classic

Yes, I’ve been watching them since the days of Fiestas and fiat 500s when Chris wouldn’t appear on camera ! When I scraped my Octavia a few years ago I went to a local bodyshop paid £750 +vat directly to them, he said if I wanted a quote for insurance it would be over £2,000

Yes, it is a Škoda Elroq, will be interesting to see what the budget brings…..😬. I think mine is software 5.4, it has linked perfectly with OVO and also the my Škoda app works properly as well.

The problem with car insurance repairs and write offs is that thousands of skilled mechanics and painters & body repair professionals have left the trade and not enough new ones are coming in. At the same time the cars, whatever their power source, have become even more complicated. Hence relativity minor damage becomes “unrepairable” especially within a timeframe involving hire cars being provided etc.

Sorry to report no issues with apps and I have been using the EV a lot, just under 3k miles in 6 weeks. Using OVO charge* app, synced perfectly with the Elroq. It’s set to 80% and the time the car is required for and I just plug in at the end of the day. POD point charger, set to dumb mode and the car/OVO communicate and it charges. Only thing I’ve had to alter is a couple of times telling it to go to 100%. But in reality 80% is giving 180 to 200 miles range. edit : the app is “OVO Charge”

Unfortunately after decades of systems involving cash and a reliance on people to declare honestly their earnings, we are in a place where public services can’t cope. Annoyingly if you make more than £1000 from a side hustle you should pay tax on that. If they decide to tax “classic” cars and tax large cars by weight then so be it. Vote for the party that will change things back at the next general election, but the money will have to come from somewhere or the public services reduced.

It is something they could improve. Feed it back to Škoda, there is Škoda EV lounge on Facebook (which I’m not on….) I got an email invite to join Škoda All Ears which is some kind of customer feedback panel. Improvements like this will presumably be exactly what they’re looking for.

He is now officially an EVangalist ! Stopping at Newport Pagnell because he needed a break and didn’t even charge the car. Charged at Sheffield Porsche, then stopped twice more for his own personal needs with no car charge. Could have done it without stopping for charge if he’d had 100% at the start in London but he started with 59%.

Only way I can see is to press the steering wheel voice control button (top left hand side) and say your command .

Good stuff 👍

Do not buy an electric car, don’t do it, do not buy an electric car.

Interesting video, in the future this will probably just be normality using the car to store electricity for your house. Unfortunately for many Škoda owners it seems this currently will only work on the bigger battery 85’s, which must also have software version 5.4 or later.

Exactly, they want to charge people driving Chelsea Tractor type things known as SUV but they are going to get trades people, people with company vans, people with wheelchair accessible vehicles, those that need a slightly higher vehicle or 7 seaters. It is a sledgehammer to crack a nut. If it is just on residential permits then a visitor can still sail into Cardiff with a V 8 petrol Range Rover at no extra cost.

I might have interpreted this wrongly but isn’t it about permits so will affect Cardiff residents but not visitors ? To be honest doing it on weight is lazy. People with vans for work are penalised unfairly. It will include a lot of EVs so maybe it is a way to tax them, my Elroq is 2457kg gvw so would fall foul of it. Like Graham, my previous Škoda Superb estate would be ok but takes up more space….

Close shave for The MacMaster !

The government should also be incentivising EV apprenticeships and training existing mechanics. It’s all just left to the dealers who are hedging their bets on whether the whole thing really takes off.

Absolutely spot on Dave and the government should be doing something to rectify that. They probably would say they are, but I don’t see it. Build more charging stations, bring the price down, put in 7kwh ac chargers in as many places as possible. People that want EVs but are restricted by infrastructure should write to their MPs etc. We are at the point where the government is only really playing at it so their bit in the history books doesn’t look too bad, even the Tories brought in pro EV legislation, I reckon 25 more years of limbo maybe less if technology produces a mega fast charging battery that does 500 miles and can tow a 2000kg trailer.

PHEV’s are borderline pointless you literally get the worst of both worlds. The facts about fossil fuel use are out there and people have a choice and have still got years of that choice. It would be nice if legislation wasn’t required but unfortunately it is, as is the case with most things. History will have a chapter on where we are now, where people who’d only ever known the petrol and diesel way were reluctant to change. Future generations will have more of an incentive.

I’d vote for it Graham, but can you imagine the meltdown if Reeves announced in the next budget a complete shake up where EVERYONE paid their fair share ?

I thought that was an image of Starmer counting all the fuel duty and vat you’re giving him.

It is interesting what puts people off EV. The reality for most EV users is that use of rapids is not very often, so overall running costs are low, but I can see how if you were more dependent on them it would tip the scales towards staying with petrol or diesel. I’ve been interested in cars and engines all of my life and went to work in the industry as a mechanic and have done various jobs on all types of vehicles. I’m still fascinated by them and love classic vehicles (I could happily spend hours just listening to a Gardner 6LXB engine idling !) but driving around all day today in modern traffic in an EV is just a way better experience than petrol or diesel whether manual or automatic in my opinion. That is just driving around and not including the reduced fumes and CO2 and cheaper running costs. And what is interesting is that I am the most tech-phobic Luddite in most other respects. It’s clearly a human thing like old trainspotters loving steam engines and hating diesel’s and electrics or people loving Spitfires and DC3s more than the Airbus they go on holiday in.

OVO have already doubled their 7p charge anytime rate to 14p (for most users) . In any case even 24p per kWh is around half the cost of petrol/diesel.

I think the “Truth” was discovered quite a while ago unfortunately some people are struggling to accept it. You made an interesting point earlier about tax Graham. I knew the fuel cost of my petrol car was £0.15 per mile to run, I realised that a fair amount was fuel duty but until your post about tax paying I had no idea how much that was. Fuel duty is 52.95 pence per litre and then there is 20% vat on the whole cost of the fuel and the duty, so you are paying tax on tax. That’s the truth you need to worry about, not whether a lorry fire was caused by spontaneous combustion of an EV or the lorry brakes overheating and how EV hire cars will exploit holidaymakers.

I guess people who have to drive to a destination hundreds of miles away and then need to return hundreds of miles in one go will have to keep away from EVs until their range improves. As for tax, I pay a fair amount to HMRC and my ev will be £195 ved (I think). There’s no doubt that some sort of pay per mile road tax will come in the future or maybe smart meters will calculate tax to replace fuel duty. As it stands that isn’t the case which makes this the absolute sweet spot to run an EV. You, Barrie Crampton, the MacMaster (who is actually taking the p*** out of the anti EV crowd), and the other obsessed characters are just doing EV drivers a favour putting people off, so many thanks 👍.

These problems do not exist at the level you believe them to be. I’ve done 1500 miles in 3 weeks with no issues whatsoever. This has cost around £30 in electricity compared to £225 in my previous Superb. On two journeys of just over 200 miles round trip I planned a short top up charge but actually didn’t need it (probably same journey in winter I would ). I’m no evangelist, there’s still a lot to improve, but there isn’t anything to prevent an ev being a perfectly capable car for most users.

Enjoy ! Looks great