That's fantastic, until the subsidy and freebie tap turns off.
There are no subsidies as such, just tax breaks and interest free loans. The real advantage is that electricity is way cheaper than fuel.
First question. Do you actually get 330 miles range without driving like a granny/undertaker? I'll be very keen for one when you can do 300 miles at normal motorway speeds of 80-90.
No not at 80-90, but it’s still not bad. Just like regular card don’t get anywhere near the stated mileage if you drive fast on the motorway. It’s still pretty good though, and like I say you can recharge at 600mph which means it’s really not taking that long to get filled up again.. 100 miles in 10 minutes.
There are some serious question marks about the viability of the car market with electric cars because industry professionals state that after 10 years the batteries die, and effectively the car is scrap. The average age of a car on UK roads is 14 years, which implies a massive reduction in travel and a large section of the population losing their mobility.
Battery Maintenance technology has improved massively along with the batteries themselves, so although performance (Range) will undoubtedly drop off they’re not going to drop to zero. Maybe a car that would do 300 miles will only do 150, someone will still want that...
There are also problems with the viability of the charging network. In effect, there will never be a viable charging network because electric cars will generally be charged at home, so there will be too little demand to make charging stations economically viable under any plausible scenario.
There’s already a pretty good charging network, so I’m not worried about that at all.
Questions also remain about the economics of electric cars, which only match up when many of the large costs of conventional car ownership are removed - i.e. tax on fuel, vehicle tax, parking charges, congestion charges. When the government stops subsidising EVs, the costs will mushroom.
The economics do add up, if our fuel was tax free then yes diesel would be cheaper, but do you really see them slashing fuel duty any time soon? It only ever goes one way. I wouldn’t have bought one if the economics didn’t add up, I was as sceptical as you 6 months ago. But i did the maths on buying a £30k famIly car vs the nearly £50k Tesla over 5 years and the Tesla won. Even if you look at it over 8 years (which is the Tesla battery warranty) and write the Tesla down to zero the massive saving in fuel cost still makes the Tesla cheaper. For me anyway, factoring in the tax advantages.
The other thing is there’s every likelihood that electric vehicles will be much more reliable than petrol or diesel. If you think about an engine, there’s so much to go wrong, heavy parts change direction thousands of times a minute, piston rings scrape up and down the bores, belts cogs and chains all spinning around, sensors, coolant, oil, DPF, add blue, etc etc.. an electric motor is a spindle running on a fixed axis, there’s nothing changing direction, it’s just a bearing either end. Industrial motors can rack up thousands of hours without any maintenance. That’s the other advantage of electric, servicing costs are way less..
