Graham Butcher

The photo would certainly imply that was the case, I think, anyway? If so then its a deviation from the thread.

True, I know of approximately 50 Skodas that are preregistered sitting on an airfield. There used to a big field here that was home to about 100 or so new Fords, but I'm not sure if they were preregistered or not as the cars were parked side on the point of view, behind locked gates and some distance from the vantage point.

True, but the overall figure is still small in comparison at this juncture.

Be that as it may, I still think your claim is flawed, but I'm bored with this now as it is just expanding way beyond what it started out as which was how it is happening in the UK, but you seem to be drawing more into the equation at each point to justify your view point that electric is the way to go, and I'm fine with your view you are perfectly entitled to your view, as are the rest of us entitled to our own views. The plain and simple truth, (forgetting all discussions about good or bad for the planet) is that the vast amount of the public apparently are not currently taking up the EV option and the overall discussion was about why that might be. Cost, lack of finances, charging infrastructure etc, can you not accept that? The billions, should have been edited, but I thought that the link did that for me, and it clearly mentioned the figure of 1.474 billion and left it at that as anyone following the thread would have opened the link and seen the correct figure, so your claim of 3 or 4 is just a red herring as is the Audi Q5 in China which can be had for less than £10k, apparently. Trouble is I live in the UK, a car built to Chinese specs may not be suitable for the UK, and then you still have to add in the shipping, import duties, and all the red tape and costs incurred in getting the Q5 registered here in the UK and sort out the warranties etc. Where are you going to look for anything else to add in to your figures, next. I started out by pointing out that your claim of 40 million was actually higher than the official figure for the UK which was somewhere around 35 million including all the ICE powered cars. I had clearly stated that it was the UK I was talking about, not the world. Is it any wonder that YouTube has a name for people who just cannot bear to hear anything said against EV vehicles when people cannot accept what they can actually see with their own eyes happening right in front of them?

@lol-lol Yes, change is indeed happening, but that change can also swing back if governments keep kicking the can away. Anyway the point is still the same as has been already pointed out, that change is still very small and if you are now widening the EV part up to include other types of vehicle, then to be absolutely fair to all and everyone else in the discussion, you need to do the same for all the ICE equivalents that you have just excluded in order to skew the discussion in favour of EVs. If you do that, I'm pretty sure that the overall figures will remain almost static in their relationships to each other. Another point to take into consideration is that EV adoption is heavily skewed anyway because in China there are parking lots and fields of unsold EV cars that have already been registered for their own nefarious reasons, so they are also included in your figures, but they are replacing any fuel burning vehicles, but they have all massively increased the amount of pollution that has been generated in their production just to sit there and rot in fields. I also suspect that China is not alone in the distortion of these figures, either. What will you do next, add in e-scooters and hoverboards, drones etc? 😉 Face it, to get people to make a massive swing towards EVs, there are still issues to be resolved and there is very little point in making them mandatory until the bigger picture has been addressed and resolved and people can see that they offer cleaner and cheaper transport, but that also has to be at lower cost of ownership. No point is claiming that the longer term ownership will reduce the cost of ownership with home charging etc, remember that a large proportion of the worlds' population cannot home charge like you can.

Yes we have a load of those Volvos on my local force. I like the idea of them going back to Superb as my car also makes them check it out, especially as its debadged.

Either way, it is still not that many, and if the can keeps getting kicked down the road, that small number might begin to shrink a bit, who knows?

Superbs seem to be pretty common here in the UK as well with the police, but I'm not at all sure if any of them are of the armoured variety.

The same still holds true, there are billions of cars on the road across the globe, and you mention having 40million EVs by the end of this year 🤣 How Many Cars Are There In The World? Statistics by Country. (hedgescompany.com)

Yep, and if Mike Brewer is correct, that can could be further kicked down the road again, and so they have every right to be peed off.

But it still remains a requirement to look at the screen to operate. All electronics today that use screens have the ability to change the language to suit the person operating it.

In the UK???? We currently only have 35million cars in the UK of all types.

Not at all, how many of these supercapacitors do you find in the modern car? Certainly not in the parts that @J.R. said he was designing years ago. Technology is always developing at a pace and the types of capacitor I was referring to in electronics are those used to smooth out any transients such as small breaks/dips in the supply rails of electronic circuits such as @automass was having with his dashcam and mobile phone disconnecting and reconnecting each time his start/stop cut in and out. Such capacitors only need to store very small amounts of energy to keep such items fed with power when there was a major dip in the car's supply voltage due to the start-up current causing a volt drop.

That site is just referring to new car sales for the last 3 years, and PHEV and EV's are still in the minority and will take several years to achieve an equal balance between ICE and EV on the UK roads, so my point is still valid.

Utterly useless to a overseas visitor, but switches and knobs aren't, they remain in the same place in a car model sold in Germany, USA, UK etc so any driver, regardless of their native tongue could sit in the same model in any country and just drive it safely as they will already know where the buttons are located.

Totally agree with you on this, the Superb is better in this respect but even that annoys the hell out of me. In my old Mk2 there was a push button on the steering wheel to start and end a phone call, so it could be operated without taking my eyes off the road. In the Mk3 this is no longer the case, that function is now moved to the touch screen, which demands that I have to look at the screen in order to touch it in the right spot. While all of this makes the cars cheaper to make, it does not translate into cheaper cars for us to purchase, or cheaper to replace say a screen if the digitizer fails. It also has not gone unnoticed by the insurance companies, and premiums have been adjusted upwards to reflect the higher chances of a claim being made. Personally, I see no difference in using a central touch screen like that in a Tesla to using a mobile phone in a car, if the driver has to look at it in order to operate it, then it should have no place in a car.

If the speech engine is as good as that in my TomTom sat nav, it is almost useless.

Well Einstein, you are so wrong with your assertions, try 415V RMS, 3 phase supply which has a peak to peak voltage of approx 680Vac @50Hz with 2,000A incomer in a switchboard and see how you fair. FYI, I am well aware that it's the bodies muscles that throw a person across a room, and its, the muscles' reaction to electrical stimulus received from the shock. AC passes through 0V 100 times on a 50Hz supply which allow the muscles to force the body away from the point of contact as the voltage swings between +ve and -ve , whereas on a DC supply, there is never going to be 0V until either the energy is dissipated or the supply is switched off. On a DC supply, the point of contact with the voltage is critical when it comes to being locked onto the supply, but as always the voltage and the available amount of energy also play a large part. You as a self-confessed person who used to design electronics parts for the automotive industry should be aware that there is a huge difference in the amount of energy being supplied from a charged capacitor in electronics to say that coming from a mercury arc rectifier. The video link is more for the benefit of others to get a grasp of what we are talking about and the kind of energy involved.

I totally agree with your thinking, I really don't want to be having to go over the whole saga time and time again. I'm fine with people's choice to own and run an EV, its a free country and hell I might even end up with one myself if the right conditions crop up, I'm far from being anti them. But the différance is that I'm realistic enough to fully understand that there is an inherent risk with them, they have not yet reached their peak in terms of development.

According to SMMT, the UK figures do not reflect those you quoted, they say 1.1 million EV cars (with a plug, so that is PHEV and full EVs) on the UK roads and some 35,148,045 cars in total, so 34 times more ICE than EV, therefore fires will be higher with ICE by association because of their sheer numbers. I still say that it is way too early to claim that EV's are safer, they haven't reached a critical point yet in their lifecycle where ageing and fatigue in components start to demonstrate high failure rates. Nissan Leaf, launched in 2009 in Japan, first went on sale in the UK in March 2011 and after selling 500,000 in 6 years, it was replaced in 2017 with version 2, so EVs and PHEV are still not making massive inroads to the UK motoring scene if you go with the figures from the SMMT who should know their stuff? More than 1m electric vehicles now on UK roads | Electric fleet news Used Nissan Leaf (Mk1, 2011-2018) review | Auto Express As in the video, Tesla do seem to have the market share and that is maybe because they appeal more the younger generation with their integration with a mobile phone through their APP and they can deliver sooner than most other brands and they also started with a clean piece of paper and had no traditional car building thinking to cloud their vision.

Oh, really, being a part of an HSE series of safety lectures and film shows at various factories around the UK, you somehow doubt that I speak the truth, geez. I have been in the electrical industry in various capacities all of my working life, and you are trying to cast doubt on what I'm saying. Shame on you. 'Desperate' man was 'dead for two minutes' after being electrocuted while stealing scrap to pay bills during lockdown | UK News | Sky News

Not enough clearly, it is the older cars that catch fire, ie, older than 10 years. A 10 year car is not old really to most people.

Oh,I was reading about them last night and they were supposed to have been sold back for dismantling and destruction when they weren't required anymore?

Did you know that there are some UK made armoured Superb's that are bullet resistant and bombproof Skoda Superb's for use by the police and private VIP carrying companies where VIP's need to be transported in less conspicuous and attention grabbing cars? The sort of cars that you would associate with these people would be Jag, BMW's, Mercedes Benz, Maybach's, Rolls Royce and Bentleys etc, but who would be looking such people in a Skoda Superb? Driving Skoda's bulletproof, blast-resistant Superb Estate (video) 10 things you need to know about Skoda’s armoured Superb | Top Gear Meet the £120k Skoda Superb Estate | CAR Magazine

@toot When I watched the second video you linked, I thought for a second that was driving the Scot rail car . The EVROS 1200 mile EV van challenge was not quite smooth sailing, with the Highland Council, stepping to lend them their charging facilities in the council yard at Fort William, they would have been well and truly stuffed. So there go, I do watch the videos and in my opinion that is how we can all learn something new each day, my mind is never closed to new ideas, but like any good engineer, I always question and probe things first, act in haste and repent at leisure