lol-lol

The Polo ID looks a really good cars as with the Cupra and Skoda siblings, they will steal sales from the Renault 5 etc as they are much better in some areas. But most other models ie the lower ID range have been fraught with problems. The Chinese are streaking ahead and very difficult to see how they can compete but Renault, Dacia, Alpine has shown it is possible to grow market sector even against the Chinese onslaught. The new import levies on Hybrids as well as EVs should give them a bit more of a chance.

EU is finalising measures to introduce Countervailing on hybrid vehicles from China similar to that which they already levy on full EVs. If the UK does not follow suit which it did not with EVs the presumably the Chinese will focus more on the UK as it will be an easier market to the UK.

Another diamond, Alpine A390, of a performance EV to join Ionic 5N etc. The Alpine A110 ev version also arriving, replacing the rapid A110 ICE car, A110 EV will be at Goodwood FoS....

Not sure when the date is exactly but all these shipments ie postal imports as simplified procedures, are coming under new regs so will be much more expensive soon due to revisions in import procedures. Many Western countries have done or are implementing this and thus will choke off billions of USD, Yuan, £, € etc of trade for China. Be interesting to see what China does next. In addition to collecting more import taxes there can be tighter control by Trading Standards who's responsibility goods meeting CE UK is. We should be a bit safer as well as collecting more taxes but landed cost to us consumers will be more ofcourse.

Always do my research both in the spec and the reviews on the Amazon site and then find reviews on YouTube. All purchases on Amazon, and a recent one directly with large power bank maker VTOMAN, the products have exceeded my expectations in quality and value. Taking one apart recently one could not help but be impressed at the biuld quality.

Organisations like Amazon ensure that they sell items of good quality for the sake of their long term business. Their are sales platforms were goods of dubious quality, perhaps Temu is one of those and Amazon Haul, their apparent response to Temu, the prices are so low then "Buyer beware" might apply. I have been over delivered on quality for incredibly low prices on goods from China 🇨🇳 and studied Asian Pacific politics and economics with the OU and seen China trade's rapid progress in volume and quality and they do sometimes sell at below the price that even the Chinese consumer can buy hence, when the UK was in the EU, Anti Dumping, counteracting etc duties were levied on Chinese origin goods. This is most evident in Chinese EVs imports but since UK left EU they have levied ADD but UK has not hence the massive level of Chinese EV imports even with our steering wheels on the other side !

Again, systems start from a few pounds and pay vack in a couple of years. One j got was £14. Small solar panel, a few led bulbs, a torch with a battery in it. Solar panel feeds battery, battery led bulbs on 3 m leads and unit also has USB outpu too. One can spend hundreds, power the fridge freezer day and night abd save money. All biult to CE UK standard and bought through Amazon.

Solution is to just get a small to medium power station which gets charged up duringvthe day and can be used to supply power in the evening or night. Power stations have the solar input, storage and invertor and even quite cheap ones oft have UPS function cutting in within 20 ms to keep the 240v running. All my Chinese made equipment has been of impressive quality and not a hint of poor manufacturing even in current high temperatures.

The total lifetime CO2 hax been well trodden and whilst an EV may take a bit more CO2 to make the figures I have seen state the ICE vehicles CO2 passes the EV after only about 25k miles. Countries like France can power their car manufacture on renewables and nuclear and Spain can run for days on renewables now. Germany, like UK, is getting their on renewable powered factories like we see with JLR plants. That monthly PCP payment can be quite high whilst other costs are low. Usually great deals at end of year as car companies try and hit the % sales target and %0 finance ad well as the EV grant help reduce the monthly payments. I think EV have enough inducement to do without grants but thise countrues tgat dropped the grants, like France, Gernany and UK quickly reintroduced to get the sales and the GST, TVA, VAT collection in. I cannot see anything stopping the EV jaugaunt unless fuel dropped back below £1 a litre and that is not likely as Excise Duty would be upped to whatsit was suppose to be pre Covid whereas currently it is massively less than it was in 2009 in real terms.

ICE cars still far too polluting. Newer better and interesting to see Ireland offering big money to scrap older ICE cars. As well as cleaner, and I still see numerous reports saying EVs are about 10 times less likely to catch fire based on fure brigades and insurance not news reports. The biggy is running costs. Ibhave been shredding my 6 year and older receipts ad I do each year and can see the thousands a year I use to spend on diesel and petrol. I dont think i am spending mire than £600 on three EVs doing about 26k miles a year. Tomorrow, 13th of June, there is 9 hours of negative priced electricity abd it touch -9p per KWh. I will use about 75 KWh of electricity in those 9 hours, mostly charging the EVs abd being paid to charge the cars is a very different scenario than the fortune I was spending on diesel and petrol.

I have not counted on or been swayed by EV subsidies in the UK. The amount of subsidy alot less than the VAT so government still net recipient of dash. I have no problem with ICE cars continuing if they can genuinely meet low emmissions in real world driving not just in a lab. Genuinely less than 50 gm/CO2, 60 mg/NO and minute PM 2.5 and 10s. Not many ICE cars do and really we need strong PHEVs so ICE can be disabled in areas where pollution of and if the bad gases and particles are above very liw limits which are not shortening the lives of tens if thousands of UK citizens.

Cars scanner reports worst cell pack voltage so don't know why more do not use it. Even with the Lithium NMC tech which is generally being replaced by LFP and soon Sodium is going to be widespread, both cheaper and safer, we mostly charge to 80% but once a month to 100% so the car can cell balance. In transportation batteries should be at their lowest state of charge without damaging the battery, provably about 15% true. Use of CO2 flooding used to starve conventional fires of oxygen but lithium battery fires, like any fire but especially lthium, need early detection and some cleverer thinking and approach, perhaps freezing gas containment by Nitrogen or another inert gas. Sure science has a way. Wonder what systems the new 9,300 car BYD ship has on it. As CMA we move 4m cars a year and are now oft using an electric truck to pull the car transporters. Tech will prevail.

Cleeverly are the dog's dooberies. Put main dealers to shame. Fortunately only 20 miles from Worcester.

Container sized power banks are becoming much more common working with the Megawatt chargers. Other countries have stipulated all car parks over 80 spaces have solar canopies to help local generation. Costs are plummeting for LFP batteries and sub $20 per KWh coming soon down from current $50 to $40.

Both the speed of charging and the cable tie both have solutions and just a casevof UK rolling out what other countryes are already doing. BYD has charging as quick as using a fuel hose for an ICE vehicle ie 1 to 1.5 MW so only takes a handful of minutes to get mostly of the battery charged. Induction charging with loops in the ground are already being used in some even European countries. Most pirsuits use radios to block the road ahead.

An ICE car at 140 mph will be getting about one eighth of the mpg that it would get at 70 mph so well down in single figures mpghebce these pursuits rarely last more than half hour when in combination with tge radio ahead abd road block. At indicated 155 my Octavia VRS was probably doing about 6 mpg. Not quite at James May's 12 minutes at 250 mph for the 26 gallon tank for the Veyron but all cars gulp fuel at full chat. Only hybrids and EVs with their regen can go big distances on much less fuel putting back massive the amounts of energy can put back in the system as with the new F1 hybrid cars and even more so with GEN4 Formula e cars.

They can get the 20% VAT back and I don't know whether there is deals that public charging supplier does. I seem to be being offered more and more public charging offers, notably BE EV which i gather is now largely owned by Octopus and now the MER network has been integrated. I just do so little public charging but might get for a month or 3 for summer driving as it can pay for itself in one or 2 charges.

In logistics, particularly air freight, there us massive fear of mobile phones, tablets, power banks. Plans have been turned vack mid journey back to home airport due to finding these devices on board. We do take extraordinary procedures with all batteries above quite a small size. In operation I have found these home solar battery invertors very well made, well impressed with their biuld quality and BMS. With all the high levels of sunshine we gave had over the last 4 months I am impressed witn devices fro. £14 to £500 how good they are when they hit 100% charge from the solar. Fan kick in, charging shuts off. The Chinese ones I have bought have all been very impressive with just the Allpower lithium NMC just stopping working. I expect in most cases ie bulk exports China is careful to allow good quality export like Japan did 50 or so years ago. Postal is a leaky environment but it is being made uneconomical by new tariffs so will likely be strangled off.

Tariff i am on ie Agile, has no requirement for having an EV and rewards use when electricity is cheap and demands higher average payment when electricity ie expensive which is also when the dirty fossil fuelled Peaker plants com online. Some of my battery solar invetor devices are very small and look like a torch or indescribable box and since most people's houses are dotted with mobile phones and tablets that are the more dangerous lithium he nkn LFP devices and restriction on have such batteries and invertors us really a nonsense. We fave tebs of millions with "Balcony" solar all over Europe, probabky hundreds of millions throughout the world and fof nany it is essential to maintain life in poor countries.

As Martin Lewis constantly states the non fixed and non Time of Use tariffs, ie where you pay the single rate at the cap rate, are PANTs. The thought of paying 30p per KWh all the time for electricity is horrible. On Octopus GO i had got my average down to 11p per KWh average but then Middle East war got that tariff up much higher sobswutched to Agile and last bill was averaging 15p pet KWh but I think I can do better than that. Effectively halfing my bill if I did not do something about it. All helps with the running costs of the EVs. Investment in my own generation and storage is the other plan in motion. No expensive roof solar for me or TESLA power wall battery setup for me. Panels bolted to frames where I can and tri function so called solar battery invertor devices which can take in solar energy, store if abd then output electricity for lighting, power fridge freezer etc. These devices also useful for when, like we just had, loss of electricity during power cuts during the thunder storms. Buy wisely, Amazon Prime and events like Black Friday etc best time to buy. Buy Lithium Iron Phosphare rThef than Ithium NMC as you should get 10 years use rather than 3 with NMC. Next battery device I buy will have the full 4 KW output to power anything but waiting for prices to fall further. Mobile batteries of 16 KWh looking interesting and payback looks like 2 or 3 rears and not the 5 or 10 until recently and with the EVs acting as massive mobile stores of electricity when prices go low, zero or negative !

Today I am getting electricity for less than zero pence per KWh, ie I am being paid to take it. Would I selm it back to the Grid at 30p per KWh but would I agree to sell it back at 10p per KWh, probably not. There is the rub. Whilst even my 40 KWh Renault 5 can do 11 KWs thru its Bidirectional onboard DC to AC invertor would i want the degradation to my battery for a poultry 10 p per KWh, probably no. I thought my 40 KWh was going to be LFP but it is Lithium NMC so not as robust in charge-discharge cycles. New Twingo is going to be LFP and noe many other EVs are LFP rather than NMC. Not sure my newish Indra wallbox is bidirectional, pretty sure it is not so they need to be converted and I imagine that is not cheap.

Octopus just released its slot electricity prices on its Agile TOU tariff. 11 hours of negative priced electricity tomorrow 7th of June 2026 ! The truth is I love having electric cars and the savings with running them ! Home running costs will benefit from the negative prices too.

I thought it was only Drax that did this these days. Green washing power station as with "sustainable" hydrocarbon fuels. Economics are driving the rapid move to renewables and with government investments in nuclear to provide reliable energy in case of rebewables not being available.

Wood pellet are counted as renewable somewhat oddly. Sea transport is very low carbon transport compared to air, rail and road. Ocean cargo ships ate moving to cleaner fuels such as LNG which reduces CO2 abd there are otger moves to even cleaner and lower carbon se transport. J would like to see no burning of anything, no supposedly sustainable fuel for air or road as it is still returning carbon in to the air even if it wad carbon from organic matter that took CO2 from the air. Only renewable or nuckear though hydrogen, ammonia does have some interesting possibilities. Just so unnecessary when renewables can provide the power we need for living except on rare circumstances.

There is going to be a place for fossil fuelled power generation but really just as a backup which is what that energy can be good at considering its current cost and pollution. There could be weather conditions and depleted battery storage that means we need gas generators to kick in but the plan is that will be rare occasions. There could be massive volcanic activity that diminishes solar production. Like China the UK should and will get plenty of solar and wind but we may need that in a calm winter. I was surprised on a visit to Hinkley point to see Olympus gas turbines to vack up the nuclear power plants. Af sea we had several diesel generator to backup the diesecon unit generating free power from the main diesel engine's exhaust where we generated super heated steam for electrical generation. Always have plenty of backup for critical energy supplies and I have no issue with them being fossil fuelled but normal electricity supply should be all zero carbon and good to see almost every country in the world, bar USA, seemed to be onboard with this agenda, even oil producers in the Middke East etc.