Which electric car to buy?

All politics is moving to extremes. I hope it will correct itself.

Some of the occasional aggressive pro EV posts are partly born from the anti EV guff/fake news. It’s frustrating for some. I personally wish @Wildcamper would stop amplifying right wing nonsense crapola.

There you go another frustrated post! There is an anti-EV thread which @Wildcamper could post on.
The natural and unfortunate repercussion of years of Centrist politics. Sadly it gives the fringes a louder voice to pound the pulpit.

Look at the leaders of the post Blair and Cameron eras for both main parties. They drifted further to ideals, both left and right respectively.

I read the comments here and they read of blame culture. It’s all ‘X’s or ‘Y’s fault.

Blame culture rarely (if ever?), works in corporations.

Anyhow. I’ll continue watching the debate unfold.

One thing I believe irrespectively. Net Zero is the correct ideal. But like most ideals it is fundamentally flawed when it comes to execution & reality.
 
One thing I believe irrespectively. Net Zero is the correct ideal. But like most ideals it is fundamentally flawed when it comes to execution & reality.

Net Zero would only be a "correct" ideal is if it's actually achievable within the 2050 timeframe, or at least roughly so. Otherwise, it's a hugely dangerous fantasy that deludes us with wishful thinking about our chances of keeping within the 1.5, or even the 2 degree warming scenarios.

My view FWIW is that in fact it isn't realistically achievable. Because, despite a conveyor belt of the "right" strategies committed to at successive COPs over 31 years since Rio in 1992 - switching to renewables, offsetting, carbon capture and storage - none have so far made anything like the progress required to track towards the Net Zero goal. Consequently, from where we are now, the annual decarbonisation rate in the 27 years remaining until 2050 is utterly unrealistic under any reasonable technological/socio-political scenario. I'm not blaming anyone for this, but it seems to me to be where we're at.

The most likely outlook at this point appears to be that net zero might only be reached late in the 21st century. Climate modelling has progressed (from when I first studied it as an environmental science student in 1980) into a very robust discipline and the central consensus of a 2.5 to 3 degree warming by 2100 seems to me entirely plausible, not simply a risk but a likelihood.

The world will be a very different place in so many ways in the late 21st century. Our children and theirs will mostly be fine, provided they can continue to sequester the lion's share of the wealth that the planet can generate, as we have done. Rich people are invariably able to cope with changes in their environment, or to move to somewhere safer/nicer.

For the less fortunate 80-90 percent of the world's population (which will by then have peaked at between 10 and 11 billion), they face decades of displacement and suffering, and in many cases, early death due to the profound climate impacts that are already starting to occur across the global South.

I'm not completely convinced that when Prof Kelly calls for a cost-benefit analysis of building some more windmills and doing some rewiring in Britain, he's planning on building those people into his calculus.
 
Last edited:
The Telegraph isn’t really a newspaper anymore. More of a right wing comment pamphlet.
I had a subscription for quite a while but it went very down hill after 2020.

They called Qwarteng’s mini budget the best they’d ever seen. Up there with GB News. Although MATT is the best cartoonist!

I can understand why some don’t like the BBC and Guardian. But they’re pretty good at environmental reporting.

The Economist is still OK.
 
I have a friend who I would call a staunch socialist. He reads the Financial Times. Only thing he trusts!
I’m a card carrying member of the Labour Party, although possibly their most right wing member. I read the FT and The Economist. I find the Guardian a bit whiny, and there’s a generation gap issue in that modern leftists have all sorts of views about gender and history that I struggle with. The Economist is a bit militaristic for me, but has great world news. I love the BBC World Service.

Having typed this I’m really not sure why it would be of any interest to anyone, except to plug the FT as an excellent paper.
 
I’m a card carrying member of the Labour Party, although possibly their most right wing member. I read the FT and The Economist. I find the Guardian a bit whiny, and there’s a generation gap issue in that modern leftists have all sorts of views about gender and history that I struggle with. The Economist is a bit militaristic for me, but has great world news. I love the BBC World Service.

Having typed this I’m really not sure why it would be of any interest to anyone, except to plug the FT as an excellent paper.

Ditto :)
 
I left the World Service last September after 9 years.
In a bid to stop reading actual news that I think makes me miserable, my wife got me a subscription to the New Statesman that I like a lot.
Similarly, I am also addicted to The Rest Is Politics. I would say just hearing grown up people talk about politics at arms length is good for my hope for the future. Day to day politics is awful.
I definitely know people who loathe Rory Stewart and Alastair Campbell though.
 
I left the World Service last September after 9 years.
In a bid to stop reading actual news that I think makes me miserable, my wife got me a subscription to the New Statesman that I like a lot.
Similarly, I am also addicted to The Rest Is Politics. I would say just hearing grown up people talk about politics at arms length is good for my hope for the future. Day to day politics is awful.
I definitely know people who loathe Rory Stewart and Alastair Campbell though.
Yes, another TRIP listener here. I worry that I agree with them too much; echo chamber problem.
 
Food for thought.
but think about all the money you've saved in petrol!
So basically if you have a 3 yr old EV, which is only worth 50% of its original price due to massive depreciation, and for even a minor accident you need to relace the battery which costs like the vehicle new, only to be immediately worth only 50%... .
So nobody repairs EVs, just salvaged, for convenience we'll ignore this CO2 cost instead of adding it to calculate the actual CO2 cost of an EV for the entire lifecycle vs ICE.
So Corrado, which colour did you order your Ioniq ?
 

Whether we like it or not, factories are changing over. The alternative is to leave the market to the Chinese.
 

Whether we like it or not, factories are changing over. The alternative is to leave the market to the Chinese.

The German Unions won't be happy!
 

Whether we like it or not, factories are changing over. The alternative is to leave the market to the Chinese.
 
For those interested in EVs look up the Autocar podcast My Week in Cars with an interview with Andy Palmer ex Aston Martin CEO and Nissan, described by some as the 'Godfather of EVs.
Very interesting listen.
 
Actually its 661 Teslas ranging from $21K for the high mileage Model 3 to $41K for the Y model SUV.
 
They had 48,000 in 2022, 11% of their stock. Seems excessive.
Wouldn't you expect them to turnover at least 1/3 of their cars each year so no car is more than 3 years old ? Only difference is that instead of replacing them like for like, the replacements will be petrol/diesel.
 
Wouldn't you expect them to turnover at least 1/3 of their cars each year so no car is more than 3 years old ? Only difference is that instead of replacing them like for like, the replacements will be petrol/diesel.
No I meant 11% seems too big a proportion of their fleet.
8% of new US sales are EVs but only 1% of registered vehicles.

Another context-free Telegraph article. A headline in search of a story.
 
Last edited:
I need a hire car for a ski trip in a couple of weeks. One option was EV, but I immediately discounted the car. I’m on limited time travelling to a less familiar area in a foreign country. In this scenario, I opted for an ICE car for convenience and peace of mind.
 

Similar threads

Back
Top