Graham Butcher

Oh come on now, only on Tuesday you was saying :- Lol-lolTuesday at 00:46 comment_5964128 If one can then it is good for both businesses and the government ti sometimes overpay. If we all take a scrimp policy then government would not be able to afford pensions, state and public servant ones, which are paid out of the ongoing public purse and not a put aside pension fund. I want to spend money freely, pay heaps of VAT to go in to the public purse. Usually on productive items like more solar panels and batteries which can save me money but occasional luxuries especially if it is employing young people who safly will not have tge kind of life most of us in our twilight years due to the decline in the UK since WW2. Costa gave one of my daughters lots of work through here degree time. Trained Barista, oddly does not drink coffee or tea. Think it was Aldous Huxley in Brave New World who praise consumption ad necessary to keep the world economy turning and people employed and governments collecting revenue and as an ex Revenue Collector I can go with that. Now you're being the Ebeneezer Scrooge whatever happened to you wanting to spend money freely and pay heaps of VAT to the public purse etc? OK, who are you and what have you done with real @lol-lol and please can we have him back safely 😉🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣

Is the electric car bubble about to be blown apart or what, I keep hearing about the way that electric cars are supposed to be flying out the door, implying that they are being brought up in increasing numbers by the car buyers. Yet I'm also hearing the exact opposite from other sources including some car manufacturers who we are reducing their exposure to the electric market and opening up again on ICE powered cars, even ones that they had previously pulled the plug on completely, and gone full electric mode. Citroen reinstates combustion engines for Berlingo and Spacetourer | Autocar Is just one such statement I have seen recently where makers were bringing back ICE powered models, including the likes of Porsche etc.

Yes, it is indeed an fully electric boat, powered by LFP batteries and is one of a fleet of such boats operated by a hire company at the location for cruising the canal with on a boating holiday. This video also by StacheD Training fully explains the system used by the boat, is was 100% LFP powered 48V for the 10KW motor and the house power. there was no petrol, diesel or gas used on the boat at all, totally powered by these LFP batteries that he shows in this video. He has been in contact with the operators of these boats during the last couple of weeks following up on the incident and learning from it. As I have mentioned previously, he is not some Vlogger cashing on clickbait's or trying to sensationalise the real life threatening nature of NMC or LFP batteries (and to think that some people are hailing LFP as a game changer!). He is a serving fire fighter, fire fighting trainer and also an engineer who is specialising in designing battery packs for electric cars, from a safety point of view (who knew that you could actually learn so much from YouTube eh?) If you follow this link to his channel, (2654) StacheD Training - YouTube you will see the extent of the problems and the research that fire departments are putting in trying to find a satisfactory solution to the problem before the time when they will become the most common type motive power. The same goes for the other so called green energy, like solar panels and home battery systems, they are a recipe for disaster just waiting to happen. He has also extensively covered the Luton car park fire and has fully explained the problems associated with multistorey, open sided carparks as well underground ones and the massive problems that firefighters have in getting equipment, men and resources to the location of the fire and the delay in doing so is why they are so deadly. In open car parks like the one at Bristol airport car park, they can get right close to the seat of the fire with their appliances and deal with the fire very quickly, and only 11 cars were damaged as a result. Bristol Airport blaze rips through car park as 11 vehicles damaged | Bristol Live This also clearly explains just why the Liverpool car park fire also was so devasting and also resulted in the total destruction of the car park, both Liverpool and Luton started on the 3rd floor.

Well now, I also listen/watch to him as well and is very interesting to see that he and the Allianz report say that there is an increase in losses due to fires. The shadow fleets are also a major concern.

More info on the boat explosion of the LFP battery powered boat at Gaydon marina, LFP are just as dangerous as NMC if not more so, they just don't burn as easily but they can and do explode and can itself be even more dangerous.

So are you saying that this fire fighter, engineer, and trainer is NOT being truthful with the battery fire situation then? If so then I think, if your company is so sure that that there is no problem, and or that they have a the perfect solution for controlling and actually extinguishing a battery in thermal runaway, that they should share their knowledge with the world. Believe me when I say that there is a fortune to be made by the people who actually can solve the riddle of that particular problem when all the experts around the world, fire fighters and fire research centres are scrambling to solve this aspect before they become even more popular and common place on the roads.

Yet another shipping company places bans of BEV and PHEV vehicles on their ships and ferries.

It was an Autotrader mistake, they listed that Rolls as being £195.

@lol-lol oh, so the petrol Kodiaq is less clean than the diesel then, and the 2020 facelift and MK2 versions are better still? I expect is because the engine has to work a bit harder in the Kodiaq then it did in the Superb as it has larger body to haul around, catching more wind than my old car did.

That seems to be right, there is a 2019 a Rolls Royce, 6.6L V12, tax is £195 but CO2 of almost 499g/km for sale at £200k. I think your 2016 bit is off however, as my 2016 Superb was taxed just £35.

You don't know the half of it, remember England is not Scotland. I don't have Ubers in my City, just normal regular taxi's and recently I had to use one, just measured it on the route-finder I have, 2 miles door to door, 6 minutes, £11.50. Using buses, to cover the trip, means 2 buses but with the concessions out of peak times total cost is £0, in peak times, which the trip I had to make was, £6 and the total time to the nearest bus stop would be 1 hr 30 mins, and this is supposed to be the councils and governments preferred choice for us pensioners for getting about in our city. It really is a total pith take. Incidentally, the time for that bus trip back in the days when I used to work on the busses would have been about 25 minutes because they ran a proper service being part of the nationalised industry it was run as a service, not a profit centre. Pensioner offers in cafes, chip shops etc still can't cut the mustard. We have a Chinese curry takeaway once a week for the 4 of us, the wive does the boiled rice and stir fried chicken, for 3 of us while the youngest has chicken nuggets and 4 pots of curry sauce and a portion of chips costs me £17.90. To get 4 portions of boiled rice, 3 chicken curry's, and 1 portion of chips would be £45.50 for a takeaway, welcome to my world.

I'm not one of them, but I have however, never smoked, gambled, or drank, never had holidays away from home. I have however raised 3 of my own Sons and a step Son, whose Father never paid any maintenance, worked full time and for a number of years when the kids were little, also had 2 part time jobs in the evenings and as my Father died young, I had to help support my Mother and help with the upkeep of her home, which needed replacement windows. Worked 2 years after my official retirement date and never started taking my occupational pension until this year and this month should be my first month of it starting to pay me an income., So from £1226 State Pension, I have to pay £1008 a month, for rent, council tax, gas, electric, so leaves very little for anything else. I have been told that I don't qualify for any of the benefits that you listed as my savings are too high and this government have also grabbed my winter fuel benefit, and I don't get any Council tax relief or housing benefits either because my sons chip in each month as does my wife otherwise we would be up **** creek. I used my tax free pension pot to finance the Kodiaq.

Well, as a pensioner, there is no way that I'd be paying out £6 for a hot drink, new business or not, I'd not be able to afford that level of support. Many pensioners are scared to turn the heating on in the winter months even and £6 would buy a reasonable amount of warmth at home. I can get almost 3 jars of instant coffee from Lidl for that £6 and that will give me many cups of coffee.

@lol-lol , the VED band is E and annual tax is just £195 which is more than the old Superb was at just £35, but that was a lighter car, but still at £195, it is still fairly low.

Yes, I'm well aware of that, but it does not fill me with happiness as I'm unlikely to be in a position to be able to buy a brand new car, or be still be driving in 20 years from, I'll be 95 then. I do still firmly believe that unless the policy is reversed in double quick time to be 100% electric, that you younger people will be in a very sticky place indeed as the folly of banning fossil fueled cars will be become a nightmare as the flaws become apparent.

@lol-lol Sensible - Dual motor Teslas ?, who ever said that they were?? To me that is as bad as having a V6 or V8 stonking great motor under your bonnet, you like me, drive something sensible, yes I have a great Skoda Kodiaq 4x4 diesel, but it is only the 2L 150bhp one and returns on a decent run upto 53mpg. Why I say that the modern combustion engine is head and shoulders cleaner and far more efficient overall than its predecessors is because when you consider my fist car was a 1957 Hillman Minx, weighs 968kg, 35bhp, 1200cc, 4 cylinder, did 31mpg, top speed of 66mph with a 0-62mph figure of 39.7seconds. Compare that with my 2019 Kodiaq, 1968cc, 150bhp, 1714kg, 53mpg, 0-62mph of 9.6seconds and a top speed of 122, they are a completely different breed of engine and getting better year on year. We have millions of mechanics globally who fully understand them and can do carry out repairs in a timely manner, compare that to modern BEVs with anything other than normal day to day servicing, requiring specialists to work on them and we have a global shortage of skilled mechanics with the right skill set and qualifications to actually work on them with repairs taking months to complete.

If you really want to know the true state of the air quality, then take a look at these snapshots taken just a few minutes ago. It shows the parts of the world where real efforts need to be made to improve the air, but by and large, the UK and Europe is not one of them. The last chart shows 12 years of historical data for just one monitoring station, at Stanford Le Hope, the same for the chart above it which shows the CO2 and Nox levels etc, and it also shows where the sources of the data have come from, the same sources as government and TFL etc get theirs from, form your own opinions on if we are being told the real truth or not.

Oh dear, there you go again, you really cannot see the problems can you. Yes, I get it that the mini cannot actually take 150kW at a go. You actually drive something sensible, but you know as well as I do that there are those who have far bigger more expensive cars, with bigger batteries and dual motors etc that are capable of accepting charges of 150kW and far higher. I was asking what might for now be a hypothetical question but it is reasonable to expect that there will times when there would be 2 higher charging capable cars connected to the same charger and then they are more than likely going to throttling in action.

Well all of that above is all very interesting to those who have the space and the ability to charge at home, off road, but at £12 for 10Kw it just shows one of the main stumbling blocks. I really don't know if the UK Government for example are even aware of the fact that they are just perpetuating a two tier social divide on yet another angle? There are those that that are the higher wage earners and are therefore far more likely to own their own home, or can afford to rent a home with off street parking and the ability to add in a home charger in order to take advantage of the added benefits that provides in considerably lower running costs. Then to further add insult to those lower paid people, the government actually giving those wealthier ones grants to purchase the cars. While those in the lower income brackets, are more than likely to live in a house with no off street parking and no access to a home charger, they are also more likely to not be able to afford the payments on a new car anyway and driving a sub £5k car and even if they were able to get a secondhand EV for that kind of money, then even at 4 miles per kW , that 10kW is only enough for 40miles, thus making it far far cheaper to run an ICE car than to rely on having to charge at public chargers. 🤨

Well, the other side of the coin would argue the opposite. Lets say for now that your right, they source from ethical sources, seeing as there is a high demand, those that were originally sourcing theirs from the same supply, who now cannot meet their requirements because more demand then supply, those others will obtain their Cobalt from not so ethical sources, whats the grand difference? Wither way, because of the EV's increased demand over the years for Cobalt, it has lead to more environmental damage being done, just cannot escape from that aspect. Yes and Yes, as more manufacturers switch their battery tech over to LFP, then there will be improvements, just as you say, that is also an inescapable fact, but however, that still resolve the other issues that already out there and as EV's grow in their artificial popularity and will in the powers to be, get their way will be the dominant mode of transport then their other inherent problems will come to the forefront even more and then we may be in even deeper water as a result. Let me once again, reiterate that it is not EV's in there own right that I object to, it is the enforcement of their adoption as the ban on fossil fueled new cars gains more momentum. Remember this is not a natural consumer lead change. Lets go back to the days when it was either walk, cycle or use horses, then Steam trucks were invented, then we saw the ICE cars slowly catching on. Was there at that time any forced adoption of mechanical transport? No, it was consumer driven and slowly the manufacturers improved their product, both in terms of efficiency and safety. Lets come up to date a bit more and then we begin to see diesel being used as a fuel for trucks, and a few cars along the way. Then we had a massive coercion by governments to adopt diesel as the fuel of choice, it was the saviour of the human race, then they were told that it was not the magic bullet that they had believed it was and they have replaced that with the EV, history repeating itself all over again?

Whoa, I never said I was OK with the mining, you're taking what I said and like many others, putting your own spin on what I said or did not say. What I said was that EV's had put an increased demand for more Cobalt, the rest is your spin. I'm not anti EV at all, what I'm anti is the forced uptake of the technology before we have learned how to handle the many negatives that also come along with it, to add to the other negatives which we already have.

On that score as to when the new BEV breaks even, when the old ICE vehicle it was purchased to replace might well have been a classic car which only tend to be driven for around 2 to 3,000 miles a year, and indeed many other older cars are indeed only used for a few short trips, as many people I know would rather use public transport for their commuting to work etc as many places now have limited parking and public parking is so expensive. So in essence unless you are using the car a lot for work purposes, and doing a good few miles in it, the actual differences may not that much at all.

Well no, the point that everyone seems to be missing (and yes, I understand that LFP batteries don't use Cobalt) is that the EV's are actually increasing the demand for Cobalt, not reducing it. Yes it will still be required for all the other things that it was before. There will be a heavy demand for all kinds of oil based products for many years to come so that demand for Cobalt is not going to go away and die. So those videos and arguments about EV's being the large driving force in the increased demand for Cobalt and the damage that the mining of it is causing, is like it or not a reality I'm afraid and its about time it was accepted as being factual and not used as a counter argument against ICE vehicles. Which, again, like it it or not have been steadily getting better over the years, more efficient in extracting far more energy from the Dino juice, so a gallon gets you considerably more miles today, then it did before, less C02 and other pollutants as well and that trend was all set to continue.

Yes, but only dirty cars if the old car was scrapped and crushed in order to get the grant. An older car if its still working OK, is considerably cleaner to keep running than it is to buy a new one with all the massive footprint to make it.

@lol-lol I always think its odd just how similar the S type in appearance to the Rover 75 which is it self supposed to be a class leader for ride comfort. If they had been that good when part of BMC and British Leyland, then may be we might still have a motor industry. We used to be world leaders, but like always, we got complacent, workers got lazier and management got ever more greedy and the rest is history.