can't be true. It was Keir Starmer forcing Nissan et al to ditch petrol. Sunak saved people from having to buy an electric car, it was in all the right newspapers and TV news shows. Thanks to Rishi making Long-Term Decisions for a Brighter Future, the dread threat of all EV by 2030 was removed.
Nissan must be mistaken .
Nissan don't make new cars at the £13k entry level range of the market like the Kia Picanto etc
By 2030 it seems entirely plausible that an electric juke will be as cheap as a petrol Juke, but it does not look likely that an electric Picanto would be available as cheap as a petrol Picanto.
So again, if in 6 years time if you could get a cheap petrol vehicle like the Picanto for £13k in real terms, but if the cheapest electric is in real terms £21k (currently £27k is cheapest) then should the Picanto be outlawed and people who want to buy it be forced to pay eight grand more?
We need to continue with what the market has been doing from Tesla onwards which is to start at the top of the market and work down with electrification, not the other way around. If in 2030 the only petrol vehicles the market still offers is 1.0 litre runarounds like the Picanto simply because electrification of them isn't affordably ready yet, then what's the harm in that?
We shouldn't really go by capital price but by the cost paid per month by the purchaser. Given that only a very small fraction of people buying new cars pay cash on the full price for them, and 80-80% get PCP (we can debate the wisdom of going the PCP route, but for this, we simply recognise that such is the default route to new car purchase at the moment and therefore what the market will be following), we need to look at the main monthly expenditure of the purchaser.
Which is PCP monthly payment plus petrol or electricity costs.
Petrol comes in at c. £1.50 per litre at the moment.
The majority of those buying electric cars will be recharging at home overnight (70%+: there's a need to address the needs of those who cannot do this, but, again, the overall market is driven by those who can do this. And the core need would be to fill in the gap for those who can't). At the moment, an EV tariff from Octopus gives £0.075 per kWh overnight.
The Picanto does c. 13 miles per litre. Assuming the default given by Kia on their finance calculator of 10,000 miles per year, that costs £1,155 per year in petrol, or £96.30 per month. The finance calculator for the Picanto gives (at 10% down payment of £1,350) a cost of £206.58 per month on PCP. This leads to a cost on PCP plus fuel of £302.88 per month to the purchaser.
The Ceed comes in at £21k, so the finance for a putative £21k Kia EV can be looked at on the same site (which helps) and comes out at £342.02 per month (using the same £1350 deposit, which is under 10% this time and probably incurs a slightly higher interest rate, but we need it to be comparable for the purchaser). If the EV has an efficiency similar to the MGZ4 (3.8 miles/kWh), it would cost £197.37 per year in electricity, or £16.45 per month). Cost is then £358.37 per month to the purchaser for PCP plus electricity.
The difference is therefore 18% more expensive to the purchaser for the 21k EV over the 13k ICE rather than the 61% of the sticker price. You only need the price to fall to about £18k to be the same affordability as a £13k ICE to the purchaser, to all intents and purposes.
A large portion of people buying cheap small cars are parking on the street not off road. I certainly was.
Even based on your average that 30% will not be recharging at home overnight that needs to be included in the maths, but I strongly suspect that 30% is disproportionately those buying smaller, cheaper vehicles.
Compare like-for-like by comparing recharging rates at commercial charging stations and redo your maths.
Want to fix electric for everyone? Addressing the charging issue is the biggest issue to tackle, not quibble over a year or two for the transition to electric.
Perhaps we should ban on-road parking, like the Japanese?
Would free up space equivalent to 16 motorways.
My Spanish Father-in-Law doesn't understand why the UK doesn't build underground carparks as all the towns in Spain seem to have. Simples - because we are incompetent and corrupt. And they are not.
Hang on - I hear right wing voices say - the Spanish ARE corrupt. And that is true. And yet they can stick underground car parks into their towns and we can't afford to...
I’m a big fan of underground car parks and was impressed when I moved to Geneva by the scale and quantity of them - even one right by where the lake joins the Rhône which must have been an engineering marvel to plan. Beautifully finished too with classical music piped out (no Vivaldi Four Seasons either). I’m not sure though whether these were private enterprises or state.
I think the last sentence is key that it is, I guess, infinitely more expensive to excavate 8 stories down than knock up a car park 8 stories up so if you are a private car park co in the UK you have a potentially exorbitant extra cost and so would need to offset it by becoming a property developer too to build flats or offices in the land above it to make it financially viable.
You would probably also face some weird laws about who owns the land underground - probably the queen’s swans - and then people would block the planning permission as the disruption to their pipes and services underground would be intolerable and they already have a car parking space in their house.
The key is to streamline and smarten up our ridiculously convoluted planning system and property taxes.
As well as streamlining planning to make changes easier, replace all land-based taxes with a simple land value tax.
A plot of land in an area zoned for planning permission for development should face exactly the same taxes whether 'banked' and undeveloped, or its built for detached homes with off road parking, or a block of flats with underground parking.
For flats etc having underground parking should be a value add that can be offered, but if added it shouldn't attract any tax since the tax should remain on the pure land value.
Might not be necessary, in the end.
There is a long-term trend of fewer young people bothering to learn to drive, and a huge backlog in lessons and tests due to COVID.
Relative demand for non-car infrastructure will continue to grow, whether you like it or not.
The market is deciding. The hysteria about the announcement last week was partly synthetic and partly misplaced. Just because people can sell something doesn’t mean they will.
Auto makers work on cycle times of years on products and platforms. They’d not be likely to chop and change at the govts whim.
But this can't be true. It was Keir Starmer forcing Nissan et al to ditch petrol. Sunak saved people from having to buy an electric car, it was in all the right newspapers and TV news shows. Thanks to Rishi making Long-Term Decisions for a Brighter Future, the dread threat of all EV by 2030 was removed.
Nissan must be mistaken .
Nissan don't make new cars at the £13k entry level range of the market like the Kia Picanto etc
By 2030 it seems entirely plausible that an electric juke will be as cheap as a petrol Juke, but it does not look likely that an electric Picanto would be available as cheap as a petrol Picanto.
So again, if in 6 years time if you could get a cheap petrol vehicle like the Picanto for £13k in real terms, but if the cheapest electric is in real terms £21k (currently £27k is cheapest) then should the Picanto be outlawed and people who want to buy it be forced to pay eight grand more?
We need to continue with what the market has been doing from Tesla onwards which is to start at the top of the market and work down with electrification, not the other way around. If in 2030 the only petrol vehicles the market still offers is 1.0 litre runarounds like the Picanto simply because electrification of them isn't affordably ready yet, then what's the harm in that?
We shouldn't really go by capital price but by the cost paid per month by the purchaser. Given that only a very small fraction of people buying new cars pay cash on the full price for them, and 80-80% get PCP (we can debate the wisdom of going the PCP route, but for this, we simply recognise that such is the default route to new car purchase at the moment and therefore what the market will be following), we need to look at the main monthly expenditure of the purchaser.
Which is PCP monthly payment plus petrol or electricity costs.
Petrol comes in at c. £1.50 per litre at the moment.
The majority of those buying electric cars will be recharging at home overnight (70%+: there's a need to address the needs of those who cannot do this, but, again, the overall market is driven by those who can do this. And the core need would be to fill in the gap for those who can't). At the moment, an EV tariff from Octopus gives £0.075 per kWh overnight.
The Picanto does c. 13 miles per litre. Assuming the default given by Kia on their finance calculator of 10,000 miles per year, that costs £1,155 per year in petrol, or £96.30 per month. The finance calculator for the Picanto gives (at 10% down payment of £1,350) a cost of £206.58 per month on PCP. This leads to a cost on PCP plus fuel of £302.88 per month to the purchaser.
The Ceed comes in at £21k, so the finance for a putative £21k Kia EV can be looked at on the same site (which helps) and comes out at £342.02 per month (using the same £1350 deposit, which is under 10% this time and probably incurs a slightly higher interest rate, but we need it to be comparable for the purchaser). If the EV has an efficiency similar to the MGZ4 (3.8 miles/kWh), it would cost £197.37 per year in electricity, or £16.45 per month). Cost is then £358.37 per month to the purchaser for PCP plus electricity.
The difference is therefore 18% more expensive to the purchaser for the 21k EV over the 13k ICE rather than the 61% of the sticker price. You only need the price to fall to about £18k to be the same affordability as a £13k ICE to the purchaser, to all intents and purposes.
A large portion of people buying cheap small cars are parking on the street not off road. I certainly was.
Even based on your average that 30% will not be recharging at home overnight that needs to be included in the maths, but I strongly suspect that 30% is disproportionately those buying smaller, cheaper vehicles.
Compare like-for-like by comparing recharging rates at commercial charging stations and redo your maths.
Want to fix electric for everyone? Addressing the charging issue is the biggest issue to tackle, not quibble over a year or two for the transition to electric.
Perhaps we should ban on-road parking, like the Japanese?
Would free up space equivalent to 16 motorways.
Do it, it's so great. Combine it with a land tax so that any temporarily empty plot gets a car park on it to pay the tax.
Could you get the market to do it?
From 2035, if you buy a new car, you must demonstrate that you have private parking provision (with a charger).
That would affect very few people, but give a strong steer to the market that there will be increasing demand for private parking in the next 10 years or so.
They have the private parking provision rule in Japan but it's a load of pointless busywork. You can fulfill it by just renting a parking space for a month then ending the contract.
The way to steer the market is just to charge more and more for on-street parking. If you need to buy off current homeowners when you introduce the system, give them a 10-year lease on a street parking space, with the right to pay for another 10 years, and let them sell it on to the highest bidder if they want to.
The market is deciding. The hysteria about the announcement last week was partly synthetic and partly misplaced. Just because people can sell something doesn’t mean they will.
Auto makers work on cycle times of years on products and platforms. They’d not be likely to chop and change at the govts whim.
But this can't be true. It was Keir Starmer forcing Nissan et al to ditch petrol. Sunak saved people from having to buy an electric car, it was in all the right newspapers and TV news shows. Thanks to Rishi making Long-Term Decisions for a Brighter Future, the dread threat of all EV by 2030 was removed.
Nissan must be mistaken .
Nissan don't make new cars at the £13k entry level range of the market like the Kia Picanto etc
By 2030 it seems entirely plausible that an electric juke will be as cheap as a petrol Juke, but it does not look likely that an electric Picanto would be available as cheap as a petrol Picanto.
So again, if in 6 years time if you could get a cheap petrol vehicle like the Picanto for £13k in real terms, but if the cheapest electric is in real terms £21k (currently £27k is cheapest) then should the Picanto be outlawed and people who want to buy it be forced to pay eight grand more?
We need to continue with what the market has been doing from Tesla onwards which is to start at the top of the market and work down with electrification, not the other way around. If in 2030 the only petrol vehicles the market still offers is 1.0 litre runarounds like the Picanto simply because electrification of them isn't affordably ready yet, then what's the harm in that?
We shouldn't really go by capital price but by the cost paid per month by the purchaser. Given that only a very small fraction of people buying new cars pay cash on the full price for them, and 80-80% get PCP (we can debate the wisdom of going the PCP route, but for this, we simply recognise that such is the default route to new car purchase at the moment and therefore what the market will be following), we need to look at the main monthly expenditure of the purchaser.
Which is PCP monthly payment plus petrol or electricity costs.
Petrol comes in at c. £1.50 per litre at the moment.
The majority of those buying electric cars will be recharging at home overnight (70%+: there's a need to address the needs of those who cannot do this, but, again, the overall market is driven by those who can do this. And the core need would be to fill in the gap for those who can't). At the moment, an EV tariff from Octopus gives £0.075 per kWh overnight.
The Picanto does c. 13 miles per litre. Assuming the default given by Kia on their finance calculator of 10,000 miles per year, that costs £1,155 per year in petrol, or £96.30 per month. The finance calculator for the Picanto gives (at 10% down payment of £1,350) a cost of £206.58 per month on PCP. This leads to a cost on PCP plus fuel of £302.88 per month to the purchaser.
The Ceed comes in at £21k, so the finance for a putative £21k Kia EV can be looked at on the same site (which helps) and comes out at £342.02 per month (using the same £1350 deposit, which is under 10% this time and probably incurs a slightly higher interest rate, but we need it to be comparable for the purchaser). If the EV has an efficiency similar to the MGZ4 (3.8 miles/kWh), it would cost £197.37 per year in electricity, or £16.45 per month). Cost is then £358.37 per month to the purchaser for PCP plus electricity.
The difference is therefore 18% more expensive to the purchaser for the 21k EV over the 13k ICE rather than the 61% of the sticker price. You only need the price to fall to about £18k to be the same affordability as a £13k ICE to the purchaser, to all intents and purposes.
A large portion of people buying cheap small cars are parking on the street not off road. I certainly was.
Even based on your average that 30% will not be recharging at home overnight that needs to be included in the maths, but I strongly suspect that 30% is disproportionately those buying smaller, cheaper vehicles.
Compare like-for-like by comparing recharging rates at commercial charging stations and redo your maths.
Want to fix electric for everyone? Addressing the charging issue is the biggest issue to tackle, not quibble over a year or two for the transition to electric.
Perhaps we should ban on-road parking, like the Japanese?
Would free up space equivalent to 16 motorways.
My Spanish Father-in-Law doesn't understand why the UK doesn't build underground carparks as all the towns in Spain seem to have. Simples - because we are incompetent and corrupt. And they are not.
Hang on - I hear right wing voices say - the Spanish ARE corrupt. And that is true. And yet they can stick underground car parks into their towns and we can't afford to...
I haven't heard of this before - can we have examples of these underground car parks in all the towns in Spain?
Quite common in France - the classic in towns such as Fontainebleau is that they dug out the town square, and then put a nice tuned up version of the town square back on top.
I was pondering yesterday on the strange anomaly of airports. If ever there were a good place to have underground parking these are surely it:
- everyone hates going out miles on a shuttle bus to a huge car park on the perimeter, and it’s a mad waste of hectares of land - You can’t build very tall multi-storeys because of the planes, and it’s a waste to have one right by the terminal like in LHR when that could be taken by airport hotels - They dig up the land and create all sorts of ducting and subterranean units when they create airports anyway, why not bury a huge car park at the same time?
Obviously not directly under the runway but adjacent and below the terminals.
The other thing is solar plants. Why on earth isn’t every airport and airfield carpeted with solar arrays, given the land can’t be used for anything else and is already brownfield?
The market is deciding. The hysteria about the announcement last week was partly synthetic and partly misplaced. Just because people can sell something doesn’t mean they will.
Auto makers work on cycle times of years on products and platforms. They’d not be likely to chop and change at the govts whim.
But this can't be true. It was Keir Starmer forcing Nissan et al to ditch petrol. Sunak saved people from having to buy an electric car, it was in all the right newspapers and TV news shows. Thanks to Rishi making Long-Term Decisions for a Brighter Future, the dread threat of all EV by 2030 was removed.
Nissan must be mistaken .
Nissan don't make new cars at the £13k entry level range of the market like the Kia Picanto etc
By 2030 it seems entirely plausible that an electric juke will be as cheap as a petrol Juke, but it does not look likely that an electric Picanto would be available as cheap as a petrol Picanto.
So again, if in 6 years time if you could get a cheap petrol vehicle like the Picanto for £13k in real terms, but if the cheapest electric is in real terms £21k (currently £27k is cheapest) then should the Picanto be outlawed and people who want to buy it be forced to pay eight grand more?
We need to continue with what the market has been doing from Tesla onwards which is to start at the top of the market and work down with electrification, not the other way around. If in 2030 the only petrol vehicles the market still offers is 1.0 litre runarounds like the Picanto simply because electrification of them isn't affordably ready yet, then what's the harm in that?
We shouldn't really go by capital price but by the cost paid per month by the purchaser. Given that only a very small fraction of people buying new cars pay cash on the full price for them, and 80-80% get PCP (we can debate the wisdom of going the PCP route, but for this, we simply recognise that such is the default route to new car purchase at the moment and therefore what the market will be following), we need to look at the main monthly expenditure of the purchaser.
Which is PCP monthly payment plus petrol or electricity costs.
Petrol comes in at c. £1.50 per litre at the moment.
The majority of those buying electric cars will be recharging at home overnight (70%+: there's a need to address the needs of those who cannot do this, but, again, the overall market is driven by those who can do this. And the core need would be to fill in the gap for those who can't). At the moment, an EV tariff from Octopus gives £0.075 per kWh overnight.
The Picanto does c. 13 miles per litre. Assuming the default given by Kia on their finance calculator of 10,000 miles per year, that costs £1,155 per year in petrol, or £96.30 per month. The finance calculator for the Picanto gives (at 10% down payment of £1,350) a cost of £206.58 per month on PCP. This leads to a cost on PCP plus fuel of £302.88 per month to the purchaser.
The Ceed comes in at £21k, so the finance for a putative £21k Kia EV can be looked at on the same site (which helps) and comes out at £342.02 per month (using the same £1350 deposit, which is under 10% this time and probably incurs a slightly higher interest rate, but we need it to be comparable for the purchaser). If the EV has an efficiency similar to the MGZ4 (3.8 miles/kWh), it would cost £197.37 per year in electricity, or £16.45 per month). Cost is then £358.37 per month to the purchaser for PCP plus electricity.
The difference is therefore 18% more expensive to the purchaser for the 21k EV over the 13k ICE rather than the 61% of the sticker price. You only need the price to fall to about £18k to be the same affordability as a £13k ICE to the purchaser, to all intents and purposes.
A large portion of people buying cheap small cars are parking on the street not off road. I certainly was.
Even based on your average that 30% will not be recharging at home overnight that needs to be included in the maths, but I strongly suspect that 30% is disproportionately those buying smaller, cheaper vehicles.
Compare like-for-like by comparing recharging rates at commercial charging stations and redo your maths.
Want to fix electric for everyone? Addressing the charging issue is the biggest issue to tackle, not quibble over a year or two for the transition to electric.
Perhaps we should ban on-road parking, like the Japanese?
Would free up space equivalent to 16 motorways.
My Spanish Father-in-Law doesn't understand why the UK doesn't build underground carparks as all the towns in Spain seem to have. Simples - because we are incompetent and corrupt. And they are not.
Hang on - I hear right wing voices say - the Spanish ARE corrupt. And that is true. And yet they can stick underground car parks into their towns and we can't afford to...
I haven't heard of this before - can we have examples of these underground car parks in all the towns in Spain?
Quite common in France - the classic in towns such as Fontainebleau is that they dug out the town square, and then put a nice tuned up version of the town square back on top.
I was pondering yesterday on the strange anomaly of airports. If ever there were a good place to have underground parking these are surely it:
- everyone hates going out miles on a shuttle bus to a huge car park on the perimeter, and it’s a mad waste of hectares of land - You can’t build very tall multi-storeys because of the planes, and it’s a waste to have one right by the terminal like in LHR when that could be taken by airport hotels - They dig up the land and create all sorts of ducting and subterranean units when they create airports anyway, why not bury a huge car park at the same time?
Obviously not directly under the runway but adjacent and below the terminals.
Gets in the way of the railway stations ...
Edit: the sub-surface ones. But actually the surface ones too, given the risk of monkeying with the foundations.
There are tantalising rumours on TwitterX that we are alarmingly close to AGI - true Artificial Intelligence - or, that OpenAI have actually achieved it already
It’s bizarre that more people aren’t talking about this; if it is true it is one of the biggest news stories in human history
There are tantalising rumours on TwitterX that we have met aliens who can travel across space to visit us.
It's bizarre that more people aren't talking about this; if it is true* it is one of the biggest news stories in human history.
* It is not true
It really might be true
When I bang on about AI, @Benpointer always says “get back to me when a robot can stack my dishwasher”. And it’s a fair point
Well, now a robot can easily stack a dishwasher, and what’s more it can learn this simply by watching you do it first
“With enough strength and dexterity, Tesla's Bot could handle almost all physical tasks by simply looking at video clips of people doing said tasks.
Picking up a vacuum and running it through the house. Sorting and folding laundry. Tidying up the house. Moving material from point A to point B. Picking up trash and placing it in a bin. Pushing a lawnmower. Monitor an area for safety-related concerns. Laying bricks. Hammering nails. Using power tools. Clean dishes... etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.”
I can find you a parrot that can recite poetry - doesn't mean it can write you any.
Are learning machines cool? Yes. But at the end of the day they're automatons that can, at a basic level, do simple tasks in relatively stable environments. Complex tasks in other scenarios are out of reach. All the hype is just sales - of course people who own stocks in AI companies would claim it would end the world or be the gadget of the future, because they'll rake the money in.
It is not coincidental that the new "AI is going to be able to do everything" line came after the "Meta is going to be the new frontier" fell through and the "NFTs and the blockchain are going to revolutionise everything" idea was proven false. Capitalism always needs a new frontier, to exploit and sell and commodify, and tech bros think they can build the next one. So far they're failing.
In my view the free chat programmes available online have written reasoning capabilities that exceed that of most graduate level professionals with over 20 years of high level report writing experience. They can write better than people who have been doing decision making and report writing for their entire career. From a management point of view they surpass most humans in knowing how to respond to situations in difficult correspondence exercises.
It is an inevitable human reaction to deny this or not look at it, but it won't help.
Indeed. Look at the dreadful, weird, childish English used in the HS2 Diversity Report - in the Spectator article linked earlier
"delivering training sessions on conscious inclusion and understanding bullying and harassment to help facilitate internal conversation and greater understanding of unconscious bias"
There are tantalising rumours on TwitterX that we are alarmingly close to AGI - true Artificial Intelligence - or, that OpenAI have actually achieved it already
It’s bizarre that more people aren’t talking about this; if it is true it is one of the biggest news stories in human history
There are tantalising rumours on TwitterX that we have met aliens who can travel across space to visit us.
It's bizarre that more people aren't talking about this; if it is true* it is one of the biggest news stories in human history.
* It is not true
It really might be true
When I bang on about AI, @Benpointer always says “get back to me when a robot can stack my dishwasher”. And it’s a fair point
Well, now a robot can easily stack a dishwasher, and what’s more it can learn this simply by watching you do it first
“With enough strength and dexterity, Tesla's Bot could handle almost all physical tasks by simply looking at video clips of people doing said tasks.
Picking up a vacuum and running it through the house. Sorting and folding laundry. Tidying up the house. Moving material from point A to point B. Picking up trash and placing it in a bin. Pushing a lawnmower. Monitor an area for safety-related concerns. Laying bricks. Hammering nails. Using power tools. Clean dishes... etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.”
I can find you a parrot that can recite poetry - doesn't mean it can write you any.
Are learning machines cool? Yes. But at the end of the day they're automatons that can, at a basic level, do simple tasks in relatively stable environments. Complex tasks in other scenarios are out of reach. All the hype is just sales - of course people who own stocks in AI companies would claim it would end the world or be the gadget of the future, because they'll rake the money in.
It is not coincidental that the new "AI is going to be able to do everything" line came after the "Meta is going to be the new frontier" fell through and the "NFTs and the blockchain are going to revolutionise everything" idea was proven false. Capitalism always needs a new frontier, to exploit and sell and commodify, and tech bros think they can build the next one. So far they're failing.
In my view the free chat programmes available online have written reasoning capabilities that exceed that of most graduate level professionals with over 20 years of high level report writing experience. They can write better than people who have been doing decision making and report writing for their entire career. From a management point of view they surpass most humans in knowing how to respond to situations in difficult correspondence exercises.
It is an inevitable human reaction to deny this or not look at it, but it won't help.
Do you mean ChatGPT, or is there a specific programme you mean? I think the most convincing ones are good at creating the approximation of human writing, until you learn it is either just lying (making up references and quotes and just general facts) or spewing nonsense (this often happens with coding where the coding looks correct, but is really just nonsense).
The way this stuff currently works is by taking the input, analysing words that are associated with the words relevant to that topic, and picking each word based on the likelihood that it is the most common word to follow the previous word. That requires it to read (and arguably steal) the work of existing people. It cannot think - it is not creating. It is a parrot - a big parrot, a complex parrot, a parrot that can maybe do some simple things - but a parrot. And that's selling parrots short, because I believe parrots have the ability of cognition.
There are tantalising rumours on TwitterX that we are alarmingly close to AGI - true Artificial Intelligence - or, that OpenAI have actually achieved it already
It’s bizarre that more people aren’t talking about this; if it is true it is one of the biggest news stories in human history
There are tantalising rumours on TwitterX that we have met aliens who can travel across space to visit us.
It's bizarre that more people aren't talking about this; if it is true* it is one of the biggest news stories in human history.
* It is not true
It really might be true
When I bang on about AI, @Benpointer always says “get back to me when a robot can stack my dishwasher”. And it’s a fair point
Well, now a robot can easily stack a dishwasher, and what’s more it can learn this simply by watching you do it first
“With enough strength and dexterity, Tesla's Bot could handle almost all physical tasks by simply looking at video clips of people doing said tasks.
Picking up a vacuum and running it through the house. Sorting and folding laundry. Tidying up the house. Moving material from point A to point B. Picking up trash and placing it in a bin. Pushing a lawnmower. Monitor an area for safety-related concerns. Laying bricks. Hammering nails. Using power tools. Clean dishes... etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.”
I can find you a parrot that can recite poetry - doesn't mean it can write you any.
Are learning machines cool? Yes. But at the end of the day they're automatons that can, at a basic level, do simple tasks in relatively stable environments. Complex tasks in other scenarios are out of reach. All the hype is just sales - of course people who own stocks in AI companies would claim it would end the world or be the gadget of the future, because they'll rake the money in.
It is not coincidental that the new "AI is going to be able to do everything" line came after the "Meta is going to be the new frontier" fell through and the "NFTs and the blockchain are going to revolutionise everything" idea was proven false. Capitalism always needs a new frontier, to exploit and sell and commodify, and tech bros think they can build the next one. So far they're failing.
In my view the free chat programmes available online have written reasoning capabilities that exceed that of most graduate level professionals with over 20 years of high level report writing experience. They can write better than people who have been doing decision making and report writing for their entire career. From a management point of view they surpass most humans in knowing how to respond to situations in difficult correspondence exercises.
It is an inevitable human reaction to deny this or not look at it, but it won't help.
The quality of the prose might be better, but the free chat programs make basic mistakes that no graduate level professionals would make after just a few years of working in their field.
The market is deciding. The hysteria about the announcement last week was partly synthetic and partly misplaced. Just because people can sell something doesn’t mean they will.
Auto makers work on cycle times of years on products and platforms. They’d not be likely to chop and change at the govts whim.
But this can't be true. It was Keir Starmer forcing Nissan et al to ditch petrol. Sunak saved people from having to buy an electric car, it was in all the right newspapers and TV news shows. Thanks to Rishi making Long-Term Decisions for a Brighter Future, the dread threat of all EV by 2030 was removed.
Nissan must be mistaken .
Nissan don't make new cars at the £13k entry level range of the market like the Kia Picanto etc
By 2030 it seems entirely plausible that an electric juke will be as cheap as a petrol Juke, but it does not look likely that an electric Picanto would be available as cheap as a petrol Picanto.
So again, if in 6 years time if you could get a cheap petrol vehicle like the Picanto for £13k in real terms, but if the cheapest electric is in real terms £21k (currently £27k is cheapest) then should the Picanto be outlawed and people who want to buy it be forced to pay eight grand more?
We need to continue with what the market has been doing from Tesla onwards which is to start at the top of the market and work down with electrification, not the other way around. If in 2030 the only petrol vehicles the market still offers is 1.0 litre runarounds like the Picanto simply because electrification of them isn't affordably ready yet, then what's the harm in that?
We shouldn't really go by capital price but by the cost paid per month by the purchaser. Given that only a very small fraction of people buying new cars pay cash on the full price for them, and 80-80% get PCP (we can debate the wisdom of going the PCP route, but for this, we simply recognise that such is the default route to new car purchase at the moment and therefore what the market will be following), we need to look at the main monthly expenditure of the purchaser.
Which is PCP monthly payment plus petrol or electricity costs.
Petrol comes in at c. £1.50 per litre at the moment.
The majority of those buying electric cars will be recharging at home overnight (70%+: there's a need to address the needs of those who cannot do this, but, again, the overall market is driven by those who can do this. And the core need would be to fill in the gap for those who can't). At the moment, an EV tariff from Octopus gives £0.075 per kWh overnight.
The Picanto does c. 13 miles per litre. Assuming the default given by Kia on their finance calculator of 10,000 miles per year, that costs £1,155 per year in petrol, or £96.30 per month. The finance calculator for the Picanto gives (at 10% down payment of £1,350) a cost of £206.58 per month on PCP. This leads to a cost on PCP plus fuel of £302.88 per month to the purchaser.
The Ceed comes in at £21k, so the finance for a putative £21k Kia EV can be looked at on the same site (which helps) and comes out at £342.02 per month (using the same £1350 deposit, which is under 10% this time and probably incurs a slightly higher interest rate, but we need it to be comparable for the purchaser). If the EV has an efficiency similar to the MGZ4 (3.8 miles/kWh), it would cost £197.37 per year in electricity, or £16.45 per month). Cost is then £358.37 per month to the purchaser for PCP plus electricity.
The difference is therefore 18% more expensive to the purchaser for the 21k EV over the 13k ICE rather than the 61% of the sticker price. You only need the price to fall to about £18k to be the same affordability as a £13k ICE to the purchaser, to all intents and purposes.
A large portion of people buying cheap small cars are parking on the street not off road. I certainly was.
Even based on your average that 30% will not be recharging at home overnight that needs to be included in the maths, but I strongly suspect that 30% is disproportionately those buying smaller, cheaper vehicles.
Compare like-for-like by comparing recharging rates at commercial charging stations and redo your maths.
Want to fix electric for everyone? Addressing the charging issue is the biggest issue to tackle, not quibble over a year or two for the transition to electric.
Perhaps we should ban on-road parking, like the Japanese?
Would free up space equivalent to 16 motorways.
My Spanish Father-in-Law doesn't understand why the UK doesn't build underground carparks as all the towns in Spain seem to have. Simples - because we are incompetent and corrupt. And they are not.
Hang on - I hear right wing voices say - the Spanish ARE corrupt. And that is true. And yet they can stick underground car parks into their towns and we can't afford to...
I’m a big fan of underground car parks and was impressed when I moved to Geneva by the scale and quantity of them - even one right by where the lake joins the Rhône which must have been an engineering marvel to plan. Beautifully finished too with classical music piped out (no Vivaldi Four Seasons either). I’m not sure though whether these were private enterprises or state.
I think the last sentence is key that it is, I guess, infinitely more expensive to excavate 8 stories down than knock up a car park 8 stories up so if you are a private car park co in the UK you have a potentially exorbitant extra cost and so would need to offset it by becoming a property developer too to build flats or offices in the land above it to make it financially viable.
You would probably also face some weird laws about who owns the land underground - probably the queen’s swans - and then people would block the planning permission as the disruption to their pipes and services underground would be intolerable and they already have a car parking space in their house.
The key is to streamline and smarten up our ridiculously convoluted planning system and property taxes.
As well as streamlining planning to make changes easier, replace all land-based taxes with a simple land value tax.
A plot of land in an area zoned for planning permission for development should face exactly the same taxes whether 'banked' and undeveloped, or its built for detached homes with off road parking, or a block of flats with underground parking.
For flats etc having underground parking should be a value add that can be offered, but if added it shouldn't attract any tax since the tax should remain on the pure land value.
Might not be necessary, in the end.
There is a long-term trend of fewer young people bothering to learn to drive, and a huge backlog in lessons and tests due to COVID.
Relative demand for non-car infrastructure will continue to grow, whether you like it or not.
There's negligible change in this country of young people bothering to learn to drive actually, the proportions who can drive by 30 have barely changed in decades. And we have a growing population anyway, not a static one, lest you forget.
Relative demand for non-car infrastructure will grow, no qualms with that at all. We should build it. Absolute demand for car infrastructure continues to grow too. No qualms with that either. We should build it too.
Jordan Tyldesley @PippyBing · 5m “Here’s a list of names I’ve heard in recent weeks touted in Labour circles for peerages should the party win an election […] Iain Anderson, Margaret Beckett, Luciana Berger, Mark Drakeford, Michael Dugher, David Evans, Harriet Harman, Margaret Hodge…
===
This is all starting to look like some in Labour are starting to take the polling for granted.
This may well prove to be a massive mistake. The Tories will throw everything at Labour next year with migration at top of the list.
The market is deciding. The hysteria about the announcement last week was partly synthetic and partly misplaced. Just because people can sell something doesn’t mean they will.
Auto makers work on cycle times of years on products and platforms. They’d not be likely to chop and change at the govts whim.
But this can't be true. It was Keir Starmer forcing Nissan et al to ditch petrol. Sunak saved people from having to buy an electric car, it was in all the right newspapers and TV news shows. Thanks to Rishi making Long-Term Decisions for a Brighter Future, the dread threat of all EV by 2030 was removed.
Nissan must be mistaken .
Nissan don't make new cars at the £13k entry level range of the market like the Kia Picanto etc
By 2030 it seems entirely plausible that an electric juke will be as cheap as a petrol Juke, but it does not look likely that an electric Picanto would be available as cheap as a petrol Picanto.
So again, if in 6 years time if you could get a cheap petrol vehicle like the Picanto for £13k in real terms, but if the cheapest electric is in real terms £21k (currently £27k is cheapest) then should the Picanto be outlawed and people who want to buy it be forced to pay eight grand more?
We need to continue with what the market has been doing from Tesla onwards which is to start at the top of the market and work down with electrification, not the other way around. If in 2030 the only petrol vehicles the market still offers is 1.0 litre runarounds like the Picanto simply because electrification of them isn't affordably ready yet, then what's the harm in that?
We shouldn't really go by capital price but by the cost paid per month by the purchaser. Given that only a very small fraction of people buying new cars pay cash on the full price for them, and 80-80% get PCP (we can debate the wisdom of going the PCP route, but for this, we simply recognise that such is the default route to new car purchase at the moment and therefore what the market will be following), we need to look at the main monthly expenditure of the purchaser.
Which is PCP monthly payment plus petrol or electricity costs.
Petrol comes in at c. £1.50 per litre at the moment.
The majority of those buying electric cars will be recharging at home overnight (70%+: there's a need to address the needs of those who cannot do this, but, again, the overall market is driven by those who can do this. And the core need would be to fill in the gap for those who can't). At the moment, an EV tariff from Octopus gives £0.075 per kWh overnight.
The Picanto does c. 13 miles per litre. Assuming the default given by Kia on their finance calculator of 10,000 miles per year, that costs £1,155 per year in petrol, or £96.30 per month. The finance calculator for the Picanto gives (at 10% down payment of £1,350) a cost of £206.58 per month on PCP. This leads to a cost on PCP plus fuel of £302.88 per month to the purchaser.
The Ceed comes in at £21k, so the finance for a putative £21k Kia EV can be looked at on the same site (which helps) and comes out at £342.02 per month (using the same £1350 deposit, which is under 10% this time and probably incurs a slightly higher interest rate, but we need it to be comparable for the purchaser). If the EV has an efficiency similar to the MGZ4 (3.8 miles/kWh), it would cost £197.37 per year in electricity, or £16.45 per month). Cost is then £358.37 per month to the purchaser for PCP plus electricity.
The difference is therefore 18% more expensive to the purchaser for the 21k EV over the 13k ICE rather than the 61% of the sticker price. You only need the price to fall to about £18k to be the same affordability as a £13k ICE to the purchaser, to all intents and purposes.
A large portion of people buying cheap small cars are parking on the street not off road. I certainly was.
Even based on your average that 30% will not be recharging at home overnight that needs to be included in the maths, but I strongly suspect that 30% is disproportionately those buying smaller, cheaper vehicles.
Compare like-for-like by comparing recharging rates at commercial charging stations and redo your maths.
Want to fix electric for everyone? Addressing the charging issue is the biggest issue to tackle, not quibble over a year or two for the transition to electric.
Perhaps we should ban on-road parking, like the Japanese?
Would free up space equivalent to 16 motorways.
My Spanish Father-in-Law doesn't understand why the UK doesn't build underground carparks as all the towns in Spain seem to have. Simples - because we are incompetent and corrupt. And they are not.
Hang on - I hear right wing voices say - the Spanish ARE corrupt. And that is true. And yet they can stick underground car parks into their towns and we can't afford to...
Planners don’t approve them because more parking encourages driving. Or something.
The market is deciding. The hysteria about the announcement last week was partly synthetic and partly misplaced. Just because people can sell something doesn’t mean they will.
Auto makers work on cycle times of years on products and platforms. They’d not be likely to chop and change at the govts whim.
But this can't be true. It was Keir Starmer forcing Nissan et al to ditch petrol. Sunak saved people from having to buy an electric car, it was in all the right newspapers and TV news shows. Thanks to Rishi making Long-Term Decisions for a Brighter Future, the dread threat of all EV by 2030 was removed.
Nissan must be mistaken .
Nissan don't make new cars at the £13k entry level range of the market like the Kia Picanto etc
By 2030 it seems entirely plausible that an electric juke will be as cheap as a petrol Juke, but it does not look likely that an electric Picanto would be available as cheap as a petrol Picanto.
So again, if in 6 years time if you could get a cheap petrol vehicle like the Picanto for £13k in real terms, but if the cheapest electric is in real terms £21k (currently £27k is cheapest) then should the Picanto be outlawed and people who want to buy it be forced to pay eight grand more?
We need to continue with what the market has been doing from Tesla onwards which is to start at the top of the market and work down with electrification, not the other way around. If in 2030 the only petrol vehicles the market still offers is 1.0 litre runarounds like the Picanto simply because electrification of them isn't affordably ready yet, then what's the harm in that?
We shouldn't really go by capital price but by the cost paid per month by the purchaser. Given that only a very small fraction of people buying new cars pay cash on the full price for them, and 80-80% get PCP (we can debate the wisdom of going the PCP route, but for this, we simply recognise that such is the default route to new car purchase at the moment and therefore what the market will be following), we need to look at the main monthly expenditure of the purchaser.
Which is PCP monthly payment plus petrol or electricity costs.
Petrol comes in at c. £1.50 per litre at the moment.
The majority of those buying electric cars will be recharging at home overnight (70%+: there's a need to address the needs of those who cannot do this, but, again, the overall market is driven by those who can do this. And the core need would be to fill in the gap for those who can't). At the moment, an EV tariff from Octopus gives £0.075 per kWh overnight.
The Picanto does c. 13 miles per litre. Assuming the default given by Kia on their finance calculator of 10,000 miles per year, that costs £1,155 per year in petrol, or £96.30 per month. The finance calculator for the Picanto gives (at 10% down payment of £1,350) a cost of £206.58 per month on PCP. This leads to a cost on PCP plus fuel of £302.88 per month to the purchaser.
The Ceed comes in at £21k, so the finance for a putative £21k Kia EV can be looked at on the same site (which helps) and comes out at £342.02 per month (using the same £1350 deposit, which is under 10% this time and probably incurs a slightly higher interest rate, but we need it to be comparable for the purchaser). If the EV has an efficiency similar to the MGZ4 (3.8 miles/kWh), it would cost £197.37 per year in electricity, or £16.45 per month). Cost is then £358.37 per month to the purchaser for PCP plus electricity.
The difference is therefore 18% more expensive to the purchaser for the 21k EV over the 13k ICE rather than the 61% of the sticker price. You only need the price to fall to about £18k to be the same affordability as a £13k ICE to the purchaser, to all intents and purposes.
A large portion of people buying cheap small cars are parking on the street not off road. I certainly was.
Even based on your average that 30% will not be recharging at home overnight that needs to be included in the maths, but I strongly suspect that 30% is disproportionately those buying smaller, cheaper vehicles.
Compare like-for-like by comparing recharging rates at commercial charging stations and redo your maths.
Want to fix electric for everyone? Addressing the charging issue is the biggest issue to tackle, not quibble over a year or two for the transition to electric.
Perhaps we should ban on-road parking, like the Japanese?
Would free up space equivalent to 16 motorways.
My Spanish Father-in-Law doesn't understand why the UK doesn't build underground carparks as all the towns in Spain seem to have. Simples - because we are incompetent and corrupt. And they are not.
Hang on - I hear right wing voices say - the Spanish ARE corrupt. And that is true. And yet they can stick underground car parks into their towns and we can't afford to...
Planners don’t approve them because more parking encourages driving. Or something.
The market is deciding. The hysteria about the announcement last week was partly synthetic and partly misplaced. Just because people can sell something doesn’t mean they will.
Auto makers work on cycle times of years on products and platforms. They’d not be likely to chop and change at the govts whim.
But this can't be true. It was Keir Starmer forcing Nissan et al to ditch petrol. Sunak saved people from having to buy an electric car, it was in all the right newspapers and TV news shows. Thanks to Rishi making Long-Term Decisions for a Brighter Future, the dread threat of all EV by 2030 was removed.
Nissan must be mistaken .
Nissan don't make new cars at the £13k entry level range of the market like the Kia Picanto etc
By 2030 it seems entirely plausible that an electric juke will be as cheap as a petrol Juke, but it does not look likely that an electric Picanto would be available as cheap as a petrol Picanto.
So again, if in 6 years time if you could get a cheap petrol vehicle like the Picanto for £13k in real terms, but if the cheapest electric is in real terms £21k (currently £27k is cheapest) then should the Picanto be outlawed and people who want to buy it be forced to pay eight grand more?
We need to continue with what the market has been doing from Tesla onwards which is to start at the top of the market and work down with electrification, not the other way around. If in 2030 the only petrol vehicles the market still offers is 1.0 litre runarounds like the Picanto simply because electrification of them isn't affordably ready yet, then what's the harm in that?
We shouldn't really go by capital price but by the cost paid per month by the purchaser. Given that only a very small fraction of people buying new cars pay cash on the full price for them, and 80-80% get PCP (we can debate the wisdom of going the PCP route, but for this, we simply recognise that such is the default route to new car purchase at the moment and therefore what the market will be following), we need to look at the main monthly expenditure of the purchaser.
Which is PCP monthly payment plus petrol or electricity costs.
Petrol comes in at c. £1.50 per litre at the moment.
The majority of those buying electric cars will be recharging at home overnight (70%+: there's a need to address the needs of those who cannot do this, but, again, the overall market is driven by those who can do this. And the core need would be to fill in the gap for those who can't). At the moment, an EV tariff from Octopus gives £0.075 per kWh overnight.
The Picanto does c. 13 miles per litre. Assuming the default given by Kia on their finance calculator of 10,000 miles per year, that costs £1,155 per year in petrol, or £96.30 per month. The finance calculator for the Picanto gives (at 10% down payment of £1,350) a cost of £206.58 per month on PCP. This leads to a cost on PCP plus fuel of £302.88 per month to the purchaser.
The Ceed comes in at £21k, so the finance for a putative £21k Kia EV can be looked at on the same site (which helps) and comes out at £342.02 per month (using the same £1350 deposit, which is under 10% this time and probably incurs a slightly higher interest rate, but we need it to be comparable for the purchaser). If the EV has an efficiency similar to the MGZ4 (3.8 miles/kWh), it would cost £197.37 per year in electricity, or £16.45 per month). Cost is then £358.37 per month to the purchaser for PCP plus electricity.
The difference is therefore 18% more expensive to the purchaser for the 21k EV over the 13k ICE rather than the 61% of the sticker price. You only need the price to fall to about £18k to be the same affordability as a £13k ICE to the purchaser, to all intents and purposes.
A large portion of people buying cheap small cars are parking on the street not off road. I certainly was.
Even based on your average that 30% will not be recharging at home overnight that needs to be included in the maths, but I strongly suspect that 30% is disproportionately those buying smaller, cheaper vehicles.
Compare like-for-like by comparing recharging rates at commercial charging stations and redo your maths.
Want to fix electric for everyone? Addressing the charging issue is the biggest issue to tackle, not quibble over a year or two for the transition to electric.
Perhaps we should ban on-road parking, like the Japanese?
Would free up space equivalent to 16 motorways.
My Spanish Father-in-Law doesn't understand why the UK doesn't build underground carparks as all the towns in Spain seem to have. Simples - because we are incompetent and corrupt. And they are not.
Hang on - I hear right wing voices say - the Spanish ARE corrupt. And that is true. And yet they can stick underground car parks into their towns and we can't afford to...
Planners don’t approve them because more parking encourages driving. Or something.
Its not entirely this. They are also expensive to build, complex land assembly issues etc.
It will be interesting to see if this gets any pick up internationally.
Shades of Nick Griffin demanding to be listened to over Rotherham etc. If you want to be listened to, try not to be a rancid grandstanding bigot with no genuine concern for the issue.
The market is deciding. The hysteria about the announcement last week was partly synthetic and partly misplaced. Just because people can sell something doesn’t mean they will.
Auto makers work on cycle times of years on products and platforms. They’d not be likely to chop and change at the govts whim.
But this can't be true. It was Keir Starmer forcing Nissan et al to ditch petrol. Sunak saved people from having to buy an electric car, it was in all the right newspapers and TV news shows. Thanks to Rishi making Long-Term Decisions for a Brighter Future, the dread threat of all EV by 2030 was removed.
Nissan must be mistaken .
Nissan don't make new cars at the £13k entry level range of the market like the Kia Picanto etc
By 2030 it seems entirely plausible that an electric juke will be as cheap as a petrol Juke, but it does not look likely that an electric Picanto would be available as cheap as a petrol Picanto.
So again, if in 6 years time if you could get a cheap petrol vehicle like the Picanto for £13k in real terms, but if the cheapest electric is in real terms £21k (currently £27k is cheapest) then should the Picanto be outlawed and people who want to buy it be forced to pay eight grand more?
We need to continue with what the market has been doing from Tesla onwards which is to start at the top of the market and work down with electrification, not the other way around. If in 2030 the only petrol vehicles the market still offers is 1.0 litre runarounds like the Picanto simply because electrification of them isn't affordably ready yet, then what's the harm in that?
We shouldn't really go by capital price but by the cost paid per month by the purchaser. Given that only a very small fraction of people buying new cars pay cash on the full price for them, and 80-80% get PCP (we can debate the wisdom of going the PCP route, but for this, we simply recognise that such is the default route to new car purchase at the moment and therefore what the market will be following), we need to look at the main monthly expenditure of the purchaser.
Which is PCP monthly payment plus petrol or electricity costs.
Petrol comes in at c. £1.50 per litre at the moment.
The majority of those buying electric cars will be recharging at home overnight (70%+: there's a need to address the needs of those who cannot do this, but, again, the overall market is driven by those who can do this. And the core need would be to fill in the gap for those who can't). At the moment, an EV tariff from Octopus gives £0.075 per kWh overnight.
The Picanto does c. 13 miles per litre. Assuming the default given by Kia on their finance calculator of 10,000 miles per year, that costs £1,155 per year in petrol, or £96.30 per month. The finance calculator for the Picanto gives (at 10% down payment of £1,350) a cost of £206.58 per month on PCP. This leads to a cost on PCP plus fuel of £302.88 per month to the purchaser.
The Ceed comes in at £21k, so the finance for a putative £21k Kia EV can be looked at on the same site (which helps) and comes out at £342.02 per month (using the same £1350 deposit, which is under 10% this time and probably incurs a slightly higher interest rate, but we need it to be comparable for the purchaser). If the EV has an efficiency similar to the MGZ4 (3.8 miles/kWh), it would cost £197.37 per year in electricity, or £16.45 per month). Cost is then £358.37 per month to the purchaser for PCP plus electricity.
The difference is therefore 18% more expensive to the purchaser for the 21k EV over the 13k ICE rather than the 61% of the sticker price. You only need the price to fall to about £18k to be the same affordability as a £13k ICE to the purchaser, to all intents and purposes.
A large portion of people buying cheap small cars are parking on the street not off road. I certainly was.
Even based on your average that 30% will not be recharging at home overnight that needs to be included in the maths, but I strongly suspect that 30% is disproportionately those buying smaller, cheaper vehicles.
Compare like-for-like by comparing recharging rates at commercial charging stations and redo your maths.
Want to fix electric for everyone? Addressing the charging issue is the biggest issue to tackle, not quibble over a year or two for the transition to electric.
Perhaps we should ban on-road parking, like the Japanese?
Would free up space equivalent to 16 motorways.
My Spanish Father-in-Law doesn't understand why the UK doesn't build underground carparks as all the towns in Spain seem to have. Simples - because we are incompetent and corrupt. And they are not.
Hang on - I hear right wing voices say - the Spanish ARE corrupt. And that is true. And yet they can stick underground car parks into their towns and we can't afford to...
I haven't heard of this before - can we have examples of these underground car parks in all the towns in Spain?
Quite common in France - the classic in towns such as Fontainebleau is that they dug out the town square, and then put a nice tuned up version of the town square back on top.
I was pondering yesterday on the strange anomaly of airports. If ever there were a good place to have underground parking these are surely it:
- everyone hates going out miles on a shuttle bus to a huge car park on the perimeter, and it’s a mad waste of hectares of land - You can’t build very tall multi-storeys because of the planes, and it’s a waste to have one right by the terminal like in LHR when that could be taken by airport hotels - They dig up the land and create all sorts of ducting and subterranean units when they create airports anyway, why not bury a huge car park at the same time?
Obviously not directly under the runway but adjacent and below the terminals.
The other thing is solar plants. Why on earth isn’t every airport and airfield carpeted with solar arrays, given the land can’t be used for anything else and is already brownfield?
A fair point, but consider safety. At present running off the tarmac onto the grass isn't a huge disaster per se, as the plane has a fair chance to slow down in relative safety. But if one clutters it up with lots of steel girders and solar panels ...
I don't suppose the passengers would like it either. (I also wonder about the effect on airfield surveillance radar*, too.)
*Edit. The kind that tracks plane movements on the ground.
The market is deciding. The hysteria about the announcement last week was partly synthetic and partly misplaced. Just because people can sell something doesn’t mean they will.
Auto makers work on cycle times of years on products and platforms. They’d not be likely to chop and change at the govts whim.
But this can't be true. It was Keir Starmer forcing Nissan et al to ditch petrol. Sunak saved people from having to buy an electric car, it was in all the right newspapers and TV news shows. Thanks to Rishi making Long-Term Decisions for a Brighter Future, the dread threat of all EV by 2030 was removed.
Nissan must be mistaken .
Nissan don't make new cars at the £13k entry level range of the market like the Kia Picanto etc
By 2030 it seems entirely plausible that an electric juke will be as cheap as a petrol Juke, but it does not look likely that an electric Picanto would be available as cheap as a petrol Picanto.
So again, if in 6 years time if you could get a cheap petrol vehicle like the Picanto for £13k in real terms, but if the cheapest electric is in real terms £21k (currently £27k is cheapest) then should the Picanto be outlawed and people who want to buy it be forced to pay eight grand more?
We need to continue with what the market has been doing from Tesla onwards which is to start at the top of the market and work down with electrification, not the other way around. If in 2030 the only petrol vehicles the market still offers is 1.0 litre runarounds like the Picanto simply because electrification of them isn't affordably ready yet, then what's the harm in that?
We shouldn't really go by capital price but by the cost paid per month by the purchaser. Given that only a very small fraction of people buying new cars pay cash on the full price for them, and 80-80% get PCP (we can debate the wisdom of going the PCP route, but for this, we simply recognise that such is the default route to new car purchase at the moment and therefore what the market will be following), we need to look at the main monthly expenditure of the purchaser.
Which is PCP monthly payment plus petrol or electricity costs.
Petrol comes in at c. £1.50 per litre at the moment.
The majority of those buying electric cars will be recharging at home overnight (70%+: there's a need to address the needs of those who cannot do this, but, again, the overall market is driven by those who can do this. And the core need would be to fill in the gap for those who can't). At the moment, an EV tariff from Octopus gives £0.075 per kWh overnight.
The Picanto does c. 13 miles per litre. Assuming the default given by Kia on their finance calculator of 10,000 miles per year, that costs £1,155 per year in petrol, or £96.30 per month. The finance calculator for the Picanto gives (at 10% down payment of £1,350) a cost of £206.58 per month on PCP. This leads to a cost on PCP plus fuel of £302.88 per month to the purchaser.
The Ceed comes in at £21k, so the finance for a putative £21k Kia EV can be looked at on the same site (which helps) and comes out at £342.02 per month (using the same £1350 deposit, which is under 10% this time and probably incurs a slightly higher interest rate, but we need it to be comparable for the purchaser). If the EV has an efficiency similar to the MGZ4 (3.8 miles/kWh), it would cost £197.37 per year in electricity, or £16.45 per month). Cost is then £358.37 per month to the purchaser for PCP plus electricity.
The difference is therefore 18% more expensive to the purchaser for the 21k EV over the 13k ICE rather than the 61% of the sticker price. You only need the price to fall to about £18k to be the same affordability as a £13k ICE to the purchaser, to all intents and purposes.
A large portion of people buying cheap small cars are parking on the street not off road. I certainly was.
Even based on your average that 30% will not be recharging at home overnight that needs to be included in the maths, but I strongly suspect that 30% is disproportionately those buying smaller, cheaper vehicles.
Compare like-for-like by comparing recharging rates at commercial charging stations and redo your maths.
Want to fix electric for everyone? Addressing the charging issue is the biggest issue to tackle, not quibble over a year or two for the transition to electric.
Perhaps we should ban on-road parking, like the Japanese?
Would free up space equivalent to 16 motorways.
My Spanish Father-in-Law doesn't understand why the UK doesn't build underground carparks as all the towns in Spain seem to have. Simples - because we are incompetent and corrupt. And they are not.
Hang on - I hear right wing voices say - the Spanish ARE corrupt. And that is true. And yet they can stick underground car parks into their towns and we can't afford to...
Planners don’t approve them because more parking encourages driving. Or something.
The market is deciding. The hysteria about the announcement last week was partly synthetic and partly misplaced. Just because people can sell something doesn’t mean they will.
Auto makers work on cycle times of years on products and platforms. They’d not be likely to chop and change at the govts whim.
But this can't be true. It was Keir Starmer forcing Nissan et al to ditch petrol. Sunak saved people from having to buy an electric car, it was in all the right newspapers and TV news shows. Thanks to Rishi making Long-Term Decisions for a Brighter Future, the dread threat of all EV by 2030 was removed.
Nissan must be mistaken .
Nissan don't make new cars at the £13k entry level range of the market like the Kia Picanto etc
By 2030 it seems entirely plausible that an electric juke will be as cheap as a petrol Juke, but it does not look likely that an electric Picanto would be available as cheap as a petrol Picanto.
So again, if in 6 years time if you could get a cheap petrol vehicle like the Picanto for £13k in real terms, but if the cheapest electric is in real terms £21k (currently £27k is cheapest) then should the Picanto be outlawed and people who want to buy it be forced to pay eight grand more?
We need to continue with what the market has been doing from Tesla onwards which is to start at the top of the market and work down with electrification, not the other way around. If in 2030 the only petrol vehicles the market still offers is 1.0 litre runarounds like the Picanto simply because electrification of them isn't affordably ready yet, then what's the harm in that?
We shouldn't really go by capital price but by the cost paid per month by the purchaser. Given that only a very small fraction of people buying new cars pay cash on the full price for them, and 80-80% get PCP (we can debate the wisdom of going the PCP route, but for this, we simply recognise that such is the default route to new car purchase at the moment and therefore what the market will be following), we need to look at the main monthly expenditure of the purchaser.
Which is PCP monthly payment plus petrol or electricity costs.
Petrol comes in at c. £1.50 per litre at the moment.
The majority of those buying electric cars will be recharging at home overnight (70%+: there's a need to address the needs of those who cannot do this, but, again, the overall market is driven by those who can do this. And the core need would be to fill in the gap for those who can't). At the moment, an EV tariff from Octopus gives £0.075 per kWh overnight.
The Picanto does c. 13 miles per litre. Assuming the default given by Kia on their finance calculator of 10,000 miles per year, that costs £1,155 per year in petrol, or £96.30 per month. The finance calculator for the Picanto gives (at 10% down payment of £1,350) a cost of £206.58 per month on PCP. This leads to a cost on PCP plus fuel of £302.88 per month to the purchaser.
The Ceed comes in at £21k, so the finance for a putative £21k Kia EV can be looked at on the same site (which helps) and comes out at £342.02 per month (using the same £1350 deposit, which is under 10% this time and probably incurs a slightly higher interest rate, but we need it to be comparable for the purchaser). If the EV has an efficiency similar to the MGZ4 (3.8 miles/kWh), it would cost £197.37 per year in electricity, or £16.45 per month). Cost is then £358.37 per month to the purchaser for PCP plus electricity.
The difference is therefore 18% more expensive to the purchaser for the 21k EV over the 13k ICE rather than the 61% of the sticker price. You only need the price to fall to about £18k to be the same affordability as a £13k ICE to the purchaser, to all intents and purposes.
A large portion of people buying cheap small cars are parking on the street not off road. I certainly was.
Even based on your average that 30% will not be recharging at home overnight that needs to be included in the maths, but I strongly suspect that 30% is disproportionately those buying smaller, cheaper vehicles.
Compare like-for-like by comparing recharging rates at commercial charging stations and redo your maths.
Want to fix electric for everyone? Addressing the charging issue is the biggest issue to tackle, not quibble over a year or two for the transition to electric.
Perhaps we should ban on-road parking, like the Japanese?
Would free up space equivalent to 16 motorways.
My Spanish Father-in-Law doesn't understand why the UK doesn't build underground carparks as all the towns in Spain seem to have. Simples - because we are incompetent and corrupt. And they are not.
Hang on - I hear right wing voices say - the Spanish ARE corrupt. And that is true. And yet they can stick underground car parks into their towns and we can't afford to...
Planners don’t approve them because more parking encourages driving. Or something.
The market is deciding. The hysteria about the announcement last week was partly synthetic and partly misplaced. Just because people can sell something doesn’t mean they will.
Auto makers work on cycle times of years on products and platforms. They’d not be likely to chop and change at the govts whim.
But this can't be true. It was Keir Starmer forcing Nissan et al to ditch petrol. Sunak saved people from having to buy an electric car, it was in all the right newspapers and TV news shows. Thanks to Rishi making Long-Term Decisions for a Brighter Future, the dread threat of all EV by 2030 was removed.
Nissan must be mistaken .
Nissan don't make new cars at the £13k entry level range of the market like the Kia Picanto etc
By 2030 it seems entirely plausible that an electric juke will be as cheap as a petrol Juke, but it does not look likely that an electric Picanto would be available as cheap as a petrol Picanto.
So again, if in 6 years time if you could get a cheap petrol vehicle like the Picanto for £13k in real terms, but if the cheapest electric is in real terms £21k (currently £27k is cheapest) then should the Picanto be outlawed and people who want to buy it be forced to pay eight grand more?
We need to continue with what the market has been doing from Tesla onwards which is to start at the top of the market and work down with electrification, not the other way around. If in 2030 the only petrol vehicles the market still offers is 1.0 litre runarounds like the Picanto simply because electrification of them isn't affordably ready yet, then what's the harm in that?
We shouldn't really go by capital price but by the cost paid per month by the purchaser. Given that only a very small fraction of people buying new cars pay cash on the full price for them, and 80-80% get PCP (we can debate the wisdom of going the PCP route, but for this, we simply recognise that such is the default route to new car purchase at the moment and therefore what the market will be following), we need to look at the main monthly expenditure of the purchaser.
Which is PCP monthly payment plus petrol or electricity costs.
Petrol comes in at c. £1.50 per litre at the moment.
The majority of those buying electric cars will be recharging at home overnight (70%+: there's a need to address the needs of those who cannot do this, but, again, the overall market is driven by those who can do this. And the core need would be to fill in the gap for those who can't). At the moment, an EV tariff from Octopus gives £0.075 per kWh overnight.
The Picanto does c. 13 miles per litre. Assuming the default given by Kia on their finance calculator of 10,000 miles per year, that costs £1,155 per year in petrol, or £96.30 per month. The finance calculator for the Picanto gives (at 10% down payment of £1,350) a cost of £206.58 per month on PCP. This leads to a cost on PCP plus fuel of £302.88 per month to the purchaser.
The Ceed comes in at £21k, so the finance for a putative £21k Kia EV can be looked at on the same site (which helps) and comes out at £342.02 per month (using the same £1350 deposit, which is under 10% this time and probably incurs a slightly higher interest rate, but we need it to be comparable for the purchaser). If the EV has an efficiency similar to the MGZ4 (3.8 miles/kWh), it would cost £197.37 per year in electricity, or £16.45 per month). Cost is then £358.37 per month to the purchaser for PCP plus electricity.
The difference is therefore 18% more expensive to the purchaser for the 21k EV over the 13k ICE rather than the 61% of the sticker price. You only need the price to fall to about £18k to be the same affordability as a £13k ICE to the purchaser, to all intents and purposes.
A large portion of people buying cheap small cars are parking on the street not off road. I certainly was.
Even based on your average that 30% will not be recharging at home overnight that needs to be included in the maths, but I strongly suspect that 30% is disproportionately those buying smaller, cheaper vehicles.
Compare like-for-like by comparing recharging rates at commercial charging stations and redo your maths.
Want to fix electric for everyone? Addressing the charging issue is the biggest issue to tackle, not quibble over a year or two for the transition to electric.
Perhaps we should ban on-road parking, like the Japanese?
Would free up space equivalent to 16 motorways.
My Spanish Father-in-Law doesn't understand why the UK doesn't build underground carparks as all the towns in Spain seem to have. Simples - because we are incompetent and corrupt. And they are not.
Hang on - I hear right wing voices say - the Spanish ARE corrupt. And that is true. And yet they can stick underground car parks into their towns and we can't afford to...
Planners don’t approve them because more parking encourages driving. Or something.
Its not entirely this. They are also expensive to build, complex land assembly issues etc.
Costs money and because of the way the Treasury looks at everything only the cheapest options are allowed...
Jordan Tyldesley @PippyBing · 5m “Here’s a list of names I’ve heard in recent weeks touted in Labour circles for peerages should the party win an election […] Iain Anderson, Margaret Beckett, Luciana Berger, Mark Drakeford, Michael Dugher, David Evans, Harriet Harman, Margaret Hodge…
===
This is all starting to look like some in Labour are starting to take the polling for granted.
This may well prove to be a massive mistake. The Tories will throw everything at Labour next year with migration at top of the list.
The Tories have had 13 years to deal with immigration and they haven't exactly done a good job....
The market is deciding. The hysteria about the announcement last week was partly synthetic and partly misplaced. Just because people can sell something doesn’t mean they will.
Auto makers work on cycle times of years on products and platforms. They’d not be likely to chop and change at the govts whim.
But this can't be true. It was Keir Starmer forcing Nissan et al to ditch petrol. Sunak saved people from having to buy an electric car, it was in all the right newspapers and TV news shows. Thanks to Rishi making Long-Term Decisions for a Brighter Future, the dread threat of all EV by 2030 was removed.
Nissan must be mistaken .
Nissan don't make new cars at the £13k entry level range of the market like the Kia Picanto etc
By 2030 it seems entirely plausible that an electric juke will be as cheap as a petrol Juke, but it does not look likely that an electric Picanto would be available as cheap as a petrol Picanto.
So again, if in 6 years time if you could get a cheap petrol vehicle like the Picanto for £13k in real terms, but if the cheapest electric is in real terms £21k (currently £27k is cheapest) then should the Picanto be outlawed and people who want to buy it be forced to pay eight grand more?
We need to continue with what the market has been doing from Tesla onwards which is to start at the top of the market and work down with electrification, not the other way around. If in 2030 the only petrol vehicles the market still offers is 1.0 litre runarounds like the Picanto simply because electrification of them isn't affordably ready yet, then what's the harm in that?
We shouldn't really go by capital price but by the cost paid per month by the purchaser. Given that only a very small fraction of people buying new cars pay cash on the full price for them, and 80-80% get PCP (we can debate the wisdom of going the PCP route, but for this, we simply recognise that such is the default route to new car purchase at the moment and therefore what the market will be following), we need to look at the main monthly expenditure of the purchaser.
Which is PCP monthly payment plus petrol or electricity costs.
Petrol comes in at c. £1.50 per litre at the moment.
The majority of those buying electric cars will be recharging at home overnight (70%+: there's a need to address the needs of those who cannot do this, but, again, the overall market is driven by those who can do this. And the core need would be to fill in the gap for those who can't). At the moment, an EV tariff from Octopus gives £0.075 per kWh overnight.
The Picanto does c. 13 miles per litre. Assuming the default given by Kia on their finance calculator of 10,000 miles per year, that costs £1,155 per year in petrol, or £96.30 per month. The finance calculator for the Picanto gives (at 10% down payment of £1,350) a cost of £206.58 per month on PCP. This leads to a cost on PCP plus fuel of £302.88 per month to the purchaser.
The Ceed comes in at £21k, so the finance for a putative £21k Kia EV can be looked at on the same site (which helps) and comes out at £342.02 per month (using the same £1350 deposit, which is under 10% this time and probably incurs a slightly higher interest rate, but we need it to be comparable for the purchaser). If the EV has an efficiency similar to the MGZ4 (3.8 miles/kWh), it would cost £197.37 per year in electricity, or £16.45 per month). Cost is then £358.37 per month to the purchaser for PCP plus electricity.
The difference is therefore 18% more expensive to the purchaser for the 21k EV over the 13k ICE rather than the 61% of the sticker price. You only need the price to fall to about £18k to be the same affordability as a £13k ICE to the purchaser, to all intents and purposes.
A large portion of people buying cheap small cars are parking on the street not off road. I certainly was.
Even based on your average that 30% will not be recharging at home overnight that needs to be included in the maths, but I strongly suspect that 30% is disproportionately those buying smaller, cheaper vehicles.
Compare like-for-like by comparing recharging rates at commercial charging stations and redo your maths.
Want to fix electric for everyone? Addressing the charging issue is the biggest issue to tackle, not quibble over a year or two for the transition to electric.
Perhaps we should ban on-road parking, like the Japanese?
Would free up space equivalent to 16 motorways.
My Spanish Father-in-Law doesn't understand why the UK doesn't build underground carparks as all the towns in Spain seem to have. Simples - because we are incompetent and corrupt. And they are not.
Hang on - I hear right wing voices say - the Spanish ARE corrupt. And that is true. And yet they can stick underground car parks into their towns and we can't afford to...
I haven't heard of this before - can we have examples of these underground car parks in all the towns in Spain?
Quite common in France - the classic in towns such as Fontainebleau is that they dug out the town square, and then put a nice tuned up version of the town square back on top.
I was pondering yesterday on the strange anomaly of airports. If ever there were a good place to have underground parking these are surely it:
- everyone hates going out miles on a shuttle bus to a huge car park on the perimeter, and it’s a mad waste of hectares of land - You can’t build very tall multi-storeys because of the planes, and it’s a waste to have one right by the terminal like in LHR when that could be taken by airport hotels - They dig up the land and create all sorts of ducting and subterranean units when they create airports anyway, why not bury a huge car park at the same time?
Obviously not directly under the runway but adjacent and below the terminals.
The other thing is solar plants. Why on earth isn’t every airport and airfield carpeted with solar arrays, given the land can’t be used for anything else and is already brownfield?
A fair point, but consider safety. At present running off the tarmac onto the grass isn't a huge disaster per se, as the plane has a fair chance to slow down in relative safety. But if one clutters it up with lots of steel girders and solar panels ...
I don't suppose the passengers would like it either. (I also wonder about the effect on airfield surveillance radar, too.)
Yes fair enough. I've looked it up to see if any airports do use them. Nice article from Wired a couple of years ago discussing the pros and cons
The market is deciding. The hysteria about the announcement last week was partly synthetic and partly misplaced. Just because people can sell something doesn’t mean they will.
Auto makers work on cycle times of years on products and platforms. They’d not be likely to chop and change at the govts whim.
But this can't be true. It was Keir Starmer forcing Nissan et al to ditch petrol. Sunak saved people from having to buy an electric car, it was in all the right newspapers and TV news shows. Thanks to Rishi making Long-Term Decisions for a Brighter Future, the dread threat of all EV by 2030 was removed.
Nissan must be mistaken .
Nissan don't make new cars at the £13k entry level range of the market like the Kia Picanto etc
By 2030 it seems entirely plausible that an electric juke will be as cheap as a petrol Juke, but it does not look likely that an electric Picanto would be available as cheap as a petrol Picanto.
So again, if in 6 years time if you could get a cheap petrol vehicle like the Picanto for £13k in real terms, but if the cheapest electric is in real terms £21k (currently £27k is cheapest) then should the Picanto be outlawed and people who want to buy it be forced to pay eight grand more?
We need to continue with what the market has been doing from Tesla onwards which is to start at the top of the market and work down with electrification, not the other way around. If in 2030 the only petrol vehicles the market still offers is 1.0 litre runarounds like the Picanto simply because electrification of them isn't affordably ready yet, then what's the harm in that?
We shouldn't really go by capital price but by the cost paid per month by the purchaser. Given that only a very small fraction of people buying new cars pay cash on the full price for them, and 80-80% get PCP (we can debate the wisdom of going the PCP route, but for this, we simply recognise that such is the default route to new car purchase at the moment and therefore what the market will be following), we need to look at the main monthly expenditure of the purchaser.
Which is PCP monthly payment plus petrol or electricity costs.
Petrol comes in at c. £1.50 per litre at the moment.
The majority of those buying electric cars will be recharging at home overnight (70%+: there's a need to address the needs of those who cannot do this, but, again, the overall market is driven by those who can do this. And the core need would be to fill in the gap for those who can't). At the moment, an EV tariff from Octopus gives £0.075 per kWh overnight.
The Picanto does c. 13 miles per litre. Assuming the default given by Kia on their finance calculator of 10,000 miles per year, that costs £1,155 per year in petrol, or £96.30 per month. The finance calculator for the Picanto gives (at 10% down payment of £1,350) a cost of £206.58 per month on PCP. This leads to a cost on PCP plus fuel of £302.88 per month to the purchaser.
The Ceed comes in at £21k, so the finance for a putative £21k Kia EV can be looked at on the same site (which helps) and comes out at £342.02 per month (using the same £1350 deposit, which is under 10% this time and probably incurs a slightly higher interest rate, but we need it to be comparable for the purchaser). If the EV has an efficiency similar to the MGZ4 (3.8 miles/kWh), it would cost £197.37 per year in electricity, or £16.45 per month). Cost is then £358.37 per month to the purchaser for PCP plus electricity.
The difference is therefore 18% more expensive to the purchaser for the 21k EV over the 13k ICE rather than the 61% of the sticker price. You only need the price to fall to about £18k to be the same affordability as a £13k ICE to the purchaser, to all intents and purposes.
A large portion of people buying cheap small cars are parking on the street not off road. I certainly was.
Even based on your average that 30% will not be recharging at home overnight that needs to be included in the maths, but I strongly suspect that 30% is disproportionately those buying smaller, cheaper vehicles.
Compare like-for-like by comparing recharging rates at commercial charging stations and redo your maths.
Want to fix electric for everyone? Addressing the charging issue is the biggest issue to tackle, not quibble over a year or two for the transition to electric.
Perhaps we should ban on-road parking, like the Japanese?
Would free up space equivalent to 16 motorways.
My Spanish Father-in-Law doesn't understand why the UK doesn't build underground carparks as all the towns in Spain seem to have. Simples - because we are incompetent and corrupt. And they are not.
Hang on - I hear right wing voices say - the Spanish ARE corrupt. And that is true. And yet they can stick underground car parks into their towns and we can't afford to...
Planners don’t approve them because more parking encourages driving. Or something.
There's a fabulous u/g car park in Bloomsbury Square, WC1, in the shape of a double helix. You drive round and round and down and down and slowly you realise you're climbing and, before you find a space, you're back out in the daylight again.
There are tantalising rumours on TwitterX that we are alarmingly close to AGI - true Artificial Intelligence - or, that OpenAI have actually achieved it already
It’s bizarre that more people aren’t talking about this; if it is true it is one of the biggest news stories in human history
There are tantalising rumours on TwitterX that we have met aliens who can travel across space to visit us.
It's bizarre that more people aren't talking about this; if it is true* it is one of the biggest news stories in human history.
* It is not true
It really might be true
When I bang on about AI, @Benpointer always says “get back to me when a robot can stack my dishwasher”. And it’s a fair point
Well, now a robot can easily stack a dishwasher, and what’s more it can learn this simply by watching you do it first
“With enough strength and dexterity, Tesla's Bot could handle almost all physical tasks by simply looking at video clips of people doing said tasks.
Picking up a vacuum and running it through the house. Sorting and folding laundry. Tidying up the house. Moving material from point A to point B. Picking up trash and placing it in a bin. Pushing a lawnmower. Monitor an area for safety-related concerns. Laying bricks. Hammering nails. Using power tools. Clean dishes... etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.”
(I'm fairly bullish on AI, but Optimus feels more like one of Elon's toy projects than something real - if it gets to the point where it can make Boston Dynamics-style videos in 5-10 years time, I think he'll be happy)
But we are clearly close to a “dishwasher stacking” AI robot, which is my original point. As that is the Turing Test proposed by @Benpointer
Sure - have a look at Ocado's Robotic Pick system, which does a better job of packing shopping into bags without crushing or damaging delicate items than any human. I bet it'd do a great job with stacking a dishwasher, too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UjczYsjO6fQ
The market is deciding. The hysteria about the announcement last week was partly synthetic and partly misplaced. Just because people can sell something doesn’t mean they will.
Auto makers work on cycle times of years on products and platforms. They’d not be likely to chop and change at the govts whim.
But this can't be true. It was Keir Starmer forcing Nissan et al to ditch petrol. Sunak saved people from having to buy an electric car, it was in all the right newspapers and TV news shows. Thanks to Rishi making Long-Term Decisions for a Brighter Future, the dread threat of all EV by 2030 was removed.
Nissan must be mistaken .
Nissan don't make new cars at the £13k entry level range of the market like the Kia Picanto etc
By 2030 it seems entirely plausible that an electric juke will be as cheap as a petrol Juke, but it does not look likely that an electric Picanto would be available as cheap as a petrol Picanto.
So again, if in 6 years time if you could get a cheap petrol vehicle like the Picanto for £13k in real terms, but if the cheapest electric is in real terms £21k (currently £27k is cheapest) then should the Picanto be outlawed and people who want to buy it be forced to pay eight grand more?
We need to continue with what the market has been doing from Tesla onwards which is to start at the top of the market and work down with electrification, not the other way around. If in 2030 the only petrol vehicles the market still offers is 1.0 litre runarounds like the Picanto simply because electrification of them isn't affordably ready yet, then what's the harm in that?
We shouldn't really go by capital price but by the cost paid per month by the purchaser. Given that only a very small fraction of people buying new cars pay cash on the full price for them, and 80-80% get PCP (we can debate the wisdom of going the PCP route, but for this, we simply recognise that such is the default route to new car purchase at the moment and therefore what the market will be following), we need to look at the main monthly expenditure of the purchaser.
Which is PCP monthly payment plus petrol or electricity costs.
Petrol comes in at c. £1.50 per litre at the moment.
The majority of those buying electric cars will be recharging at home overnight (70%+: there's a need to address the needs of those who cannot do this, but, again, the overall market is driven by those who can do this. And the core need would be to fill in the gap for those who can't). At the moment, an EV tariff from Octopus gives £0.075 per kWh overnight.
The Picanto does c. 13 miles per litre. Assuming the default given by Kia on their finance calculator of 10,000 miles per year, that costs £1,155 per year in petrol, or £96.30 per month. The finance calculator for the Picanto gives (at 10% down payment of £1,350) a cost of £206.58 per month on PCP. This leads to a cost on PCP plus fuel of £302.88 per month to the purchaser.
The Ceed comes in at £21k, so the finance for a putative £21k Kia EV can be looked at on the same site (which helps) and comes out at £342.02 per month (using the same £1350 deposit, which is under 10% this time and probably incurs a slightly higher interest rate, but we need it to be comparable for the purchaser). If the EV has an efficiency similar to the MGZ4 (3.8 miles/kWh), it would cost £197.37 per year in electricity, or £16.45 per month). Cost is then £358.37 per month to the purchaser for PCP plus electricity.
The difference is therefore 18% more expensive to the purchaser for the 21k EV over the 13k ICE rather than the 61% of the sticker price. You only need the price to fall to about £18k to be the same affordability as a £13k ICE to the purchaser, to all intents and purposes.
A large portion of people buying cheap small cars are parking on the street not off road. I certainly was.
Even based on your average that 30% will not be recharging at home overnight that needs to be included in the maths, but I strongly suspect that 30% is disproportionately those buying smaller, cheaper vehicles.
Compare like-for-like by comparing recharging rates at commercial charging stations and redo your maths.
Want to fix electric for everyone? Addressing the charging issue is the biggest issue to tackle, not quibble over a year or two for the transition to electric.
Perhaps we should ban on-road parking, like the Japanese?
Would free up space equivalent to 16 motorways.
My Spanish Father-in-Law doesn't understand why the UK doesn't build underground carparks as all the towns in Spain seem to have. Simples - because we are incompetent and corrupt. And they are not.
Hang on - I hear right wing voices say - the Spanish ARE corrupt. And that is true. And yet they can stick underground car parks into their towns and we can't afford to...
I haven't heard of this before - can we have examples of these underground car parks in all the towns in Spain?
Quite common in France - the classic in towns such as Fontainebleau is that they dug out the town square, and then put a nice tuned up version of the town square back on top.
I was pondering yesterday on the strange anomaly of airports. If ever there were a good place to have underground parking these are surely it:
- everyone hates going out miles on a shuttle bus to a huge car park on the perimeter, and it’s a mad waste of hectares of land - You can’t build very tall multi-storeys because of the planes, and it’s a waste to have one right by the terminal like in LHR when that could be taken by airport hotels - They dig up the land and create all sorts of ducting and subterranean units when they create airports anyway, why not bury a huge car park at the same time?
Obviously not directly under the runway but adjacent and below the terminals.
The other thing is solar plants. Why on earth isn’t every airport and airfield carpeted with solar arrays, given the land can’t be used for anything else and is already brownfield?
A fair point, but consider safety. At present running off the tarmac onto the grass isn't a huge disaster per se, as the plane has a fair chance to slow down in relative safety. But if one clutters it up with lots of steel girders and solar panels ...
I don't suppose the passengers would like it either. (I also wonder about the effect on airfield surveillance radar*, too.)
*Edit. The kind that tracks plane movements on the ground.
A crash would be even more environmentally friendly though.
There are tantalising rumours on TwitterX that we are alarmingly close to AGI - true Artificial Intelligence - or, that OpenAI have actually achieved it already
It’s bizarre that more people aren’t talking about this; if it is true it is one of the biggest news stories in human history
There are tantalising rumours on TwitterX that we have met aliens who can travel across space to visit us.
It's bizarre that more people aren't talking about this; if it is true* it is one of the biggest news stories in human history.
* It is not true
It really might be true
When I bang on about AI, @Benpointer always says “get back to me when a robot can stack my dishwasher”. And it’s a fair point
Well, now a robot can easily stack a dishwasher, and what’s more it can learn this simply by watching you do it first
“With enough strength and dexterity, Tesla's Bot could handle almost all physical tasks by simply looking at video clips of people doing said tasks.
Picking up a vacuum and running it through the house. Sorting and folding laundry. Tidying up the house. Moving material from point A to point B. Picking up trash and placing it in a bin. Pushing a lawnmower. Monitor an area for safety-related concerns. Laying bricks. Hammering nails. Using power tools. Clean dishes... etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.”
I can find you a parrot that can recite poetry - doesn't mean it can write you any.
Are learning machines cool? Yes. But at the end of the day they're automatons that can, at a basic level, do simple tasks in relatively stable environments. Complex tasks in other scenarios are out of reach. All the hype is just sales - of course people who own stocks in AI companies would claim it would end the world or be the gadget of the future, because they'll rake the money in.
It is not coincidental that the new "AI is going to be able to do everything" line came after the "Meta is going to be the new frontier" fell through and the "NFTs and the blockchain are going to revolutionise everything" idea was proven false. Capitalism always needs a new frontier, to exploit and sell and commodify, and tech bros think they can build the next one. So far they're failing.
In my view the free chat programmes available online have written reasoning capabilities that exceed that of most graduate level professionals with over 20 years of high level report writing experience. They can write better than people who have been doing decision making and report writing for their entire career. From a management point of view they surpass most humans in knowing how to respond to situations in difficult correspondence exercises.
It is an inevitable human reaction to deny this or not look at it, but it won't help.
Do you mean ChatGPT, or is there a specific programme you mean? I think the most convincing ones are good at creating the approximation of human writing, until you learn it is either just lying (making up references and quotes and just general facts) or spewing nonsense (this often happens with coding where the coding looks correct, but is really just nonsense).
The way this stuff currently works is by taking the input, analysing words that are associated with the words relevant to that topic, and picking each word based on the likelihood that it is the most common word to follow the previous word. That requires it to read (and arguably steal) the work of existing people. It cannot think - it is not creating. It is a parrot - a big parrot, a complex parrot, a parrot that can maybe do some simple things - but a parrot. And that's selling parrots short, because I believe parrots have the ability of cognition.
So, is the robot video real, or not?
You still haven't told us, and you still don't realise the significance of that
The market is deciding. The hysteria about the announcement last week was partly synthetic and partly misplaced. Just because people can sell something doesn’t mean they will.
Auto makers work on cycle times of years on products and platforms. They’d not be likely to chop and change at the govts whim.
But this can't be true. It was Keir Starmer forcing Nissan et al to ditch petrol. Sunak saved people from having to buy an electric car, it was in all the right newspapers and TV news shows. Thanks to Rishi making Long-Term Decisions for a Brighter Future, the dread threat of all EV by 2030 was removed.
Nissan must be mistaken .
Nissan don't make new cars at the £13k entry level range of the market like the Kia Picanto etc
By 2030 it seems entirely plausible that an electric juke will be as cheap as a petrol Juke, but it does not look likely that an electric Picanto would be available as cheap as a petrol Picanto.
So again, if in 6 years time if you could get a cheap petrol vehicle like the Picanto for £13k in real terms, but if the cheapest electric is in real terms £21k (currently £27k is cheapest) then should the Picanto be outlawed and people who want to buy it be forced to pay eight grand more?
We need to continue with what the market has been doing from Tesla onwards which is to start at the top of the market and work down with electrification, not the other way around. If in 2030 the only petrol vehicles the market still offers is 1.0 litre runarounds like the Picanto simply because electrification of them isn't affordably ready yet, then what's the harm in that?
We shouldn't really go by capital price but by the cost paid per month by the purchaser. Given that only a very small fraction of people buying new cars pay cash on the full price for them, and 80-80% get PCP (we can debate the wisdom of going the PCP route, but for this, we simply recognise that such is the default route to new car purchase at the moment and therefore what the market will be following), we need to look at the main monthly expenditure of the purchaser.
Which is PCP monthly payment plus petrol or electricity costs.
Petrol comes in at c. £1.50 per litre at the moment.
The majority of those buying electric cars will be recharging at home overnight (70%+: there's a need to address the needs of those who cannot do this, but, again, the overall market is driven by those who can do this. And the core need would be to fill in the gap for those who can't). At the moment, an EV tariff from Octopus gives £0.075 per kWh overnight.
The Picanto does c. 13 miles per litre. Assuming the default given by Kia on their finance calculator of 10,000 miles per year, that costs £1,155 per year in petrol, or £96.30 per month. The finance calculator for the Picanto gives (at 10% down payment of £1,350) a cost of £206.58 per month on PCP. This leads to a cost on PCP plus fuel of £302.88 per month to the purchaser.
The Ceed comes in at £21k, so the finance for a putative £21k Kia EV can be looked at on the same site (which helps) and comes out at £342.02 per month (using the same £1350 deposit, which is under 10% this time and probably incurs a slightly higher interest rate, but we need it to be comparable for the purchaser). If the EV has an efficiency similar to the MGZ4 (3.8 miles/kWh), it would cost £197.37 per year in electricity, or £16.45 per month). Cost is then £358.37 per month to the purchaser for PCP plus electricity.
The difference is therefore 18% more expensive to the purchaser for the 21k EV over the 13k ICE rather than the 61% of the sticker price. You only need the price to fall to about £18k to be the same affordability as a £13k ICE to the purchaser, to all intents and purposes.
A large portion of people buying cheap small cars are parking on the street not off road. I certainly was.
Even based on your average that 30% will not be recharging at home overnight that needs to be included in the maths, but I strongly suspect that 30% is disproportionately those buying smaller, cheaper vehicles.
Compare like-for-like by comparing recharging rates at commercial charging stations and redo your maths.
Want to fix electric for everyone? Addressing the charging issue is the biggest issue to tackle, not quibble over a year or two for the transition to electric.
Perhaps we should ban on-road parking, like the Japanese?
Would free up space equivalent to 16 motorways.
My Spanish Father-in-Law doesn't understand why the UK doesn't build underground carparks as all the towns in Spain seem to have. Simples - because we are incompetent and corrupt. And they are not.
Hang on - I hear right wing voices say - the Spanish ARE corrupt. And that is true. And yet they can stick underground car parks into their towns and we can't afford to...
I haven't heard of this before - can we have examples of these underground car parks in all the towns in Spain?
Quite common in France - the classic in towns such as Fontainebleau is that they dug out the town square, and then put a nice tuned up version of the town square back on top.
I was pondering yesterday on the strange anomaly of airports. If ever there were a good place to have underground parking these are surely it:
- everyone hates going out miles on a shuttle bus to a huge car park on the perimeter, and it’s a mad waste of hectares of land - You can’t build very tall multi-storeys because of the planes, and it’s a waste to have one right by the terminal like in LHR when that could be taken by airport hotels - They dig up the land and create all sorts of ducting and subterranean units when they create airports anyway, why not bury a huge car park at the same time?
Obviously not directly under the runway but adjacent and below the terminals.
Why don't we have a biig loong building and land planes on the roof? Sort of like a landbased aircraft carrier?
I started this on previous thread and think it needs some discussion.
The current odds for the 4 favourite teams (SA, IRE, FRA, NZ) are all 3-1 to 4-1. Probably a fair reflection with no value to be seen. England are then at 10/1, with Wales 22/1. England looks about right but not in comparison to Wales - not because of any perception in strength - but because of the run in of both teams. England have not qualified yet and still need to beat Samoa to do so (not a foregone conclusion). England will then probably play Fiji (who beat them recently) while Wales probably play Argentina (who have not impressed). After that Wales and England have a similar route through SF & F. My point is that the odds are overpriced for England in comparison to Wales - there is definitely value in the Welsh odds - not in England.
You point out that Fiji have beaten England recently in a warm up whilst England were doing fitness cycles to prep for the WC but not that Wales could be considered to have been lucky to beat Fiji due to a lot of terrible reffing decisions in the match.
Your big win was v Australia who lost in the recent Rugby Championship at home to Argentina who England managed to make mugs out of. Argentina also only lost by one point to SA in the same Rugby Championship.
I think Wales are looking good but maybe not been tested as hard as you think and England have been tested harder than you think so the odds could be correct.
I accept your points regarding recent playing record - but this does not get away from fact that England have two tough matches to play compared to Wales one to reach SF (Wales have already qualified and can lose to Georgia without changing anything).
Surely by your calculations though Samoa is not a difficult game, Samoa lost to Argentina who apparently haven’t impressed, and according to a lot of commentary after England beat them they are crap, so England have to play a team that is worse than and lost to a team that hasn’t impressed and who were given a beating by England.
I'd say Wales are good value compared to England. But I think it is more a case of England being overvalued than Wales being undervalued.
I'd give the chances roughly as follows:
Fr: 30% Ire: 24% NZ: 18% SAF: 16% (I am much more negative on SAF since I saw their lack of specialist hookers and flyhalves) Wal: 6% Eng: 4% Fiji: 2% Arg: 1% Anyone else: < 1%
I take the point that the big four have all got to play each other so only two of those will get to the semis. But at the moment I'd say the chances of one of the top four NOT winning it are only about one in ten.
Fieldwork all post Rishi's announcement cancelling climate change. Three polls now so I think we can declare a bounce, of around 4-5%.
I think this shows the impact when you have one party opening up a contentious issue where the public is probably more evenly split than polling VI. It got a huge amount of press, and if even say 35% of people agreed with Rishi that might have been enough to push the polling up.
Long term it's a reversion to the polling numbers earlier in the summer, before quite a marked dip the week before the net zero anouncements.
The market is deciding. The hysteria about the announcement last week was partly synthetic and partly misplaced. Just because people can sell something doesn’t mean they will.
Auto makers work on cycle times of years on products and platforms. They’d not be likely to chop and change at the govts whim.
But this can't be true. It was Keir Starmer forcing Nissan et al to ditch petrol. Sunak saved people from having to buy an electric car, it was in all the right newspapers and TV news shows. Thanks to Rishi making Long-Term Decisions for a Brighter Future, the dread threat of all EV by 2030 was removed.
Nissan must be mistaken .
Nissan don't make new cars at the £13k entry level range of the market like the Kia Picanto etc
By 2030 it seems entirely plausible that an electric juke will be as cheap as a petrol Juke, but it does not look likely that an electric Picanto would be available as cheap as a petrol Picanto.
So again, if in 6 years time if you could get a cheap petrol vehicle like the Picanto for £13k in real terms, but if the cheapest electric is in real terms £21k (currently £27k is cheapest) then should the Picanto be outlawed and people who want to buy it be forced to pay eight grand more?
We need to continue with what the market has been doing from Tesla onwards which is to start at the top of the market and work down with electrification, not the other way around. If in 2030 the only petrol vehicles the market still offers is 1.0 litre runarounds like the Picanto simply because electrification of them isn't affordably ready yet, then what's the harm in that?
We shouldn't really go by capital price but by the cost paid per month by the purchaser. Given that only a very small fraction of people buying new cars pay cash on the full price for them, and 80-80% get PCP (we can debate the wisdom of going the PCP route, but for this, we simply recognise that such is the default route to new car purchase at the moment and therefore what the market will be following), we need to look at the main monthly expenditure of the purchaser.
Which is PCP monthly payment plus petrol or electricity costs.
Petrol comes in at c. £1.50 per litre at the moment.
The majority of those buying electric cars will be recharging at home overnight (70%+: there's a need to address the needs of those who cannot do this, but, again, the overall market is driven by those who can do this. And the core need would be to fill in the gap for those who can't). At the moment, an EV tariff from Octopus gives £0.075 per kWh overnight.
The Picanto does c. 13 miles per litre. Assuming the default given by Kia on their finance calculator of 10,000 miles per year, that costs £1,155 per year in petrol, or £96.30 per month. The finance calculator for the Picanto gives (at 10% down payment of £1,350) a cost of £206.58 per month on PCP. This leads to a cost on PCP plus fuel of £302.88 per month to the purchaser.
The Ceed comes in at £21k, so the finance for a putative £21k Kia EV can be looked at on the same site (which helps) and comes out at £342.02 per month (using the same £1350 deposit, which is under 10% this time and probably incurs a slightly higher interest rate, but we need it to be comparable for the purchaser). If the EV has an efficiency similar to the MGZ4 (3.8 miles/kWh), it would cost £197.37 per year in electricity, or £16.45 per month). Cost is then £358.37 per month to the purchaser for PCP plus electricity.
The difference is therefore 18% more expensive to the purchaser for the 21k EV over the 13k ICE rather than the 61% of the sticker price. You only need the price to fall to about £18k to be the same affordability as a £13k ICE to the purchaser, to all intents and purposes.
A large portion of people buying cheap small cars are parking on the street not off road. I certainly was.
Even based on your average that 30% will not be recharging at home overnight that needs to be included in the maths, but I strongly suspect that 30% is disproportionately those buying smaller, cheaper vehicles.
Compare like-for-like by comparing recharging rates at commercial charging stations and redo your maths.
Want to fix electric for everyone? Addressing the charging issue is the biggest issue to tackle, not quibble over a year or two for the transition to electric.
Perhaps we should ban on-road parking, like the Japanese?
Would free up space equivalent to 16 motorways.
My Spanish Father-in-Law doesn't understand why the UK doesn't build underground carparks as all the towns in Spain seem to have. Simples - because we are incompetent and corrupt. And they are not.
Hang on - I hear right wing voices say - the Spanish ARE corrupt. And that is true. And yet they can stick underground car parks into their towns and we can't afford to...
I haven't heard of this before - can we have examples of these underground car parks in all the towns in Spain?
Quite common in France - the classic in towns such as Fontainebleau is that they dug out the town square, and then put a nice tuned up version of the town square back on top.
Also very common in German cities. A new housing block or new commerical building has to provide a certain level of off road parking, and this is almost always put in the foundadtions of the building. This is not so new. My house (in Berlin) was built in 1980 and has underground parking as do most of the houses on my road.
Comments
It’s bizarre that more people aren’t talking about this; if it is true it is one of the biggest news stories in human history
Given that only a very small fraction of people buying new cars pay cash on the full price for them, and 80-80% get PCP (we can debate the wisdom of going the PCP route, but for this, we simply recognise that such is the default route to new car purchase at the moment and therefore what the market will be following), we need to look at the main monthly expenditure of the purchaser.
Which is PCP monthly payment plus petrol or electricity costs.
Petrol comes in at c. £1.50 per litre at the moment.
The majority of those buying electric cars will be recharging at home overnight (70%+: there's a need to address the needs of those who cannot do this, but, again, the overall market is driven by those who can do this. And the core need would be to fill in the gap for those who can't). At the moment, an EV tariff from Octopus gives £0.075 per kWh overnight.
The Picanto does c. 13 miles per litre. Assuming the default given by Kia on their finance calculator of 10,000 miles per year, that costs £1,155 per year in petrol, or £96.30 per month. The finance calculator for the Picanto gives (at 10% down payment of £1,350) a cost of £206.58 per month on PCP. This leads to a cost on PCP plus fuel of £302.88 per month to the purchaser.
The Ceed comes in at £21k, so the finance for a putative £21k Kia EV can be looked at on the same site (which helps) and comes out at £342.02 per month (using the same £1350 deposit, which is under 10% this time and probably incurs a slightly higher interest rate, but we need it to be comparable for the purchaser). If the EV has an efficiency similar to the MGZ4 (3.8 miles/kWh), it would cost £197.37 per year in electricity, or £16.45 per month).
Cost is then £358.37 per month to the purchaser for PCP plus electricity.
The difference is therefore 18% more expensive to the purchaser for the 21k EV over the 13k ICE rather than the 61% of the sticker price. You only need the price to fall to about £18k to be the same affordability as a £13k ICE to the purchaser, to all intents and purposes.
It's bizarre that more people aren't talking about this; if it is true* it is one of the biggest news stories in human history.
* It is not true
edit- p.s. good article on woke HS2 by the way
2010 was when I bought my current Kia that I still drive to this day. When I bought that, Kia had established their reputation rather than being considered cheap shit, and started to offer 7 year warranties which they were the first to do.
Anyone buying today isn't buying an unheard of brand with a 3 year warranty, they're buying a known brand with a longer warranty like I did in 2010.
'my response was absurd because the thing I was responding was absurd'
(the 'thing I was responding' == 'my response')
Not very enlightening, but consistent
I'd give the chances roughly as follows:
Fr: 30%
Ire: 24%
NZ: 18%
SAF: 16% (I am much more negative on SAF since I saw their lack of specialist hookers and flyhalves)
Wal: 6%
Eng: 4%
Fiji: 2%
Arg: 1%
Anyone else: < 1%
I take the point that the big four have all got to play each other so only two of those will get to the semis. But at the moment I'd say the chances of one of the top four NOT winning it are only about one in ten.
TL:DR it’s a massive bleeping mess, which has been going on for ages and was always going to come to a head at some point.
Even based on your average that 30% will not be recharging at home overnight that needs to be included in the maths, but I strongly suspect that 30% is disproportionately those buying smaller, cheaper vehicles.
Compare like-for-like by comparing recharging rates at commercial charging stations and redo your maths.
Want to fix electric for everyone? Addressing the charging issue is the biggest issue to tackle, not quibble over a year or two for the transition to electric.
Perhaps a question for the doctors as much as Bart
Would free up space equivalent to 16 motorways.
Remarkably some Councils deliberately do the polar opposite. Nottingham for instance taxes firms that provide off road parking to their employees. Total insanity - if their employees park on the road, no tax paid. 🤦♂️
Anyway, its an academic debate. This is already in play. The industry is switching back to electric after a century tarting around with internal combustion. And there is nothing the Tories can do to stop the terrible creep of modernity.
Whether the industry takes six or twelve years to finish that transition is moot.
What's not moot is providing charging facilities to those without off road parking. That is where all political discussion should be aimed at, anything else is just nonsense.
Hang on - I hear right wing voices say - the Spanish ARE corrupt. And that is true. And yet they can stick underground car parks into their towns and we can't afford to...
It will certainly not be 30% unable to charge cheaply overnight by 2030. There are a whole swathe of options being looked at for this (lamp post chargers, pop-up charge points, etc), and that's crucial.
Especially as many or even all companies will cease offering ICE cars by then, anyway. Removing one entire supply chain gives significant savings; keeping ICE capability when it's a tiny (and non-subisdised) segment of the market becomes unworkable.
Kia, for example, are going in heavily on EVs. And they've done pretty well on that so far - their EVs are highly rated. I can see them getting down to the £20k level fairly easily (especially as battery pack prices plummet) and the £15k-£18k level is vey plausible.
Mandating a switchover date removes some risk to companies making investments and increases the prospects of getting those lower prices, as they therefore make those investments with the foreknowledge that this will be the state of things in the UK at that time.
Workplaces and living rooms need natural light, they're not well suited to being underground. Parking spaces don't. Secure underground parking takes no real estate at all, it should be completely encouraged - instead we discourage it.
Madness.
1. Invest in power generation. We don't make enough electricity and have to import it more than we export it.
2. Invest in power transmission. We still have the stupidity of a network which doesn't invest in transmission capacity and charges so much for what it has that building green power in the places it is windy isn't cost-effective once delivered
3. Copy the 1922 Railway Grouping Act for EV charging companies. Go from 40 shit ones to 4 good ones. Having charging infrastructure which is actually maintained and usable is critical, as opposed to the wild west have now
4. Install a generic simple charging post every time you dig up the road. Mass produce something simple enough to be reliable, which means not being at the whim of compatibility with 40 different operators.
When I bang on about AI, @Benpointer always says “get back to me when a robot can stack my dishwasher”. And it’s a fair point
Well, now a robot can easily stack a dishwasher, and what’s more it can learn this simply by watching you do it first
https://x.com/tesla_optimus/status/1705728820693668189?s=46&t=bulOICNH15U6kB0MwE6Lfw
“With enough strength and dexterity, Tesla's Bot could handle almost all physical tasks by simply looking at video clips of people doing said tasks.
Picking up a vacuum and running it through the house. Sorting and folding laundry. Tidying up the house. Moving material from point A to point B. Picking up trash and placing it in a bin. Pushing a lawnmower. Monitor an area for safety-related concerns. Laying bricks. Hammering nails. Using power tools. Clean dishes... etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.”
https://x.com/farzyness/status/1706006003135779299?s=46&t=bulOICNH15U6kB0MwE6Lfw
It isn't the worst idea in the world. It would fix so many issues that are outstanding from when I first lived in Yorkshire. The Ouse Bridge would be
fixedreplaced as they'd upgrade the A63 to motorway all the way into Hull. Stamford Bridge would finally get a bypass. You'd have the restoration of the train line between Hull and York (Beverley is cut adrift at the moment thanks to Dr Beeching). Full fibre everywhere (not tied to KCOM). High-end retailers. Soaring property prices.Great Driffield. The legislative capital of a post-Brexit United Kingdom. Those sunlit uplands (or Wolds) look marvellous.
I can just see Jacob Rees-Mogg in Boyes or Yorkshire Trading Company...
Both Houses have tiny majorities and are often controlled by different parties, as is the case at the moment, hence the arguments about the budget. At some point, they either need to pass the same budget bill(s) in both Houses, or see the Federal government shut down until it’s resolved. They’ve now got five days until the shutdown starts by default.
My suspicion is that the Senate willl pass a Continuation Bill, which the House will get through with a handful of Republican rebels or abstainers - and then McCarthy will be fired as House Speaker by a different set of Republican rebels, who see him going back on his promise to them for a more granular approach to budget setting.
So Samoa can win two games (including a 5 pointer against England) and reach 15 points. If they do Japan can only get 7 points max (and that with a win over Argentina, which would send England through).
Argentina win two games with a bonus point to get to 14? Then Samoa get to 15 points (two bonus point wins?) and this knocks out England (is it game vs the side on equals points or points difference? - If the latter Argentina have a mountain to climb).
I think it will be England vs Fiji and Wales vs Argentina. Both winnable by the 6N team so then its 180 minutes from glory.
I actually thought Wales were excellent on Sunday, and they must have a shout in any semi-final. The defence was superb.
England has two games in the greasy 8 (actually 9) pm slot, and then a game at 5 with much better ball skills, albeit against a poor Chile.
Are learning machines cool? Yes. But at the end of the day they're automatons that can, at a basic level, do simple tasks in relatively stable environments. Complex tasks in other scenarios are out of reach. All the hype is just sales - of course people who own stocks in AI companies would claim it would end the world or be the gadget of the future, because they'll rake the money in.
It is not coincidental that the new "AI is going to be able to do everything" line came after the "Meta is going to be the new frontier" fell through and the "NFTs and the blockchain are going to revolutionise everything" idea was proven false. Capitalism always needs a new frontier, to exploit and sell and commodify, and tech bros think they can build the next one. So far they're failing.
We need to be fastidious grammatically he're on PB.
From 2035, if you buy a new car, you must demonstrate that you have private parking provision (with a charger).
That would affect very few people, but give a strong steer to the market that there will be increasing demand for private parking in the next 10 years or so.
What do PBers think?
https://www.pymnts.com/artificial-intelligence-2/2023/is-going-for-broke-with-chatgpt-bankrupting-sam-altmans-openai/
But by talking only to the remaining base, especially now when it's at its narrowest, they risk poisoning their own future standing with everyone else.
The impression given by Braverman turning on gay people and women is backed up by the government's abandonment of the Conversion Therapy bill. Similarly, Sunak smirking about trashing HS2 is of a piece with his helicopter junkets. And the highest tax burden ever on working people sits alongside an inheritance tax bung to those who hope to benefit from unearned wealth.
These things might, just might, save them a handful of seats at the next election. But it comes at the cost of retoxifying their brand, and making it all the more likely that they'll be out of power for two or even three parliaments rather than just the one.
I think the last sentence is key that it is, I guess, infinitely more expensive to excavate 8 stories down than knock up a car park 8 stories up so if you are a private car park co in the UK you have a potentially exorbitant extra cost and so would need to offset it by becoming a property developer too to build flats or offices in the land above it to make it financially viable.
You would probably also face some weird laws about who owns the land underground - probably the queen’s swans - and then people would block the planning permission as the disruption to their pipes and services underground would be intolerable and they already have a car parking space in their house.
I don't know what the exact problem is but having to re-pour the concrete deck in-situ does not inspire confidence in the longevity of the structure.
Still, I suppose all motorways will have a 30mph limit soon, so the current situation is good practice for that at least.
Think about it
See - I can make true statements that could be read as sarcastic or could just be true too.
Facebook backed the wrong horse tho they are now rapidly striving to catch up
(I'm fairly bullish on AI, but Optimus feels more like one of Elon's toy projects than something real - if it gets to the point where it can make Boston Dynamics-style videos in 5-10 years time, I think he'll be happy)
Should indeed be motorway to Hull. Heading that way, you feel like you must somehow have missed the Hull turn-off when the road gets smaller!
As well as streamlining planning to make changes easier, replace all land-based taxes with a simple land value tax.
A plot of land in an area zoned for planning permission for development should face exactly the same taxes whether 'banked' and undeveloped, or its built for detached homes with off road parking, or a block of flats with underground parking.
For flats etc having underground parking should be a value add that can be offered, but if added it shouldn't attract any tax since the tax should remain on the pure land value.
AI will be able to do some things in the near future, sure; but a humanoid learning robot is not a thing we have yet. A dude wearing a green screen costume, or a CGI robot (or a bit of both) is the Occam's Razor right now until we have more than "twitter is saying"
AI robot, which is my original point. As that is the Turing Test proposed by @Benpointer
It is an inevitable human reaction to deny this or not look at it, but it won't help.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-australia-66920778
I recommend not reading the whole article if you are squeamish.
Didn't realise we were at the stage of croc experts, but not surprised they aren't to be trusted.
On the evidence of a dodgy video of a robot looking thing picking up oversized lego blocks? On Twitter?
I would say I have a bridge to sell you, but I'm sure you already bought an NFT of one that you're sure will make you rich in the future.
- everyone hates going out miles on a shuttle bus to a huge car park on the perimeter, and it’s a mad waste of hectares of land
- You can’t build very tall multi-storeys because of the planes, and it’s a waste to have one right by the terminal like in LHR when that could be taken by airport hotels
- They dig up the land and create all sorts of ducting and subterranean units when they create airports anyway, why not bury a huge car park at the same time?
Obviously not directly under the runway but adjacent and below the terminals.
But it takes ages to get anywhere. You feel like you've done a day's journey just to get to civilisation.
There is a long-term trend of fewer young people bothering to learn to drive, and a huge backlog in lessons and tests due to COVID.
Relative demand for non-car infrastructure will continue to grow, whether you like it or not.
The way to steer the market is just to charge more and more for on-street parking. If you need to buy off current homeowners when you introduce the system, give them a 10-year lease on a street parking space, with the right to pay for another 10 years, and let them sell it on to the highest bidder if they want to.
Edit: the sub-surface ones. But actually the surface ones too, given the risk of monkeying with the foundations.
"delivering training sessions on conscious inclusion and understanding bullying and harassment to help facilitate internal conversation and greater understanding of unconscious bias"
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/the-deep-absurdity-of-hs2-diversitys-agenda/
ChatGPT could absolutely write that three times better
The way this stuff currently works is by taking the input, analysing words that are associated with the words relevant to that topic, and picking each word based on the likelihood that it is the most common word to follow the previous word. That requires it to read (and arguably steal) the work of existing people. It cannot think - it is not creating. It is a parrot - a big parrot, a complex parrot, a parrot that can maybe do some simple things - but a parrot. And that's selling parrots short, because I believe parrots have the ability of cognition.
"The Post Office Scandal: An Absolute Catastrophe in Litigation: Richard Moorhead"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=15MiwVKXhts
Relative demand for non-car infrastructure will grow, no qualms with that at all. We should build it.
Absolute demand for car infrastructure continues to grow too. No qualms with that either. We should build it too.
@PippyBing
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5m
“Here’s a list of names I’ve heard in recent weeks touted in Labour circles for peerages should the party win an election […] Iain Anderson, Margaret Beckett, Luciana Berger, Mark Drakeford, Michael Dugher, David Evans, Harriet Harman, Margaret Hodge…
===
This is all starting to look like some in Labour are starting to take the polling for granted.
This may well prove to be a massive mistake. The Tories will throw everything at Labour next year with migration at top of the list.
https://archive.ph/QxbZG
I don't suppose the passengers would like it either. (I also wonder about the effect on airfield surveillance radar*, too.)
*Edit. The kind that tracks plane movements on the ground.
https://www.wired.com/story/why-not-turn-airports-into-giant-solar-farms/
You still haven't told us, and you still don't realise the significance of that
Con: 27% (+3 from 13-14 Sep)
Lab: 43% (-2)
Lib Dems: 10% (+1)
Reform UK: 8% (=)
Green: 7% (-2)
SNP: 4% (+1)
https://x.com/YouGov/status/1706625693302325430?s=20
Fieldwork all post Rishi's announcement cancelling climate change. Three polls now so I think we can declare a bounce, of around 4-5%.
I think this shows the impact when you have one party opening up a contentious issue where the public is probably more evenly split than polling VI. It got a huge amount of press, and if even say 35% of people agreed with Rishi that might have been enough to push the polling up.
Long term it's a reversion to the polling numbers earlier in the summer, before quite a marked dip the week before the net zero anouncements.