Bad time for Tesla Drivers

£12.50 on top of the congestion charge every time your car hits the road, great if you’re a millionaire, not so good if you’re on minimum wage.

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My son will be in it from August. They have my dad’s old Polo which they use around half a dozen times a month. That would be £75 a month unless they stump up and get a newer car. They are Sadiq Khan’s model citizens, really. Both work in the NHS, use public transport in the main, Nick cycles to work quite often depending upon shift and clinic. Khan’s proper sticking it up them, and looking down their street last weekend they’re far from unique… :angry:

ICEs don’t necessarily need banning. It depends on vital matters like economy, the EVs’ attractiveness and the charging infrastructure. Where I live, EVs are the most economic cars you can both buy and drive, there are competitive EV equivalents to almost any ICE car and the charging infrastructure is pretty decent, also when you are off the beaten track.

So EVs are what people are buying. In 2022, 92.7 pct of all private household buyers chose EVs. Every fifth car on the road is now an EV, and people are happy with them. Me, I’ll never go back.

Conditions are different from country to country. But over here, the whole ban year discussion has become irrelevant. The market has already spoken.

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A post was split to a new topic: Maeving RM1

How are EV’s cheaper to buy than petrol/diesel cars in Norway? Is there a large government subsidy for EV’s or a large tax on petrol/diesel cars? Over here in the UK the electric versions seem to be many thousands more expensive than the petrol/diesel version even after the reduced government EV rebate.

It’s an amusing irony that one of the richest nations on earth, due to sales of fossil fuels, is now seemingly leading the way in EVs. Just shows what can be done if wealth is distributed a bit more evenly :wink:

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People with power and wealth will do whatever they must in order to keep or increase their power and wealth, irrespective of whether they have a habitable planet to live on. It makes no sense as a global society but that’s human nature (generally speaking).

When we are used to what must be the world’s highest tax level for cars, second to Denmark, it helped a lot when EVs for years were totally tax free. Comparable ICEs were 30 pct more expensive. That made a sales boom and suddenly there was a market for charging stations. So more people found EVs interesting, also people who couldn’t charge at home. Now the government is gradually introducing tax, but at this point only for the amount exceeding 42,000 UKP. And when you want to drive your car, you soon find that there is a vast difference between highly taxed petrol/diesel and heavily subsidised household electricity. From an economic perspective it’s a no-brainer. Again, I’m only talking about my country.

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My beat up old pickup is 18 years old and I paid £7000 for it 5 years ago. It does 450/470 miles per fill up of the tank. This fill takes a maximum of 5 minutes. How do I replace with a battery vehicle that will do the same for the same money?

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I suppose that’s fine if you like sitting around for hours waiting for it to charge up. My pickup fills in around 5 minutes and gives around 450 miles from this. I really don’t want to sit around for hours wasting my driving time waiting for the battery to fill up.

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We all have our driving habits, and yours are probably different from mine. To pick a number, 95 pct of my trips have our garage as the destination. The car recharges its battery at night-time tariffs while I recharge in my bed.

On multi-day trips during summer, we can drive for at least five hours at highway speed before we really, really need to charge. Which means that our bodies need a rest way before the car does. So we typically make a stop after two hours, three is stretching it, where we pee, have some coffee, maybe lunch – the same way as we always did. After 30-45 minutes, the car is topped up. The trick is never having to stop to charge, we charge while stopped anyway.

It works for us. It may not work for you.

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Wow Tax free. I suppose you must be familiar with the conversation we are now starting to have about how the government recoups the lost taxes?

Last January we bought a cheap runabout, a '63 plate Dacia Duster, 92k miles on the clock for £3k. It’s a 1.4 litre Renault diesel engine on a nissan Juke chassis with Renault bodywork, 50 + mpg, £135 road tax and cheap as chips to insure. Takes 3 adults, 5 dogs and pulls like a train, now showing 106k miles and cost me £40 to do oil change including oil and air filter and just needed an 80p number plate light at mot time. I could probably still get £3k for it, wonder how much I’d lose in the first year of ev ownership? ££££ probably.

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@PatW and @glenn2926 EV ownership is not (and not intended) for the likes of us.

If the normalising of £40k + or £200-300+/m isn’t normal to you, or me…so be it.

Them and us. Us and them.

There’s a video above about EVs, and, just in passing, the £1000 cost of just supply and install of the home charger was brushed over…

If I had to, for an emergency, I could likely beg, steal or borrow that sort of money. But it would have a knock on effect elsewhere in my finances.

I have suggested the wife works longer hours, but she simply won’t do it!! Wait til I tell Greta!?

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I could afford one, i just resent being ripped off and I like my landcruiser. :joy:

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Looks like @Erlings neighbours are in on the next boom, providing much needed materials for the construction of “clean” electric vehicles, among other things. Rare earth metals are the dirty side of EV manufacture, not as widely talked about as perhaps it should be. :slightly_smiling_face:

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The people developing these technologies understand that the so-called rare Earth metals (not all are rare) are an issue. Like everything, it’s a problem to be solved and much work goes in to it when the economics justify the research. Remember when ni-cad was the battery of choice? Impediments aren’t necessarily showstoppers.

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I can even remember when Ever-Ready was the battery of choice. :rofl:

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And they were bloody awful! :grin:

Down here in NL there’s a council which is proposing forbidding people buying new built houses to have an ICE driven vehicle and/or having a wood fired hearth. Surely that’s infringing on peoples rights? Ridiculous.