I mean, I feel like even if petrol wasn't as expensive as it is, the sales would be booming anyway, maybe a sliver slower - for the simple reason that affordable EVs are now here and they are pretty damn good now. After years and years of lamenting "where are the EVs for your average Joe Smith" - they are now here. Funnily enough, they aren't made by Volkswagen or Peugeot, but they are here anyway.
And Europe's cheapest new car - Dacia Spring - is an EV.
You're delusional if you think an EV is affordable for an average person. The average person barely makes enough to cover rent, food, bills and save a little money - 15-30k EUR for an entry level EV is out of question. Meanwhile most people can afford to get a late 90s/early 00s used car that will actually get the job done.
In the uk, there can be good deals on used EVs. My Hyundai Kona EV (64kWh) (2022 plate) was £18K for a 18 month old car with 9K miles on the clock and lots of options. It does about 280 miles on a charge and I do have the advantage of cheap home charging (8p per kWh) so it’s under a £5 for my weekly commute.
A big step up from my old Ford fiesta, just look for the deals
£18k is something like 60% of the median income in the UK after taxes. And that doesn’t even include the other associated costs. Average people would view that as a major expense.
Many people don’t have the elasticity in their month-to-month expenses that is assumed here.
Even going off your £18k price, a car loan search shows it would be under £200 per month. Not sure where they pulled £600 from.
But filling up my wife's compact Peugeot 208 (I think?) was £75 over the weekend. Filling up twice is almost the same monthly cost as buying a larger electric SUV.
It definitely seems like it would be worth investigating your options.
It did seem odd, I usually buy used cars around 10K and 18 months old. But after getting friends and recommendations for EVs and a decent trade in to offset the 18K a little and some savings and finance, I went for the Kona. Won’t go back.
I used to have a diesel Renault Clio, thankfully I don’t have it anymore at the current £2 per litre for diesel.
On the commute into Edinburgh today, there’s plenty of newer cars than mine and quite a few EVs, so some people are buying them.
Average fleet age in EU looks to be around 13 years so when you say "most people", you're likely off by 10-15 years in terms of second hand purchases. Greece might be the only EU country that gets close to what you said. I get the point about affordability but it's good to base discussion on facts.
Also, EVs have been around for quite a few years now so it is no longer necessary to buy them new.
Thanks. Too late to edit. If anybody wants the actual link, Google can figure it out from my download path. :) The only PII in the link is also in my username. It also leaked that I'm probably a Linux user.
If you worry about such failure modes, you shouldn't drive a car at all.
And especially not one with an ICE.
The main batteries most often have a 8y/160,000km guarantee. (Some even more.)
There a enough affordable, used BEVs that are only a quarter through that milages and age.
At least in Europe people still buy cheap new cars.
In the US the people who can afford new cars generally want massive SUV's. Meanwhile a lot of the people buying used cars often would prefer a bare bones small vehicle with fewer years and lower miles than something fancier or larger but with more miles. But of course those aren't available since nobody buys those things new. Which leads to the ridiculous outcome that a lightly used Honda Civic is basically the same price as a new one.
I mean, I'll be honest - I feel like you knew exactly what I meant but then twisted it to make a point you wanted to make.
Yes, obviously your average person buys a second hand car and new car prices(all of them, not just EVs) are out of reach.
But the article is about sales(as in - new car sales) - and your average Joe Smith buying a new car is increasingly likely to buy an EV because among other new cars, EVs have actually became affordable.
There is still no widespread charging infra. Oh sure, there are chargers. If you're lucky and your town is on a state highway there might be one or two chargers in the entire town — their purpose being so visitors don't become stranded.
Outside of cities, they are not there in sufficient quantity for widespread adoption.
The apartment problem has not been solved either, and people do not have the time in their lives to dedicate to charging at a shared public charger.
Europe still loves its compact manual transmission cars; but what we may see is a transition away from diesel to petrol vehicles strictly for cost reasons.
Strangely I’d expect urban centers with apartments and street parking to be the problem.
In the US Electric vehicles are easier for those who can park a car next to an outlet they own. We have a lot more suburbia with people owning their own charging.
I’m in the US but I’m basically charging the same way. 16A 240v. I’ve accidentally stepped it down to 13A and didn’t really notice. If you sleep, and can plug your car in while you do so, you can charge.
Sadly, it is—I recently moved to Ireland from the US, and it's annoyingly difficult to find an automatic transmission here. (Fortunately, I'm not currently in the market for a car; I live and work in Dublin, where the public transport is fantastic by American standards, and passable by European.)
"compact manual transmission cars" means cheapest cars you can get. Nobody loves them, but they were cheap. They aren't cheap anymore and if TCO points to a small EV, people will buy that one.
If my memory servers right, in 2008 you could buy a new Dacia Sandero for under 6000 euro in our country (EU). It's over 13600 right now for the current generation.
Who would have imagined that Vladimir Putin would oversee a sizeable NATO expansion, the reduction of European gas usage, and, in combination with Trump, the increased adoption of electric vehicles?
History may look back on them as having done rather a lot to move the world off of fossil fuels.
Or that Donald Trump would bring about less meat consumption, less oil consumption - twice!, internet decentralisation and end the global reliance on the dollar.
EVs plus charging with a grid powered by solar when the sun shines bright at midday is one of the most powerful forces in averting anthropogenic climate change.
I would say removing the need for personal vehicles were possible would be a much more powerful force, but yours is much more practical at least short term (decade's time frame).
I lived car free 5 years in London and half year in Netherlands. There's plenty of cars in Europe and in some sense traffic is worse there than here in NZ.
Gasoline would be $0.99 if EV platforms (build your own whatever) and low cost China Auto imports were available in America. But Elon has a hold on congress.
Those would hurt legacy auto much more than Tesla, which is why the last admin who had a lot of legacy auto union donations banned them. If anything Tesla will benefit from the charging infrastructure created due to a lot more EVs on the roads.
Being blunt, I don't think Elon is the only factor in that.
That protectionism is just as much in place for the sake of GM, Ford, and Stellantis, and their suppliers. In 2008 it was estimated that if the big three (Well, back then it was Chrysler instead of Stellantis) went under without a bailout [0], that up to 3 million jobs across the country were at risk. Michigan alone would have possibly lost over 8% of it's jobs.
We do see similar-ish protectionism in other countries as well, FWIW. Part of Toyota and Honda's lack of aggressive shifting to EVs is that a 'full shift' would remove millions of jobs from the workforce. Toyota has even published what could be considered propaganda in their home country about it [1].
It's an elephant in the room. European automakers are all struggling with it too, with various degrees of failure.
If there is one irony I will point out, it's that if they had all been more aggressive about hybrid technology for at least the last 15 years, they could have at least kicked the can down the road. Which honestly may have helped; part of the problem is that when things like engine or transmission plants are built, the amortization of the costs between the factory itself, training workers, expected retooling etc is measured and planned in the 10-30ish year range. The complacency means they have a bunch of assets that would be unpaletable write-offs.
Cause, Let's face it; every carmaker could have at least been doing even basic hybrids for most of their non-truck models for over a decade, which aren't perfect but would have raised the bar for MPG and improved the economies of scale faster [2].
[0] - For whatever it's worth, Ford at the time did not need a bailout, but did ask for a line of credit that it never had to use in case the others totally collapsed, because if that had happened it would have been a huge impact to their suppliers.
[2] - I'll point to the Ford Maverick, which initially launched at ~22K and got 35-40MPG in base configuration despite being a very large compact truck. IMO if the automakers got serious about the tech in 2010, we could have seen something at that price point at least 5 years sooner.
In Netherlands you could also get paid for charging your car. There is such thing called ERE Certificates - emission reduction unit certificate is generated by offsetting emissions. Pollutters have to buy them to offset the harm. It's up to 0.1 euro per KWh (electricity costs 0.28 euro per KWh), depending on the demand.
Technically, anything what you plug into your car charger would do. The requirement is to have a licensed meter in the charging box. When setting up, you configure connection to your ERE provider and it just reports.
The Jeffrey Epstein Memorial War is the worst thing to ever hit the American auto industry and workers, since that industry is so far behind on EV adoption they'll never catch up to the Asian manufacturers.
It'll kill them, the Big 3 should be losing their everloving minds over it.
The problem is not the chargers, for example in my country, we would need to double our energy production, transport capacity, to phase out fossil fuels. The costs would be enormous, double the infra work in the last 70 years.
Gotta admit, Trump, with operation Epstein's Fury, probably did more for ecology and the fight against climate change than any other politician before him.
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[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 52.6 ms ] threadA big step up from my old Ford fiesta, just look for the deals
> My Hyundai Kona EV (64kWh) (2022 plate) was £18K
Completely fkn tone deaf.
Many people don’t have the elasticity in their month-to-month expenses that is assumed here.
You can get a used Hyundai Kona EV from Hyundai for under £15k.
https://used.hyundai.co.uk/en/used-car-search/hyundai/kona/k...
Even going off your £18k price, a car loan search shows it would be under £200 per month. Not sure where they pulled £600 from.
But filling up my wife's compact Peugeot 208 (I think?) was £75 over the weekend. Filling up twice is almost the same monthly cost as buying a larger electric SUV.
It definitely seems like it would be worth investigating your options.
I used to have a diesel Renault Clio, thankfully I don’t have it anymore at the current £2 per litre for diesel.
On the commute into Edinburgh today, there’s plenty of newer cars than mine and quite a few EVs, so some people are buying them.
Also, EVs have been around for quite a few years now so it is no longer necessary to buy them new.
https://www.acea.auto/publication/report-vehicles-on-europea...
What do you do when, say, the insulation on the motor’s windings disintegrates over night on a whole production run of thousands of cars.
Or the batteries turn out to a fail at some yet to be revealed number of charge cycles.
file:///home/blarsen/Downloads/How-durable-are-electric-vehicles-BVRLA-report-by-New-Automotive-September-2026.pdf
Your download folder path is leaking : D
The main batteries most often have a 8y/160,000km guarantee. (Some even more.) There a enough affordable, used BEVs that are only a quarter through that milages and age.
In the US the people who can afford new cars generally want massive SUV's. Meanwhile a lot of the people buying used cars often would prefer a bare bones small vehicle with fewer years and lower miles than something fancier or larger but with more miles. But of course those aren't available since nobody buys those things new. Which leads to the ridiculous outcome that a lightly used Honda Civic is basically the same price as a new one.
Yes, obviously your average person buys a second hand car and new car prices(all of them, not just EVs) are out of reach.
But the article is about sales(as in - new car sales) - and your average Joe Smith buying a new car is increasingly likely to buy an EV because among other new cars, EVs have actually became affordable.
There is still no widespread charging infra. Oh sure, there are chargers. If you're lucky and your town is on a state highway there might be one or two chargers in the entire town — their purpose being so visitors don't become stranded.
Outside of cities, they are not there in sufficient quantity for widespread adoption.
The apartment problem has not been solved either, and people do not have the time in their lives to dedicate to charging at a shared public charger.
Europe still loves its compact manual transmission cars; but what we may see is a transition away from diesel to petrol vehicles strictly for cost reasons.
In the US Electric vehicles are easier for those who can park a car next to an outlet they own. We have a lot more suburbia with people owning their own charging.
You can charge your car at home on a simple reinforced 230V socket. Even city car which should be bad for this purpose have at least 200km of range.
This then gets split into constituent phases of 240V each at the panel.
Or if you call your electrician, then in modern garages, you can take it straight.
I thought this was a German (D/A/CH) fetish, is it all of Europe?
"compact manual transmission cars" means cheapest cars you can get. Nobody loves them, but they were cheap. They aren't cheap anymore and if TCO points to a small EV, people will buy that one.
If my memory servers right, in 2008 you could buy a new Dacia Sandero for under 6000 euro in our country (EU). It's over 13600 right now for the current generation.
History may look back on them as having done rather a lot to move the world off of fossil fuels.
Let's go to lunch in Tbilisi walks through door to there. Once done, just walk back through to home.
I am of course talking about public transportation. Bike + tram + train keeps the citizens fit and healthy.
Going from car parking to car parking must suck, what a way to live
That protectionism is just as much in place for the sake of GM, Ford, and Stellantis, and their suppliers. In 2008 it was estimated that if the big three (Well, back then it was Chrysler instead of Stellantis) went under without a bailout [0], that up to 3 million jobs across the country were at risk. Michigan alone would have possibly lost over 8% of it's jobs.
We do see similar-ish protectionism in other countries as well, FWIW. Part of Toyota and Honda's lack of aggressive shifting to EVs is that a 'full shift' would remove millions of jobs from the workforce. Toyota has even published what could be considered propaganda in their home country about it [1].
It's an elephant in the room. European automakers are all struggling with it too, with various degrees of failure.
If there is one irony I will point out, it's that if they had all been more aggressive about hybrid technology for at least the last 15 years, they could have at least kicked the can down the road. Which honestly may have helped; part of the problem is that when things like engine or transmission plants are built, the amortization of the costs between the factory itself, training workers, expected retooling etc is measured and planned in the 10-30ish year range. The complacency means they have a bunch of assets that would be unpaletable write-offs.
Cause, Let's face it; every carmaker could have at least been doing even basic hybrids for most of their non-truck models for over a decade, which aren't perfect but would have raised the bar for MPG and improved the economies of scale faster [2].
[0] - For whatever it's worth, Ford at the time did not need a bailout, but did ask for a line of credit that it never had to use in case the others totally collapsed, because if that had happened it would have been a huge impact to their suppliers.
[1] - https://electrek.co/2021/11/11/how-toyota-sneakily-spreads-a...
[2] - I'll point to the Ford Maverick, which initially launched at ~22K and got 35-40MPG in base configuration despite being a very large compact truck. IMO if the automakers got serious about the tech in 2010, we could have seen something at that price point at least 5 years sooner.
Can you get this money if you instead choose a much better option, like riding the bike or going with public transport?
Or is this only for people who choose cars?
But to be fair we don't consider the health benefits of a human powering it either
It'll kill them, the Big 3 should be losing their everloving minds over it.
Have you seen the state of the German auto industry? You can point and laugh.
And they have been warned about this, in 2019, by vice chancellor Robert Habeck (Greens). Too bad nobody cared to listen.
The Germans hate electric cars for some weird reason.
As a Brit it can be confusing converting gallons to gallons as Americans don't gallon properly.
Transport is generally put at - 15-25% increase. Due to both needing less refinement and transport, and just how efficient BEVs are.
Electrification generally reduces energy use, while increasing electricity use, due to much higher efficiency.
So if you are correct it will only be because you don't produce the energy used in ICE but instead import it after buying it on the global market.
premium $6.95
diesel $8.99