lol-lol

Sky is using a Taycan for their League of their own 1000 mile trip to Turin plus a BMW 120D and some Ford big thing...

Reportedly the most unreliable brand currently on the market it is has been said. Think I would consider a BYD but not a MG/SAIC car. Car Dealer MagazineMG named the most unreliable used car brand as top 10 wor...MG has been named the most unreliable car manufacturer following a survey of nearly 30,000 owners. What Car? quizzed 29,967 owners of used cars up toWhat Car? Reliability Survey: Mo...What Car? Reliability Survey: Most and least reliable sma...In our annual Reliability Survey, we ask readers to rate the dependability of cars aged up to five years old. Here we list the most and least reliable small SUVs in the UK

AC chargers to stay at 49p per kwh. Would like to see even more 11, 16 or 22 kw chargers. One can save so much money, if one has the time to kill, one can save enough to pay for coffees or even food if one is hanging around for an hour or two. Might well be using more AV from the Gridserve chargers.

Nissan was cut to junk bond status by Moodys last month....... https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-02-26/nissan-cut-to-junk-by-fitch-ratings-days-after-moody-s-downgrade Failure to merge, allow take over by Honda probably. Departure of Nissan CEO in Japan. Nissan, as ever, have some good products but have looked disorganised and their debt very large but then so is Japan as a whole ie twice GDP I recall. Companies are obliged to keep spares available for 7 years I recall rolling for 7 years I seem to recall but if your bust your bust. Be a lot more bankruptcies if these trade war tariff's bite.

Renault will be making the Nissan Micra EV in Northern France alongside the R5, as long as Nissan don't go out of business I suppose. Looks good and with R5 internals might sell ok, if car buyers are willing to take a risk on a brand that may go in the next year or so. Then one might think similar for VW and other European legacy companies ? If only Elon would sell Tesla that might recover it's share price too.

The Energy guy on Martin Lewis said it was sharing the cost of the local infrastructure so dense population areas were cheaper than sparsely populated areas which made some sense. Octopus not the cheapest dual rate tariff but they generally have good customer service and I think their day rates maybe better than those with a cheaper night rate. The referral scheme and sometimes the free or savings scheme also nice side bits ie worth quite a few quid at times. Think I will probably stay with Octopus despite not being the cheapest but I will continue to add portable solar panels and more batteries to further reduce my day time usage even more. Some dual rate tariff users have got their day time rate use down to just a few percent so their average lecky tariff is way under a 10p per kwh average which is what I am aiming for. One only has to see the disaster after the sub station fire at Hayes and Heathrow area to see the benefits of local generation and electrical storage to allow continued living and working when there is such a massive outage due to the grid dropping out for many hours. The effect on cargo coming in to our Heathrow depots has been massive. Losses will be in the hundreds of millions no doubt. All preventable with current tech on electrical storage and generation.

Octopus Go rates from April Fool's day........ Surprised at the regional variation..... Daily standing charge down £36 a year but day time lecky up 2.4p per kwh and I use about 5 Kwh during the day so 12p a day of day rate lecky so roughly cost neutral. I use more like 12 kwh at night mainly the twice weekly EV charges but that is not costing more ie staying at 8.5 p per kWh........

What was one of my company's subsidiaries, Source London, I see s now branded TotalEnergies as that is who we sold the division too ie Total and they now have 2,700 in London and now they are installing n Birmingham too. The above is just in Camden and this is what we found was having to deal with each individual London council, of which there were over 40 compared to Paris where we only had to deal with one metropolitan authority, much easer to get our chargers installed and get our 5,000 Pininfarini little sold state battery'd Bluecars on the streets. The install of the chargers, particularly the powerful DC ones requiring lots of 3 phase power was oft a challenge and expense. Did do RHD versions and launch on London but was nowhere near as big as the Pars scheme. Required subsidies to keep going in these early stages which the Paris mayor stopped dong so the scheme ended but t was reckoned to be taking up to 100k cars of the road at peak times. Hireable in 6 minute slots and best result was 40 hires in a day I recall. Particular useful n gong from Garde du Nord to Garde to Lyon for example.

Indeed. Any association with TESLA is widely considered a risk now. Dealerships, TESLA chargers, fire bombing individual vehicles.

More actions against TESLA for safety concerns on TESLAs. Also TESLA wthdrawn for EV subsidies list.

Steering gear fails far more often than land lubbers would care to think is actually the case. I have gone up to the bridge sometimes and there has been nobody up there, just the autopilot humming away. The American flagged small container vessel ploughed in to the Av gas tanker at full telegraph speed of 16 knots ie about 20 mph, that is a lot of genetic energy and luckily it looked like it only split one or two of the tanks, still a thousand or two thousand tonnes of kerosene but hopefully will evaporate quickly. Did find it interesting that it was a Russian captain on the US flagged vessel. Hopefully one or two crew members or officers will spill the beans. The Humber Estuary has the highest tonnage of any port area in the UK so hopefully closing it for even a few hours did not do too much economic damage.

You might if you have a good radar system that is penetrative the fog, not at breakneck speed but nice to have fog or rain penetrative systems like aircraft have rather than just another version of eye and brain IMO.

I think lidar/radar is a better technology as it does what I cannot ie bounce radio or sound waves into and read messages back whereas camera are only a secondary visual system and I am happy trusting my eyes and brain rather than Tesla optics and Tesla software. The radar I don't have as I am not a bat or Daredevil (would not admit even i was). Radar enhances what i cannot do, optics and software, not so much.

Good enough for what ? Good enough equivalent to teaching a 5 year old to drive on the beach as long as one is ready to intercede at a quarter seconds notice ? That is not even reliable adaptive cruise control to me never mind self driving and I therefore would not use it at all for fear it would let me down and end some one or several people using such systems with such flaws. Simply would never switch them on.

I think much of the problem is that those driving Teslas believe that the cars systems are a lot better than they are. UK police driving in their high cab motorway vehicle so they can look in to cars, vans and even trucks and then see a Tesla driver in the car on his own sitting in the passenger seat and no one in the drivers seat. This is clearly way more faith the the Tesla's systems deserve to have placed in them. Cases of Teslas just pulling across the road on trucks with gaps under their load which Teslas optical systems sees as the road clear and so crosses into the path of the truck. Reminds me of the German WW2 battleships and battle cruisers which used great optical rangefunding whereas the British used radar on the ships and on the cliffs of Dover to spot the Nazi aircraft and vessels but in the dark, or foggy or rainy conditions you would rather have the radar rather than the optical systems and that us one of the main reason the Nazis lost the war.

Perhaps the UK should consider stopping all Tesla sales until the bad weather safety performance etc issue is fixed and require all teslas on the road to be retro fitted ? A thousand accidents attributed to poor safety performance in poor light conditions plus those dozen or so deaths should be reason enough Euroncap is run in good light conditions, looks like the tests should be run in fog, heavy rain, low sun etc where Teslas seem to perform badly. Better off in a Dacia Spring and the walking, cycling public would be too.

A car company that sells only electric cars which rely on camaras rather than Lidar....... Shock

Like Donald Elon could go bankrupt in on or more of his businesses. His family have been been dumping their shares in huge chucks. If, say the car business, becomes so unprofitable, as seems to happening, then a point is reached, like with Nissan now, that the supplier contracts for batteries etc which they just cannot fulfil as car demand has spiralled downwards then Musk may just choose to walk away from TESLA or more likely sell it so his toxicity is no longer affecting the brand, it would be a good buy for one of the three big US brands or even outside the industry. Tesla could then continue its journey. Like with Trump seeing one of the business go bust effectively, Trumps has had 3 or is it 4 bankruptcies, does affect ones future investment as one gets a reputation for being toxic in the money markets. Arthur Andersen, Enron, Madoff all thought too big to fail but now in the history books as super massive collapses.

Liked this....... The Tesla chainsaw massacre stock market valuation, it is now halved I gather.......... And even on Elon's X, he is pro free speech it is good to see below ....

I have been wondering what i would say to Geoff of Worcescsestershire if I say him, nothing nice i am sure. Leach comes to mind but then I knew a nice customs officer called Geoff Leach, can't remember the spelling but it would sound the same.

It is unusual for me to praise US buyers but they are much more orientated to what is a cars model year. Sometimes it is good to specify some odd features so one knows one is getting the latest build. With EVs the battery packs can improve by a percent or two as energy density incrementally improves so the later factory build can have more battery storage. The car makers, like Renault, will keep calling the car 60 kWh but actually the battery is bigger when measured by draw test and using car scanner though sometimes the BMS will disguise the lower and upper buffers. The tiny Dacia Spring battery has driven 40 km past nil % state of charge. My 60 kWh Scenic did not even give a performance warning until 11 miles past zero percent battery showing. Spring's actual battery useability is from -9% and can charge to 106%. A 15% useabilty more than 100% displayed. Keep meaning to get Car Scanner to see some of the internal information. Maybe we will see hybrid batteries growing quite a bit well as those batteries cheaper so hybrids will get better. If they "save" drivers and fast parcel operator running costs they should not stay in the customs warehouse at the ports. Cheaper finance coming too with lower Base rates should also help car sales.

Never happened in ICE times ! Might be something to do with Covid as well though. I remember seeing some models at Portbury docks for months if not longer and they were right by the sea, well Bristol Channel, so would have had some salty air for good measure. Mail OnlineThousands of unwanted motors stored on airfield amid coro...Thousands of unwanted cars have been left to fill up an airfield in Thurleigh, Bedfordshire, amid fears about the long-term future of the motor industry amid a slump caused by the coronavirus pande...

SMMT data for February 2025..... BEV + PHEV + HEV now exceed number of pure petrol car sales. https://www.smmt.co.uk/vehicle-data/car-registrations/

Tesla owners rebranding their cars as Audis ICE cars ....... (Presumably to avoid vandalism due to Elon Musk's more recent political and government actions)

R5 back on the replacement list for my Zoe ZE 50. Drove a 150 hp one yesterday after driving the Spring. Spring surprisingly nippy. Being so narrow and on skinny tyres it does lean quite a bit. The deal breaker for the Spring was just the drivers seat, and the front passenger seat was just so uncomfortable for a tallish and biggish chap like me. I would struggle to drive this car for over 15 minutes without starting to feel quite uncomfortable. Otherwise car was pretty amazing in most departments for less than £17k and with very good finance deals etc. 150 hp Renault 5 felt quicker than my 170 hp Scenic which it is on paper and really feels so. The back seats are still noticeable short of space and I would have like a Frunk like the Spring has but the cabin feels quite classy IMO and the drivers seat 9 out of 10. Not quite long enough seat length to be perfect but I could see myself doing long trips ie down to Plymouth from Worcester no problem. I can see why this car won Car of the Year 2025. It is not perfect ie rear seat space and it "only" got 4 stars on Euroncap but a worth winner, not driven or even seen lots of other 2025 cars but it is a very nice place to be and for prices between £22.5k to £27k or so a good price to attract lots of buyers. Would like to see finance APR drop for 5.5% to 5% with the scenario of falling central bank rates but we will see what happens in Q2 and Q3 on the deals on offer. Zoe goes back in September and I will miss that diamond of a small EV but the 5 will be a good replacement and as a second EV to the Scenic.