I know a man with an F reg Golf GTi for sale if you’re interested?
I know a man with an F reg Golf GTi for sale if you’re interested?
You'd have more fun in one of those. I've had three, and along with the e30, they're one of the best motoring packages ever conceived.Originally Posted by Dave+63
I've had both loved the golf as basic as can be, loved the e30 325i wasn't much fun in the snow though
Good to know the tech is evolving, and I’m not suggesting we go backwards, just that perhaps we dump some luxuries that we don’t really need in favour of more efficiency and if it means more, cheaper EV’s to choose from for the man/woman in the street as opposed to early adopters/the wealthy then I don’t see a problem.
Sorely tempted by that Golf gti!
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Dacia might well be one of the first to enter this end of the market.
https://www.drivingelectric.com/daci...ing-considered
I would have said that MG have already done this with the MG5
Admittedly it’s not as cheap as the car in the link, but for a medium sized electric car, I think it’s good value.
Last edited by jaytip; 10th August 2021 at 13:44.
I’d kinda dismissed them as I believe even with the gov grant it’s base is north of £20k either way the market is calling for more players in the low end market.
Everyone's finances will be different of course.
I was wary of spending the necessary to buy a new/newish electric car, until someone pointed out to me that I would probably save about £2k/year in fuel/tax/servicing costs and that if you can borrow cheaply (eg mortgage) the cost of the borrowing would be far less than the saving.
Best wishes,
Martyn.
My daughter bought a new MG ZS EV for around £21k last year; they’re about £26k now as there aren’t the discounts there were. The MG5 is similar.
I've had an MG5LR since September 2021. I think it's brilliant. It's got all the toys you actually need but not the ones that are in real terms frivolous. I am getting 200 or slightly more miles in the winter and 250 to 260 during summer, and that's regularly using aircon, heating, and Boom radio. For my purposes it's the perfect car.
Own fewer cars per household...smaller and lighter would be better, make fewer powered trips and consume less that's what it's gonnna take.
Agreed, but in the absence of viable public transport in many areas, car ownership becomes almost a necessity to get to work on time. We’re wedded to the motor car whether we like it or not and I can’t see that changing. Smaller lighter vehicles makes a lot of sense, many modern cars are too big for narrow British roads and some incentives to get back to sensibly sized cars would make sense.
Electric vehicles will improve local air quality, that’s the big plus as I see it, but unless the rest of the world changes behaviours the CO2 emissions/ global warming problems will be unaffected by what we choose to do.
I can see a situation in the next 10-15 years where any drivers of ICE vehicles will be looked upon as pariahs. I think as the tech becomes more advanced, the anxiety that most people have about range slowly disappears and the issue regarding charging stations are rectified more and more people will convert over.
Imagine being the owner of that one ICE vehicle in a street full of electric vehicles!
Currently they’re not for everybody, if you’ve got to do plus 200 miles a day then I think things may currently be more complicated, if you’re the kind of person who’ stops for a coffee for 20 minutes and has a rapid charger en route then maybe not.
For me someone who does something like 40-50 miles a day they make perfect sense.
I do about 130 to 140 miles a day and there's no chance of having a fast charger on my drive. I have a fusebox under the stairs and no external walls near it thus making the installation impossible without having to tear up my recently installed flooring. I would love an EV but would have to get that range from a 13 amp socket. When that is doable, I'll get on board.
Unless you have 3 phase at home I think all you could have anyway is a standard 7kw charger.
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My next spare car will be an EV.
My primary car can't be swapped yet, but when the charging infrastructure and speed are there I'll be all in right away.
I had a Tesla for a couple of weeks in the states. I loved it, but found myself in a lot of shopping mall car parks for 45 minutes buying tat and didn't need and eating rubbish while the vehicle charged. It's a pretty poor experience and that's with decent infrastructure. It'll get better, but I drive to Skye from London 3-4 times a year as well as driving holidays in France and at the moment it's too much of a lottery. My friends with EVs who make similar journeys all have stories of hitting 2 or 3 charging stations in a row either busy or broken. It took one guy 5 hours to get charged. I can't risk that with young kids yet.
These are all teething problems though. Soon a charge will take no longer than filling up petrol.
I’ve driven a Skoda Enyaq today and it’s fantastic. In the short trip I’ve done albeit a mix of town and country it retuned 3.5 miles per KW. I know I’m not currently using lights etc but even so this would exceed my weekly need. Just had the quote and it’ll be £455 a month which includes VAT with 3 payments down. Serious contender to the Merc IMO.
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I have taken the plunge and ordered a Q4 that should show up around end Sept. Combined with a purchase discount, gov incentive and trading in a Polo meant the net cost to trade was a pretty decent deal.
It’s going to be used almost exclusively in the city and for school run. For this I think it works really well given its efficient, quiet, nimble in traffic, lots of space inside given the outside dimensions etc
I am looking at adding solar on the house roof as well, plus it looks like EV’s have much lower service costs as well as lower fuel cost all of which which should mean it’s cheap to run.
We will see how it all works out but I don’t think we have got this one wrong !
We've had an ID3 for a few weeks now.
Positive:
- dirt cheap lease via work (NHS), just over £200 per month including insurance; did mean restricted choice of colour and spec
- extremely cheap to run
- lots of kit
- quick!
- spacious inside
- very comfortable
- quiet
- super on long journeys
- pretty good range for local journeys
- free charging point installation and 4g connection
Negative:
- missing a couple of features we'd got used to (autolock and reversing camera)
- range much diminished on motorway drives
- hit and miss on charging out and about
We did a long trip (Bromley in Kent to Liverpool) recently, visit Haywood's shop to pick up a watch. The car nav identified a charging station, but when we got there it wouldn't work. Managed to get to the next one- it was an anxious time, mind. Next time we will stick to charging at motorway/ major A-road services- there are more and they tend to be working. On the plus side, we charged up at a car park over night in Liverpool, and the spa hotel we used on the way home had just installed chargers, and we got powered up for free!
I'm not sure we will go back to ICE. Although we do have a second vehicle- 2011 Brazilian made VW T2 camper, which has a 1.4 Polo engine in it.
Just thinking about home charging, how big would a portable power pack have to be that you could take from your house to your on street parked EV ? It would have to be secured in some way though of course. Is it feasible?
Cheers..
Jase
Presumably for a full charge would have to be as big as the car's own battery.
Fella on the Lane is an RAC man. They are moving to four wheel bogies for towing EV’s with flat batteries and the new vans are ditching all the carried useful stock for power packs to boost enough for 20 ish miles.
Pitch
One of those Honda portable generators stashed in the boot might do the trick.
Diesel-powered generator to charge your electric vehicle.........job done!
Electric vehicles don’t appeal to me (yet) but having a 75’ x 12’ driveway means I’ll have plenty if space for off- road charging when I do eventually buy one. I can see lots of drawbacks but I can also sense which way the wind is blowing.
In a word, no.
When you look long into an abyss, the abyss looks long into you.........
If you haven't watched the Guy Martin 'Worlds Fastest Electric Car' then do so its a great watch and a lot of interesting stuff on there with a Lincolnite analysis, my favourite part his when he has the Porsche Taycan and says the salesmen told me its pronounced 'Tay-Caaan', Guys reply 'Not in Lincolnshire Mate"
RIAC
My friend has an MG ZE EV and we've been using electrons whizzing round Surrey. I was very impressed by it's performance and would certainly consider an EV.
https://apple.news/Acy0ZESP1TfCy_vAKeHeiWQ
Doesn’t make very happy reading for the midlands car industry
About time our government took a bit more interest in this and the viability of the uk specialty steels business, currently hobbled by crippling energy costs and allowing Turkish steel makers with on-site COAL (!) fired power stations to undercut them in the market
In 21st century Britain such opinions are heresy.
"Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. The third time it's enemy action."
'Populism, the last refuge of a Tory scoundrel'.
Is EV the future or is Hydrogen? Reminds me of the VHS and Betamax saga.
It’s certainly not hydrogen. Too many compromises and inefficiencies for cars; possibly a solution for LGV and similar.
Yeah you could be right.
I’d forgotten this one, a few years ago I changed the brake pads on my neighbours Volvo, three weeks later he put it in for a service at the main dealer, they called him to say he needed new front brake pads, he hasn’t been back to them since. He says he won’t buy another new Volvo
We've had a 19 plate i3S for a couple of weeks now. In theory it's my wife's. In reality this proper petrolhead is loving BEV life so far.
In the US, the infrastructure is just not there yet. There are states saying they want to ban non EVs in about 10 years time. Where are all these millions of vehicles going to charge, many of which can’t just plug in at home overnight?
We need a LOT more of this type of thing. This is my head office, as a company we try hard to be climate conscious. Every parking space has bookable chargers. 100's of charging spaces.
Impressive! Where is that?We need a LOT more of this type of thing. This is my head office, as a company we try hard to be climate conscious. Every parking space has bookable chargers. 100's of charging spaces.
The charging issue will be solved wherever cars park, no car is driving around 24/7, and at some point they’ll be parked either roadside or on a driveway/in a driveway or car park for hours.
That’s where the chargers need to be. It’s a challenge, but also an employment and revenue opportunity.
It's up in Edinburgh, sadly it's not my local office otherwise I'd be using the facilities. I'm fortunate enough to be able to have a home charging point - you're right though, they need to be everywhere. I did my first 'long' trip in my EV last week, I stopped at a large motorway service station and there was only 1 charging point! I had to wait for it to be free to charge enough to get home. They make money, I simply don't understand why there weren't 10, instead of just 1!
Pleased to read NatWest have upped their game. I worked at that office until 3 years ago and they had 3 charging points that I knew of (one of which was unofficially “reserved” for an exec)We need a LOT more of this type of thing. This is my head office, as a company we try hard to be climate conscious. Every parking space has bookable chargers. 100's of charging spaces.
Currently spending some time in Cannes where the film festival is just starting
I see BMW is a major Sponsor, making 200 all electric vehicles available .
Went for a long walk last evening along the coast and in one of the marina car parks, found their base for the event.
Along with 8 large MAN (Volkswagen) turbo diesel generating sets parked up connected to the biggest bank of charging points you’ve ever seen
I’ve worked in and around that type of kit all my life and I’d reckon on about 4mw of diesel power generation there.
The irony was not lost…
https://www.press.bmwgroup.com/globa...al?language=en
Last edited by GOAT; 14th May 2023 at 08:19.
Unbelievable really, makes an utter mockery.
It was the same at the 'Climate Summit' in Scotland. Much a to do was made of the fact that 100% EV buses were being used to transport delegates to and from hotels etc. In reality there were some very large diesel KVa generators tucked away that were used to keep them charged.
When you look long into an abyss, the abyss looks long into you.........
You're deliberately not mentioning that the generators were powered with veg oil? Which they were.
You're right, it was a bad "optic" to to use electric buses when the charging infrastructure was not present to charge them properly.
And even worse to try and publicise the green use when compromises were being made, but they were still powered by non-fossil fuel.
But buses are one of the few types of transport that could very effectively be electric powered, as they do relatively low mileage, with lots of start-stop, and are inactive overnight.
All they need is effective charging in depot, which, when you congregate a lot of buses together, would be fairly power hungry and hard to do.
So you can see why, without proper planning, the mistake was made.
Not deliberately, HVO use in generators is increasing but it's still an ICE albeit with reduced emissions.
Last edited by Chris_in_the_UK; 15th May 2023 at 17:42.
When you look long into an abyss, the abyss looks long into you.........
Agree does look appealing, now when they can just get the price s down into realistic territory, could be a winner like the earlier model...''an all-electric car for all people'' as their copy promises.
Last edited by Passenger; 28th May 2023 at 11:00.
What price guess you putting on that ? I'll go with 30k+ as a starter....
Sadly reckon you're right, doesn't their electric Zoe start at 29K...It's too much. It would be great if someone could do a car that had iterations from bare minimum tech/ no frills and then on upwards, which was kinda what they did with the original Renault 5's I think...you'd think the super mini category potentially being lightish would really lend itself to such an ethos...''A car for all the people'' Nope only those with at least 30 large to spend... but really what do I know, not that much of a car guy... Cars especially if you want to drive the future are again Luxury items I guess...Gonna keep the small engine Skoda for the mid/ long term, saves putting yet another car on the road, continue watching developments.
A couple of weeks back I jumped in an Uber at Battersea which turned out to be a fully electric MG of some description. Anyway, chatting to the driver who lives in a 4th floor flat he was saying it needs to be charged everyday cost him an hour of time and between £50 & £60. For that he gets just over 200 miles, his previous car (an Ionic maybe) did over 400 for the same money and took 5 mins to fill.
Apparently charging is a nightmare as many on street chargers are not designed for cars which have the charge port on the OSR, cables are too short, black cabs charge port is NSF. He was forced to go electric as they are the only ones TfL will licence now so all new cabs will be plug in.
All in all I don’t think we was loving plug-in life.
MG4 charge port is near side rear and both the ZSEV and MG5 have charge ports on the front. Neither should be an issue for a roadside charge point.
His complaint isn’t with the EV, it’s with TFL for making the rules and the charger operators for their pricing structures.
On the flip side, it’s a positive for EVs as he wouldn’t be allowed to do his job if he had an ICE.
Longer charge cables are available to buy if the one supplied with his car isn’t long enough. 8m long enough?
https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/126291316...mis&media=COPY
Unless I'm missing something, couldn't he just turn the car around...?
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