Electric Vehicles

The end is nigh for electric vehicles and everyday we hear more stories about the huge numbers of unsold electric vehicles and every week something new emerges about their failings and the greenwashing by Governments is being exposed as the lies they are and why they are squandering £millions of our money in fanciful schemes which will never work.

Let’s be very clear here as this is not confined to any single, or small block of countries as green washing is a worldwide agenda and needs treating as such, to get a true view we have to look at the worldwide agenda or should that be worldwide fraud, you decide.

Major companies have almost stopped selling electric vehicles as they simply don’t sell and despite the UK Government cutting the BIK or benefit in kind from 25 or 40% to 2 or 5% and this is what the employees pay as company cars as perks have long gone many years ago so most people with a choice have a van as it is cheaper. If we look at the basic electric car problems we see the cost is already prohibitive as you could get a mid range BMW for around £35-40,000 and a similar specification Tesla would be around the £70-80,000 mark so initial purchase price is a problem. Next is the battery itself and they are written off for the smallest scratch on the battery and the smallest prang causing the smallest amount of body damage and speed humps are scratching batteries and writing cars off. Next is their weight and no electric car is cheap and the weight is an issue on everything from the road surface to the components such as suspension, steering and brakes which work very hard indeed and they need regular replacement which is extremely costly and Matt from CarWow ran a petrol and electric BMW along the motorway alongside each other and the petrol BMW was significantly cheaper and a diesel BMW would be cheaper still, so they aren’t cheap to run and use a lot of precious resources which have to be mined.
Range anxiety is an issue for many people and when many of them run flat they simply stop and the transmission locks and they cannot easily be unlocked as they require a certain amount of battery power to do this; and in winter they only get around 60% of their claimed range due to the cold weather and if things such as heaters, lights, and demisters are running this drops to 50% of the claimed range and this is with a new car with new batteries. Many cars have been low on power and because of gridlock they just stop in the most inopportune and dangerous places and cause dangerous problems for other road users. Accidents are problematic as they have DC batteries with 400-800 volts and a metal car body conducts electricity you have the potential for electrocuting whole families and killing them which is why fire brigades wear insulated clothing ad a matter of course if they attend any vehicle accident. Many vehicle recovery companies are refusing to recover them due to thermal runaway where the vehicle self ignites and you cannot put them out and one recovery company was very vocal in refusing to recover them as they had bought two new recovery trucks at a cost of £620,000 or £310,000 each and they say they don’t want them burning out as they cannot afford it.

Charging is a major problem for many as around 40% of the UK don’t have a driveway or off street parking and this can be a problem where people cannot access cheap electricity to charge at off peak periods and this ties them to the public charging network, meanwhile IC vehicles can go to a filling station and fill up with petrol or diesel in less than 5 minutes and choose to pay by card, cash, or other means such as a pre pay or fuel card. Meanwhile electric car users are tied to a company whose app they have to download meaning they have to have a smart phone and a credit card which means a bank account and around 10% of the UK do not have, or cannot get a bank account meaning without home charging they cannot have an electric car. If we also consider the amount of rented apartments with communal parking this means you cannot have a charger installed in most cases. If we look at actual usage we already see cold weather significantly lowers a cars range and for many this can be a problem as petrol and diesel car owners can get a fuel can and keep either petrol or diesel in the boot during bad weather and if they get stuck in ice or snow they can add some fuel to run their engine and keep themselves warm and potentially alive as this heat is a direct waste or by product of combustion itself whereas an electric car needs its battery to generate heat which quickly lowers the batteries charge significantly.

If we look around the world and turn to Canada first we see one man boasting how good his electric car is in winter and he claims it is toasting when he gets into it but fails to mention the fact this heat comes with a price; yes, reduced battery life and he also fails to mention he is a director of a battery car company and the price of heating his car up is the range reduction of 50% which cannot be good. In the UK we had the Christmas 2022 fiasco on Christmas eve and Christmas day where very few chargers and many electric cars needed charging so people could visit friends and family for their Christmas dinner and they couldn’t charge their cars up and missed Christmas day, the one main family day for many people.

Meanwhile in Canada in the depths of winter they were having huge problems with charging as the batteries were much slower to charge and this created massive queues and the recovery services were bringing in discharged cars and they could not drop them onto a charger or get them near enough to unlock and push them. This caused massive recharging times and gridlock at the superchargers while people waited for a free charger and the system failed again by not informing people of the congestion to stop them coming in and being stranded in the winter weather again.
Chicago experienced the same problems and this was with Tesla owners as the city had 100 Tesla superchargers and only 3 were working due to the cold and battery cars not charging or charging slowly is a major issue particularly with company or other vehicles where time is money and people at work cannot simply stop for over 3 hours to recharge their cars. All these Tesla owners were desperately running around looking for a working charger and this caused total gridlock in Chicago and one user filmed 22 Teslas bought in by the recovery services in one hour as they were totally flat and had shut down.

Meanwhile in Oslo they are having significant problems with their very expensive electric buses and again it was temperature related as this reduced their range by 40% and this coupled to the extended recharge times meant many buses had to be taken out of service because they discharged to quickly and could not be recharged fast enough. Silly question but isn’t Norway a cold country? And as most countries are pushing for people to go to public transport we see another fine example of why it doesn’t work and with Oslo cancelling around 40% of their bus services and more in peak periods it simply cannot be relied upon.

Back in the USA and president Biden, or should that be President cheese as the cheese doesn’t constantly fall asleep and fail to remember his children’s names; but only in America would they have a president with dementia and hand him the keys to one of the world’s largest stock of nuclear weapons. Biden made a mandate to EV’s and the Senate has now overturned it, he is unlikely to remember anyway.
Still in the USA we have rental car giant Hertz stating they are taking 20,000 Tesla electric cars off their fleet as they are expensive and people don’t want to hire or lease them as they are very expensive and come with too many problems and when a company like Hertz says this you have to take notice.

All around the world we are seeing the self detonation caused by thermal runaway causing huge explosions and large fires and while Luton airport may stick in people’s minds we need to look at the events and not the actual incident as this began with a total lie. Official sources suddenly claimed it was a diesel vehicle and not a battery vehicle and then admitted they didn’t know which vehicle started the fire and wouldn’t know until ACPOA released the video footage, so straight away a blatant lie as if you don’t know what vehicle started the fire how can you say if it was diesel, battery or even a Hybrid. What we saw in the following days were the Land Rover which allegedly started the fire and this was irrefutably a lithium battery fire from either a EV or hybrid battery.

Meanwhile on the same day another Range Rover self combusted in Scotland but the media tend to downplay these incidents in a game of divide and conquer, or simply not publish issues from other countries to downplay the serious nature of the dangers these vehicles pose. There was the EV bus in Wimbledon which exploded and fortunately the passengers escaped and Potters Bar, oh yes the bus station which burned like an inferno from a fire caused by 2 buses batteries which burned the bus depot down and destroyed all the buses.

Nepal is my favourite as a senior motoring journalist made my quote of the year when he said that most houses in Nepal didn’t have electricity so how and where are they going to charge cars up as they have some horrific roads and these would trash batteries anyway.

Back to Australia and parts of it are in their summer heatwave and an essential of these Aussie houses is air conditioning and due to electricity shortages they are being told to limit their electricity consumption and turn their air conditioning units up to over 24°C to reduce their electricity consumption. Meanwhile we have the outback, that unforgiving wilderness with lots of deadly spiders and snakes and crocodiles and alligators and a proliferation of other deadly things and they say the outback runs on petrol and diesel for good reason. When you get a station half the size of Wales and their front door is 120 miles from their front gate and to next door to their neighbours means either a flight in a plane or helicopter or an overland trip of several hours, than where is there electricity? Oh yes, they have large diesel generators to provide electricity and road trains with multiple trailers full of diesel to fill their huge tanks, then there is the petrol for their motorbikes and quads and other petrol vehicles and their jet A1 or Avgas for their aircraft and their solar panels and/or wind turbines.

In Germany they have a recent constitutional court ruling which states the money left over from the covid fund cannot be spent on electric vehicles and so most of their subsidies have been cut meaning little to no subsidies for electric vehicles.

Most electric lorries and buses are a farce as two areas In America have electric buses and both have had multiple problems where the batteries have been replaced under warranty, their chargers have repeatedly failed and they are much less reliable than their diesel counterparts according to their own figures. Many lorries have much of their working time spent charging their huge batteries, the same huge batteries which take up cargo capacity and weight and one set of actual figures show a working shift where a drop and collect service would collect or drop six times a day and when you cut the volume or weight capacity of a lorry and expecting the operators to absorb these costs you really are in cuckoo land as everything travelling by road goes up in price.

Insurance is a nightmare as the insurers do not know the risks yet, let alone understand them and all insurance is going up for all IC engined cars as insurers are trying to mitigate their losses in any way they can meaning ALL insurance goes up; from figures we can find they are charging some people over £100 PER WEEK just to insure their electric cars and my issue is why should we pay for their stupidity.

Reality check? Who wants to buy a car at around twice the price of an IC engined car which does less than half you want where you cannot undertake even medium journeys without planning around charging stations and having the things to do during the charging times and assuming you have charging points at your destination.

https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=electric+vehicles+catching+fire

Meanwhile, back in the good old USA we have the new electric fire engines and boy are they good, fitted with the same problematic batteries, motors, and control gear as the electric buses which have been taken out of service because they cannot get parts; they HAVE to be fitted with ICE as standard. Back to the UK and two major fuel suppliers are at it, Shell and BP and Shell ae cutting their supplies of petrol and diesel and turning their forecourts over to EV charging so a couple of problems here, the forecourts are not large enough to support and quantity of charging cars, even with half the petrol pumps removed, and under the Petroleum Spirit Act the charging vehicles cannot be under the canopy. This means electric vehicle owners will get wet, or are they already wet. All those potential fire risks and petrol and diesel.