lol-lol

Amazing kit. Works from the BYD Power Bank batteries so not so reliant on the Grid connection. Narrator quotes the 10 times charge and discharge rates from these Blade 2 batteries used in the car and power station giving the 6 minute Impressive, even if actually about 9C ay start and 7C near the end. One would probably pull the plug at 7, 8 or 9 minutes and go if one had done the bathroom break and drink and food acquisition. Quick enough for vast majority of people i think.

Awesome tech. I think BYD will take over the current TESLA fans over to their products. Charging at 10 times the number of the battery size, upon plug in, but it will back off in the later charging curve I am sure. Where time is money this scenario now matches or beats filling up with diesel or petrol as car itself will talk to the charger unit and pass patment details quicker than ICE cars do with flashing a card and PIN etc.

Windy today down south. My 40 kwh Rebault 5 WLTP is about 190 miles. Only charged to 90%, should have gone to 95% or 100% on home charge. Got from Worcestercto S Wales with car using more than half its state of charge ie showing 43%. Strong SW wind. Up behind me on way home. Made it home with about 8% left. Slightly warmer on way home, strong tail wind helped. As usual I think bottom part od SoC display seems to get used slower than upper half. Thought I would try and test the R5 around and below the 0% SoC but still have to do that to see if rhe 40 keh battery had anything like the 46 kms past 0% the 52 KWh showed.

Feel the same way. Musk instrumental in firing about 300K Civil servants and this has in part resulted in some chaos with government in several area. Would not buy a TESLA and I think their time is done and they are slipping back rapidly in the value and tech areas to BYD etc. Happy with my Renault EVs. Occasionally use their public chargers, just crazy low prices both north and south of me ie Gloucester and Brum ie 44p per kwh peak and 22p per KWh off peak, cheaper than I can charge at home during the day and 10 to 15 times the speed ! Only do occasionally and I get a pang of guilt on those rare occasions.

A must for all true EVangelists...... Available from AMAZON EF ECOFLOW Power Hat(L-XL) 360-Degree Solar-Powered Wearable Hat, Waterproof, Ultra Light, Foldable, Dual USB-A & USB-C Ports, Charge Smart Phones Not a late April fools, they have already sold going on for a thousand of these ! Think I will wait until they go from £99 to £9.

I have had a mikd hybrid and self charging hybrid recently and they have their good points but, like PHEVs they have big down sides also. Mild hybrid one did not even notice it had any hybrid gubbins at all really, just quite good mpg. Our self charging hybrid lots its engines management and became a nightmare, after having one of its wheel changed. Too complex abd I gather the bew buyer rejected it after it went wrong another 3 times. PHEVs also massively compromised. Loads more weight, less boot space than otherwise. Shocking mileage per kwh in electric mode as almost never have heat pumps so really bad in cold weather. If fuel became very cheap again I would go for a nice simply pure petrol car. My, well daughter no 2 car I gave to her, Mk 4 Clio, 0.9 litre 3 cylinder turbo, would do better mpg than the 1.6 naturally aspirated hybrid Clio we also had. Yes hybrid was nicer to drive, lots of low down grunt from the electric motor. But my conclusion was all electric was the better way in so many respects and the recent fall in charging costs plus the big hikes in fossil fuel costs endorse that decesion. Now I do know a few people who needed to oft do hundreds of miles a day sometimes and theurcdecesion to stay with diesel is partly understandable. I wish I coukd hear they tried a TESLA model 3 or Y, best selling cars in the world, but don't think they did. There are other alternatives, as they say if you don't like sport there is always David Colman, (Monty Python i seem to recall), but there is BMW, Merc and Polestar who do EVs with almost 500 mile range after topping up for less than a tenner at home or twenty quid out on the road rather than over a hundred pounds !

As I mentioned the acquisition of the Jaecoo 7 PHEV is intended to be only in EV mode during the week for town to a nearby town commuter. Jaecoo say over 50 miles in EV mode from its 18 kwh battery. Her commute is about 7 miles so I think she will need a mid week charge to operate in EV all working week. Still incredible cheap motoring for that stint and only going to get expensive for those weekend longer trips even with the first 50 being cheap. Worth a mention also that the most popular ICE car in Europe, the Dacia Sandero and cousin Renault Clio, are popular as they are so very cheap to buy. Not sure how much buyers are bothered what power train it has. Even some of those buyers will be looking at the new 100 hp Spring and seeing it us a bit cheaper to buy and mych cheaper to run if they can put up with range of not much over 200 km and sone other shortcomings but as the cheapest car per mile it is finding many buyers.

The SMMT data is unclear what had been sold ie PHEV or whatever. Ex boss was one of those Jeacoo 7 buyers and it is a PHEV with a fairly decent sized traction battery and she expects to drive the car in EV mode during the working week and only use the ICE during weekend farther afield trips. As with the other top ten models is their any BEVs included in the data ie Puma e ? What we do know that as of March 2026, according to the monthly data by fuel type that more than half of cars registered had some component of electric traction whether that is mild hybrid, self charging hybrid, PHEV or full BEV. A real milestone and this month of April 2026 we will be able to see how buyers gave snapped up the BEVs in the showrooms, cars, vans etc. Be interesting to see how 2nd hand sales have gone, how many BEVs have been snapped up and how values of BEVs and ICE vehicles are being affected by GW3. By the state of the peace agreement in the Middle East, the lack of tankers escaping the Middle East Gulf, it is looking like fuel prices are going to stay high for a good while are whilst there are reports of almost a thousand fuel stations running out of fuel, albeit temporarily until next delivery, the Uk and much of the world is wondering when its next tanker ship is going to arrive.

I mentioned the huge uptick in freight charges, both air and sea, from Europe's main goods supply area ue China and SE Asia. Doubling and even trebling of freight rates. That will have a big effect on landed cost of goods we buy.

You must have missed the reports of substantial damage to both gas and oil facilities in the Persian Gulf. About one sixth of some facilities damaged with a quick estimation by them the repairs could take a few years rather than weeks or months. I tend to watch Aljazeera and Bloomberg rather than BBC or other British channels.

Clarkson not even a good British farmer, not been to Agricultural college abd it shows. Governments act or sometimes the right action is not to act. Israel, Iran and US, with the Gulf states as side actors, have chosen certain paths overvthe last few weeks, months, years and decades to bring us where we are today. I think many how foolish it was to rely on the pricing and supply of a remote and despotic region. This should logically spur on the adoption of more renewable and local powet generation and fuel for transportation. The policy of the different hues of UK political parties has been to financially encourage EV adoption as well using heat pump technology. Both have come on leaps and bounds in the last decade or so to make them level in many regards to fossil fuel versions and in some ways vastly superior ie running costs. One thing is fairly certain that Gulf War 3 has prompted us all to look more closely at components of our lives. The meeting at Downing St with industry to discuss the fuel hike price issues did leak a few points. I presume they may have signed NDAs but main thing i heard was a request to delay the hike in fuel Excise duty in September. Government would have asked dirsek and petrol retailer why they hiked so fast and so high. There was a report to parliament in late March ie about 2 weeks ago. Think it was saying retailers were on to make over a billion pounds on there preemptive and exorbitant actions on price. J would be angry if I was a fuel buyer, particularly diesel. Act of God is a colloquial term used for Force Majeur. Smart contracts gave clauses to pass on certain types of supply chain cost surprises. Whilst my recently left international logistics employer is one of the biggest in airfreight, rail freight and sea freight and contracts have such clauses it is oft that such companies are not massive road freight providers leaving it to smaller independent firms who i am afraid are very exposed as their contracts are not usually as watertight and tend to go bust in these sorts of times sadly. I don't think transport is going to be the same after GW3. Some might think that is a good think in the end !!

As just said both Cons and Lab government chose this path. Trump has not and he cancelled EV subsidies but he has managed to **** off ICE drivers even more with relatively expensive diesel and petrol. Whether Reform would emulate Trump we will hear over the next months and years. We still have massive choice in the UK. Those choosing pure diesel and petrol gas dropped to under half of new sales. Big middle ground of mild, self cgarging hybrid and PHEV is a big middle group and BEV continue to tick up. Most BEVs don't get the full £3750 but Asian makers are matching those European subsidies from their own margin which they are able to do as the battery packs get cheaper and cheaper. I don't dwell on this relatively little EV subsidies which compared to other financial matters the government and am more concerned with lending costs, inflation, energy cost as well as the move at best speed for the UK to be self sufficient for energy and supply of oils for plastics etc. If the UK can sell oil and gas icences to secure supply but the concern has always been that the North Sea etc is relatively expensive to extract from compared to Middle East land based wells abd from what I hear there is not a massive amount of oil and gas left that would nowhere near get us back to being an exporter as we were decades ago. There might be more fields out there. Italy just found a load of oil off Egypt. Oil and gas have to compete against renewables which continue to fall in generation costs with taller turbines and more efficient solar panels. Only if private industry bear most the financial risk with maybe some early years tax consessions so the UK has security of supply. Maybe for aviation fuel but European crude does not seem to be good for producing diesel, just the nature of the crude.

The Uk and other countries, like the largest European economy of Germany, tried a period of not giving EV grants but sales dried up and they did not get the net billions of Euros of tax and were not going to hit their emmissions targets so they reintroduced the grants. Who can say which was the dominant factor ie net tax income or emissions target or fairly equal. Didn't influence my decisions or my decision to give up my fuel card which was worth a grand or two a year. My decesion was based on no me finding it unacceptable to keep on polluting not financial. For many, particularly thise using salary sacrifice system for EVs I suspect it was mainly financial. Whether it is Con party or Labour running the scheme they gave acred similarly. I can live with my conscious as I reckon I pay about 4 times what the median tax payer pays ie average is about £5k tobm £6k where i have paid closer to £20k each year in the last few years. The 5 year old £3k grant for car and charger and recent £1500 for the 5 is chicken feed to the circa £100k in income tax and NI in that period paid.

Dont see it that way Graham. I pay tens of thousands in tax every year. I did not apply for the EV grant it is just the dealer who did the paperwork. He would have looked at me very strangely if I said no thanks. Possibly would have claimed it and added it to their margin. I have been a massive net tax contritutor. Don't use ISAs and happy to pay tax on interest on savings over the limited allowed. Like the EV grant my employer operated Salary Sacrifice in to pensions. Only opt out is to not pay anything in to pension which lets them off their contribution so as with the EV grant it is not sensible to not get it. There tends to be rules with all these schemes, minimum values to get it so the government never losses out and always gets a net receipt with it. Now Heat Pump grants is an entirely different scenario and scale. £7.5k grant, reportedly going to £9k or even £12k in certain circumstances ie low income. Now there is some big handouts but sound like we can get people off gas and heating oil and on to cheap lecky.

EV buyers, adopters still pay far more than they get in the handouts. I got the biggest handouts under the Con government ie £3k, the VAT on the car was about £6k so tax v handout was still a sizeable net receipt rather than handout for government. Scenic did not get a handout and wax actually a lower RRP than the Zoe such is the dramatic fall in EV cost. The Renault 5, bought under the Lab government reign got a handout half the size than under the Cons and I was either expecting or motivated by it as it came along after I ordered it. Again the handout was less than the half the size of the VAT on the car so government a real net gainer on the tax versus handout. It is like the net effect is that the VAT rate for EVs being lower than Standard rate rather than a big handout! Then there is the massive tax one gets on a car allowance which the government gets. In my case that was £3,600 a year of tax being paid. With ICE cars there was also the tax being paid on fuel on a fuel card, both by the employer and the employee which the government starts to miss and has to find elsewhere which is another dimension. The big miss on net taxation is where tax payers get to use the EV salary sacrifice scheme. Introduced by the Con government the tax avoidance on that can be massive. I was looking enviously at the numbers on an Audi etron where instead of paying £1300 a month one could be paying £900, a near £5k a year saving, or loss to government. All done by Cons of Lab to help achieve the lowering of pollution and reliance on non UK energy I suppose.

Think of the massive VAT collection from diesel and petrol with these evaluated prices. Maybe not wanting to kill a golden goose ?

What rate was that ? I would be very happy with anything around 10 p per kwh at least for a few hours a day. I think this Gulf war will encourage massive hone investment in batteries and balcony / plug in solar and with the nassive amount of wind power both in UK and other northern European countries there will be some hours most days and other periods of very cheap lecky it is just a case of storing it for a while. Newspapers reporting thise eith incomes of less than £35k pa could get heat pump grants of 9k to 12k as well as plug in solar grants effectively reducing annual energy bills from £2k ish to a few hundred pounds a year and therefore vastly reduce any household dependable on the sky high cost of electricity, gas and heating oil !! Wealthier households will be expected to adopt heat pump and solar solutions at their own expense or just put up with the high prices !!! Charging the 3 EVs will continue to be our main electricity usage with the house being an add on which benefits from the Octopus dual time of use tariff with the incredibly low Night time tariff rate.

Had a look but not enticing for either electricity or gas. It is the Night electricity rate which is key for my cheap running and that us not ruled by the price cap but at the discretion of Octopus and the other firms who offer dual rate tariffs. My 12M Gas is set at 5.39p per kwh until mid June abd I will start looking at fixes next month. Pla. To biuld up a but of credit, get my solar to provide all the day tine owerri need, even on cloudy days and find a nice big battery before Q3 starts. Less £100 per kwh in a criteria and at least able to supply 3 kw. Of course cpukd use thd R5 car at times as V2L. Some signs ships might get thru in bigger numbers soon.

My Renaults will not move if the cable is still attached to the car ie a movement lock. Suppose I should find out how to unbind the cable from the car if it came to it, on the Mini Cooper e too. Will check the location of both, or 3 including the Scenic, so I can use if worse comes to worse. Found this link, might be a bit generic but it does sound a common feature to have a manual release mechanism tucked away in the "engine bay" somewhere.... https://leap24.co.uk/support/cable-stuck/ In other news I had my first Octopus bill covering mostly March but a bit of April. Average electricity cost 8.35p per KWh including Day and Night rate for the 163 KWh of lecky used in the first 4 days of April. Be looking forward for plenty of that for the next 3 months. If electricity goes up 20% in July then new challenge. Whether to go for one of this Balcony, plug in solar systems but I would probably always have a storage battery between solar collection and my ring main as I tend to only be using about 200 W most the time in the day with occasion 3KW boiling the kettle and with 90% of power use during Night time period to keep the cost down. More batteries needed but one that can run over 3KW loading I reckon. But then the Renault 5 can act as Vehicle to Load which could be useful when electricity prices go nuts in July.

I have had a tug of war with 2 AC destination chargers where the locking pin failed to release my cable even though my car unlocked and charge stopped. The locking pin is quite a little diameter jobbie and whilst some force was needed it was not massive, maybe 30 or 40 kgs and not 100 or so. Not sure it counts as vandalism, they were my company chargers and talking to the engineer he blamed lack of periodic maintenance. Some chargers have little lever tabs one can press with the right screwdriver 🪛 and some gave a little extra release pull tucked away but that needs panel access. A new charge show above should not have such issues though.

With reports that some car makers, Stellantis for example, if was sounding like car makers were going to continue to make ICE vehicles beyond 2030 and 2035. Not sure about the Range Rover side of JLR who might see that ICE is still part of their future for many year to come. Certainly sales of the Range Rover knock offs such as Jaecoo are selling very well, PHEV versions particularly. Tough future I expects for JLR but at least Tara seem to be backing JLR but with some UK government backing it also appears.

As far as I can see all future Jaguar production models will be electric ie made at their UK sites and the Wolverhampton diesel plant being repurposed for electric motors. 800v architecture, tri motor configuration and 120 kwh battery packs to compete with the best of the Getnan output. Fingers crossed it is success further UK's export figures. Miss my Type S even though it had too many Ford parts for my liking. Felt special. Great jobs for Somerset for the battery packs.

Yes seems to be all about cost of local network divided by population size. Grid and capital projects ie as Dinorwig was and Great Glen hydro, Mersey and Bristol Channel tidal will be private enterprise or central government funded i guess. Sooner the better, should have been started a decade or more ago.

Saving up for the Mersey barage and then lecky weekly be so cheap locally. Scotland has the Great Glen hydro scheme then they will be set fair !

My Day rate a bit lower than that 27.16 p but I hear many are not too happy with the Standing Charge but them there is a £60B program to upgrade the Grid to be paid for. If we also add in some free sessions with Octopus the real cost can be even lower which will be very nice. Cooper E and R5 efficiency getting up over 4 KWh now temp hitting 15C and even thd much bigger Scenic should be getting close to that. I do worry public chargers are going to get much busier as dealer showrooms get emptied of EVs and EV usage also climbs and we need to get to that 200k public chargers eve though 90% plus of EV charging will continue to be done at home most likely.