13-10-2019, 11:57 PM
(This post was last modified: 14-10-2019, 12:02 AM by Tony Griffiths.)
It's all over-hyped and mired in obfuscation - I'm waiting for the much-touted, it's-just-around-the-corner battery breakthrough. You know the one: "it'll-be-in-production-next-month-and-give-500-miles-of-range-with-a-5-five-minute-recharge." Trouble is, it's not going to happen, and if it does, I want to be the first in the queue for the company's shares. For popping around town electric might be OK - but in any case, who wants to "pop around town" with traffic wardens dressed like SS officers, eye-watering parking charges and run-down high streets.
You see headlines proclaiming, "Electric cars sales up 80%." But, 80% of what? 80% of diddly-squat is still diddly-squat. In the USA, in 2018, 17.2 million light vehicles were sold - that's cars and pickups - but number of all-electric cars sold (BEVs, not hybrids) was 361,307, That's 0.2% of the total, a vanishingly-small number and just 40% of a single model sold by Ford in the same year, the F-150 pick-up. The only reason car companies produce BEVs is to lower their corporate CO2 emissions - as required by, in our case, the EU.
You see headlines proclaiming, "Electric cars sales up 80%." But, 80% of what? 80% of diddly-squat is still diddly-squat. In the USA, in 2018, 17.2 million light vehicles were sold - that's cars and pickups - but number of all-electric cars sold (BEVs, not hybrids) was 361,307, That's 0.2% of the total, a vanishingly-small number and just 40% of a single model sold by Ford in the same year, the F-150 pick-up. The only reason car companies produce BEVs is to lower their corporate CO2 emissions - as required by, in our case, the EU.