moley

To clarify my previous comments relating to the Luton airport car park fire. While diesel vehicles can catch fire getting diesel fuel to actually ignite is far more difficult. There has to be a very high heat source first. Just saying https://www.bedsfire.gov.uk/about-us/london-luton-airport-review As a result of the investigation, all evidence points to the most probable cause being an electrical fault or component failure, which started in the engine bay of the vehicle whilst it was in motion. The developing fire spread to other components, and whilst the owner of the vehicle attempted to fight the fire, the vehicle became overrun with flames and spread to other parked vehicles. A few years back a woman stopped her Vauxhall Zafira outside of our house on the way to taking her child to school, she got out of the car with her child and was talking to someone on her phone about a problem with the car. A few moments later the car went up in flames. The fire was caused by a well known fault with the vehicles heater control.

The vehicle was in fact a diesel Range Rover Sport, but the fire was electrical. Have you tried setting diesel fuel on fire?

The 'experts' were predicting a different scenario 50 years ago.

The police stated that the vehicle was registered and insured abroad, so not imported.

The vehicle was siezed under section 165 of the road traffic act, which refers to the validity of the vehicles insurance. The vehicle has not been imported but is not road legal in the UK, which raises the question as how it was allowed into the UK at point of entry. It's going to be interesting to see how this pans out as the owner / driver won't be able to get UK insurance as the vehicle is not road legal. It's not legal in the EU and evidently not legal in Albania although it appears to have been registered there.🤔

Makes you wonder why EV's aren't flying off of the shelves.🤔

Shut down the fossil fuel industry tomorrow and the answer to your question will be obvious the following day.🤔

That would work.👍

I agree that I wouldn't get into driverless car, but in this case the car kept on driving around the car park. It didn't crash, it didn't run anyone over, so apart from nearly missing his flight he didn't appear to be in any imminent danger. He could have jumped into a normal taxi where the driver has an accident or the taxi broke down. If there was a emergency 'kill switch' installed it would be OK to use in this situation, but what if the car was on the outside lane on the interstate? At least he made his flight.

Have you put different size tyres on the car to cause the odometer to overread by 5%?. Speedometers are usually set to overread by 5%, but odometers are usually pretty accurate. If I put a route in the sat nav and it says 245 miles to the destination, it's probably within a mile or two on arrival. When your odometer shows 10,500 miles you've only actually travelled 10,000 miles. This would skew the figures for mpg or miles per kwh, would it not?

I've watched s few of these Carwow reviews on EV's, where they drive them until the battery goes flat. Apart from the putting 2 people in the boot to see how big it is the reviews are quite useful. The figures at the end of the review is quite interesting. The polestar achieved 90% of the claimed range while the other cars were around 78 - 81%. The cost of fuel (diesel) for the crew / filming car (skoda Kodiaq) for the total return trip was £92. The cost of charging the Polestar was also £92, but the first charge was on 'home' charging, if the car had been charged on fast chargers the cost would have been £140.

Absolute bargain at £180,000.🤔

According to the MG website the cheapest MG4 is the SE version from £26,995. On auto trader you can pick up a 74 plate for £19,905. From April I believe VED will be the same for EV's as it for ICE vehicles.

Which part did you think was absolute tosh? We know it's a problem to 'home charge' your EV if you don't have a driveway. If you can home charge, then 100 miles can be as low as £2 to drive 100 miles in my diesel Superb is probably under £13, so the £14 he quoted is not far off of the mark. I think he over costed the 100 miles on public charging at £28, it is evidently more likely to be £18, which is still more expensive than an equivalent ICE vehicle. I don't know how EV used values are these days, so he might be wrong on that count.

This is a typical vacuum gauge.

In the 'good ole days' of distributors, points and rotor arms mechanical wear made timing a little difficult to be precise. I would set the timing with a strobe light and then use a vacuum gauge, which usually gave a slightly different reading and I would then set the timing to the reading on the vacuum gauge.

I bought Mrs Moley the 1.5 Kamiq SEL exc with the DSG box. It's a good package and the fuel economy is very similar to her previous 1.2 tsi Fabia combi with the 6 speed manual box. In June we spent 10 days in Ireland and the rental car was a VW T Cross, with the 1.0 3 cylinder engine and manual box. Although the performance was OK the 1.0 litre engine is a little gruff when pushed, where the 1.5 is more refined.

Indeed it is, but the inference is that as China reduces it's use of petrol and diesel this will lead to a collapse of the global supply system. One statement he made was that as less and less petrol and diesel is required there will be less and less fuel stations as they will not be viable and you might have to drive long distances to find a fuel station. I think he said that the the drop in demand for fossil fuels in China would be 5% per year up to 2030. While it probably is a tipping point of fuel sales in China I'm not convinced by that decline for demand for fossil fuels will be that rapid.

Shame he didn't actually show what Bloomberg were claiming. As EV sales increase and petrol and diesel sales decrease the use of fossil fuels will also decrease, but in the UK it is estimated that 96% of cars on the roads are ICE, so the demand for petrol and diesel is not going to dissappear that fast and OPEC swings production levels to suit demand and control the price. I wonder if he predicted Harris to win the US election 🤔 It looks like fossil fuels are still currently in demand.

I seriously looked at changing Mrs Moley's car to an EV in October 2023. The positives were that her annual mileage is around 4k, she didn't need a big car and the was no VED on EV's. I got quotes for installing a home charger before sitting down and doing the maths. The sensible option was the MG4 but I was unsure of it's long term viability and I really didn't want to buy a Chinese vehicle if I could help it. I would prefer to stay with Skoda, but the Enyaq is too big. She settled for the Kamiq with the 1.5 petrol engine and DSG box. The price came out about £12k less than an equivalent EV. Now the VED on EV's is going to be the same as a ICE car, so that incentive has gone. For the future I see that Skoda are planning two new EV models, a mid size and a smaller 'SUV' style. In 3 years time that might be an option, but at the moment the £12k we saved will buy us about 90,000 miles of driving.

I think the market has decided, EV sales are not going in the right direction. To impose financial penalties on car manufacturers for not selling enough EV's because the public don't want them or can't afford them is just crazy.

I wonder if anyone else has had this query. Because I have been covering around 33,000 miles a year for the last 20 years I've always run my Skoda diesels on the 2 year / 20,000 miles service regime. With this the mileage would always come first, so I was used to getting the message 1800 miles to service. Now I've retired I'm not doing the big mileage, so I was not surprised to get a 'oil service in 28 days' message yesterday. The problem I have is the last service was in May 2023 and I've only covered 16,000 miles, so 4,000 or 6 months short?

VED is a tax that goes into the 'pot' and is not specifically used for road maintenance. Every car buyer pays VAT on a new car. If you buy a new Tesla above a basic model 3 the VED for the second year will be £600 as it stands.

How do you 'dereg' a vehicle and shift the renewal date? I was under the impression that the date of first registration in the UK in the V5C was start point for taxation and MOT. The 'luxury tax on vehicles with a list price of over £40k is £410, this is added to the ved for the vehicle. If your vehicle is £190 the luxury tax will make it £600. EV's are currently exempt.

I had never heard of this make, in fact I thought that the guy at the rental desk said it was a 'Lincoln'. Evidently it's a joint venture between Volvo and Geely. It drove OK in the 5 hours to the hotel / factory / Hotel / factory and 5 hours back to Stockholm Airport.