Graham Butcher

It certainly does look like one of those, but the photo is not very clear owing to the brightness of the flames affecting the cameras settings. It does appear to have the lights in that arrangement and the "smile" under the windscreen.

Well, going by the looks of the still photo and the way that the flames are shooting right the way across the road from the offside of the bus, I'd hazard a guess that the answer is yes. There are no flames on the nearside and I doubt that there would be anything else on the bus that would/could produce a flamethrower effect like that. Interesting reading the DVSA report into bus fires, they could only pin 8 down to fuel leaking (diesel). Reminds me of the time when a new bus service was started to serve a new estate in Chelmsford while I was working on the buses, the women on that estate set about sabotaging the buses as they did not think it was safe for children in their street (WTF why did they allow their children to play on the road?). Because the terminus of the route happened to be in their road, while the bus waiting its time to do the return journey, they would open the fuel filler cap and tip bags of sugar into the tank. This did little to help their cause because the crew would call the police out to investigate, and also it meant that we engineers would have to take the breakdown truck out into their street and tow the stricken bus back to the garage to drain the tanks and flush them out. It also meant that another replacement service bus had to be sent in order to carry the passengers onto their destinations. This was a pretty regular occurrence, and it lead to a almost permanent police presence for a while. This continued until arrests were made and prosecutions took place. 🙄

The trouble is not all LED bulbs have the incorrect beam pattern as they are fitted into headlamp reflectors designed for Halogen bulbs.

Its a trench in the path, which you will have to get permission to have installed and will after a while become a problem with muck and bullets getting trapped under the bristles, or rain freezing the cable in it etc. You wish.

Full marks to this YouChubber for calling this out as a fake, as previously mentioned he is or was an engineer before and so does know his stuff.

What are peoples views on this video regarding EV insurance and what if the trend of manufacturers offering insurance is extended to other things like servicing etc?

If it was April the 1st, most definitely, but it isn't so I take it as having some sort of merit. After all the ad blue for diesel cars is also partly made from Urea which is proteins from the urine of animal mammals, so there maybe something in it after all?

Here's a twist I never saw coming, I just received this email. Hi Graham, What do you believe the biggest issue for the “electric car revolution”? Power in the grid? Lack of infrastructure? Not enough affordable electric cars? Turns out it might something far more basic – dog urine. New chargers are being designed to counteract the corrosive risk of canine fluids, following an investigation a few years back into the damage done to street furniture by precisely that liquid. And when you think about it, it makes sense, dog ownership has increased 12% in the last two years alone, which means a whole lot more urine that needs to be deposited. As the number of chargers increase along with the number of dogs, the two have potential to collide, which is why EV charger designers are taking everything into account. Including wee! Click here to read the full story

All good stuff to come, hopefully, but the most important thing that can be done right now is greatly enhance the charging networks, regulate the prices to make sure that everyone could afford to run an EV even without home charging. Also need to make sure that they can be recharged quickly, like Telsas can.

Agreed, this is a classic case of NIMBYs at work and is even more annoying is that many of these people are really quite wealthy as these locations are expensive to buy in the first place, and their wealth has possibly come from energy in one form or another.

This right here is the real reason why all forms of energy are so expensive, it's all tied into the cost of oil rather than the actual cost of producing it, if stop this linkage then energy could cost everybody far less, but I doubt that will ever happen as money is what is worshipped the most.

@RootedI'd like to take that one step further, Ok I agree about the loading of insurance on owners of BEV, if that is the gods honest truth we are being told about the costs, But that loading should only be for now while people still have a choice in the type of car they have. Once it becomes compulsory that all new cars have to be zero emissions, i.e., BEV then it would be unfair to hoist those sorts of hiked premiums onto owners as they have no choice to make apart other than forgo a car and use PT and we all what a nightmare that is and would be. Fact is that we do not at the present moment have a truly effective solution to the inherent dangers of battery fires. Ignoring all aspects of which type of fuelled car is more likely to catch fire etc, we all know that once a traction battery is on fire, it is almost impossible to put it out before it, and more often than not, the practise is to try and isolate it and let it burn itself out, as it can reignite again at a later time. Most car fires, even BEVs, do not actually start with the battery, but something else causes the ignition of other materials, so if the fire services can get to a BEV fire quick enough, they can stop the battery becoming an issue. Sadly however the trend on our island and I suspect almost everywhere else, fire cover has been reduced, despite the increase in the population and the arrival of fire services to any fire in rural areas is even more problematical owing to the distance they have to travel. These problems are really generated by governments, and they are the ones who should be solving them.

@Rootedwow, that competely missed the point. Why stop there with just any form electric vehicle, let's include all ICE as well, make them just as expensive to tax and insure and go that bit extra and make the fuel almost impossible to buy and return to steam or even good fashioned horses for even more enhanced UK safety. 🤣

Except that if that video that we are referring to is to be believed, the car was written off because of the suspected high voltage traction battery damage which means that there is a chance of the battery entering thermal runaway and destroying the car. You said that Copart will more than likely have sold the car to a new owner even before they have collected the car for transporting to their premises and the new owner driving it straight away. The question(s) I was asking is 1/ why do you think that? I understand that the car was written off under one of the four cat ratings A, B, S or N but surely there is with a suspected battery there needs to be a fifth Cat so If the car was scrapped because of suspected battery, then before that car can obtain VED status and also be insured is that has been inspected to ensure the safety of the battery and the approbate documentation raised and filed to prove it is safe? You'd be rightly p***ed off if you parked your Yeti next to a car that had been written off like the one we are talking about, only to find that the car gone in thermal runaway and destroyed your car as well, because it had indeed suffered battery damage?

WTF? You started this when you posted this. And then as an afterthought, you posted this. Then I asked the following. Then you posted this. Then I posted this and asked again as you never gave a coherent answer to the question as to why a car is written off for a dent in the protective cover by company A if company B just go and reinsurance the same car without any work being done to it. You then posted this response, bearing no relevance to the question as there are many ICE cars around with dents in their sumps, and the EV car that started this whole chain of posts off did not suffer a hole in the shield, only a scrape and a 5mm dent. There is no game, I just want an answer to the following statement that you made in your 2nd post, "That vehicle wont even get as far as Copart, they will have it sold before collection and the happy new owner will be driving it as soon as he recieves it." So the only game in town that is being played is an imaginary one in your head. If the original insurer decided that the car was a risk that they were not happy to take and wrote that car off for the battery shield dent, then the car should be considered as a risk but yet you were implying that the new owner will be driving it as soon as he receives it, which by definition means without any remedial work being done to reduce the risk of whatever the original insurer was not prepared to accept. I still ask the same genuine question, because there is a real danger here that a dangerous car could be purchased from a dealer like Copart and simply and quickly put back on the road, using the same registration details to get fresh insurance and be registered for VED. There are no hidden meanings or banana skins in my posts, I'm here on this forum as a genuine person who has always had a love of motor cars, regardless of their type of drive train or fuel that powers them.

All of my new Skodas, came with a full warranty. The first one there were none in the country and were made to order. The last one was when they were more popular and some stocks were stored, so I added some factory fitted extras and waited over 3 months for it.

That is just what I thought. Haha, no game I assure you, they were/are genuine questions, fact.

Those are not the published prices in the official price list.

They are not giving the true facts about this car, the price he gave is for the entry level ELX, of £31k, is actually £34k and the car they are testing is the top of the range Ultimate @ £40,000. I have been in this car as a passenger when my Superb goes in for service, I get a lift home and picked up again in one of these, and it suffers from road noise, and my knees are very close to the dashboard, unlike the Superb and is not that big. Also I'm told the spares and servicing are costly. SsangYong Korando e-Motion pricing and full price list at SsangYong GB, UK

Well, I'd like to think and hope that these things are in place just as you say, but, that still begs the question that if they are, then why was the car written off by the insurance company, if the new owner can just go and get new insurance with not even a visual inspection to see if the 5mm scrape and dent had been fixed? If insurance company A deemed it to be a write-off because in their opinion the risk was too high, then insurance B should be doing the same?

Good old Elon, trying to help customers out, but watching that video, you can see just how much impact that had on the protective shield as the whole shield twisted and flexed when the concrete hit it, could that have passed any impact directly onto the battery itself above and behind that shield?

Are you sure of that? I'm just wondering if the car has been written off because of the dent in the battery protection tray, then it surely has to be recorded in some fashion as to why it was written off. I mean, if the "new owner" is just allowed to drive it as soon as they receive it, without doing something to it, it makes a complete mockery of it being written off in the first place. How is the new owner going to be able to get any tax or insurance on the car if it is recorded as scrapped. I know that a Cat S can be repaired and put back into use, but that car should be regarded as a ticking bomb by any insurance company until the battery has been properly repaired and can be proven to be safe again??

Nah, I doubt that, he has drag raced many electric cars recently.

If your roads are as rough and ready as some ours are than theyre is always the danger of bottoming on some of the pot holes, or debris being thrown up from a pot hole etc which could strike the underneath and the vehicle and may then be deemed a write off.

Oh come on, you already know which was the fastest, it goes without saying that it was the electric one, surely, it has the least amount of internal losses to make up for so that translates into more grunt transferred to the road. However, being quicker is also not a good thing as it means there is also a far higher chance of an accident as a result of that power on tap. I don't think Matt Watson has driven a bus yet has he? I know he likes to drive trucks from his friends company, Ashville.