Quote Originally Posted by Richie_101 View Post
I'm not anti-EV, but I do wonder where we're going with all this.

The focus seems to be on building bigger cars with more performance and tech, which is fine if we all live a lease/PCP utopia where we can just swap to a new car every 3 years, but eventually the 'older' cars will start to develop problems and some poor soul will be left to foot the bill. I can't imagine how much maintenance costs will be to keep all the tech functioning on a modern EV or hybrid. Car manufacturers are going to be laughing all the way to the bank.

Why didn't manufacturers invest their billions into developing alternative fuels for existing cars? Coryton have developed a plant based alternative fuel for existing engines, reducing emissions by 65%, so it is possible. Maybe that could be improved further with more development/investment, but instead the response from the big players has been 'Nah...look at the shiny, shiny!' Sad times.
For me, EVs have their place in city centres providing the car is small, think BMW i3 at the very biggest. We don't need 2.8-ton EVs that can hit 60 in under 3 seconds in city centres (or for that matter anywhere else), mixing with people or sharing roads with bikes. The sooner these ridiculous things are taxed out of towns and cities the better.

The biggest issue (not I think a lack of charging) at the moment is the fear of the secondhand market. Somewhere north of 90% of new cars are leased, with the price set based on how the market usually reacts. For years it's been pretty safe but the advent of EVs has caused some problems. There was a story in Autocar not so long ago about a journalist's own EV (Cupra Born IIRC) lease coming to an end and it being worth something like £10k less than predicted at the start of the lease, all of which is the lease company's to absorb. Which will start to cause big problems if lease companies increase prices because they struggle to sell used cars at the end of leases. If your £300 per month car suddenly becomes a £400 per month car it takes it into new territory. There was a horror story of BMW quoting £30k to replace an i3's battery, while it sounds like you can get it done independently for £10k. Once it gets down to £3k, say, to do the same thing, and if other EV parts replacement costs are sensible, we'll start to see confidence grow.

The best solution is a small, lightweight car with a small ICE engine, running on biofuel, with a turbocharger or other forced induction and a small, lightweight hybrid system. Unfortunately the money isn't in it for traditional brands, with the likes of Mercedes, BMW and so on presumably going premium and leaving the lower end of the market to the Chinese, who, as I said earlier, are probably going to start flooding the market with cheap large EV SUVs laden with technology. Where the electricity is going to come from is anyone's guess.