Graham Butcher

Correct, mostly it is those business / fleet cars that make up majority of sales for as you rightly said for tax concession reasons.

Generally they seem to claim that in the main it's washer fluid, brake fluid and cabin filters and checking the condition of the tyres, which always seemed to my mind to be an over simplification of the status, but then, most are going by what Tesla suggest as a DIY list.

Existing owners excluded, diesels excluded, clearly because the former already has made the switch...FACT Diesels excluded, again clearly because it is so much harder to be able to purchase a NEW diesel car in the same style as a new EV or even PHEV.. FACT. Also evidence shows that the vast majority of PHEV cars sold on the second-hand market still have their original charging cables still sealed in their plastic packaging, indicating that most have never been plugged in and are company cars, chosen because they can benefit from tax concessions by virtue of them being PHEV, they have the ability to be driven for a short distance on electric only. The insurance aspect I can't vouch for without doing a lot of requests for insurance quotes, which may be biased because of my age, hence why I was asking about the article being factual or not, but again you seem keen to put your point across and looking for flaws in it when the writer was looking for a specific type of owner/driver because they were trying to gauge the likely take-up of EVs with the deadline coming up of not only the existing 2035 date, but also the threat of it being brought forward to its original date of 2030. If you are only looking to do research for a narrow target with a simple yes / no from ICE drivers, why on earth would the researchers bother asking current EV owners/drivers the question when they are not the ones being targeted in the survey. Keep up at the back.

Strange that you should have to pay £230 for the last service on SWMBO's electric Hyundai, as there are many EV owners here who claim that EV's don't require services, something which I always took it as read that, there would be things that they would always want to be inspecting at regular intervals like electrical connections, bearings in the motor, transmission transfer boxes, battery inspection to avoid and battery fires/problems etc and running diagnostics on all the control parts of the car which is far more complex than for an ICE.

Hmm, yes you say all of that but seem to have missed the obvious points of the article and also my question. We all get the point that a more expensive car will always cost more to insure than a less expensive one, that is a given fact. The point is, that they are claiming that an EV is around 54% more expensive to get insured than a petrol car, but is an EV 54% more expensive to buy in the first place than a petrol car? I suggest that the answer is therefore a resounding NO. Diesel was more than likely ignored because have you checked out the power plant options on most NEW cars? Diesel it seems is exceedingly difficult as an option these days. The reason why they never asked existing EV owners is also clearly stated in the article, it was asking people if they would be considering making the switch from ICE to EV, so why did you decide to thrown that curved ball into the equation? I think by now we all fully aware of your thoughts about EV and how we should be driving them, but the article was after discovering the public response at this current time about if they would be switching from ICE to EV and the result seems to be again a giant NO, they will be sticking to ICE for as long as possible.

@Colin170CR I agree about the car repairs aspect, I always used to do my own repairs then I got a company car, and sold my car and for over 40 years I never needed to lift a finger to get anything done to the cars, it was all done under contract by the leasing companies, now I'm retired and running my own car again, but too old to get involved in getting under the bonnet apart from checking the fluids, everything else goes to the garage. As to using buses etc, even though I have a free local bus pass, I have used that about 3 to 4 times in the 6 years because as you said, you need to plan everything out well in advance, and we can no longer hop on a bus and go from one side of the city to the other, as all buses now are called shuttles and go from various points around the area into the centre and back again, meaning that you now have to catch at least 2 to do what I used to be able to do with a single bus. Then you have to get from point A to point B in the centre in order to catch the other bus, and this is called progress??? I tend to take my car to one of 2 garages for repairs and that always involves 2 buses at the minimum and because of the need to catch the second bus, it means that a trip by car of 5 to 10 minutes to reach either garage, now takes anything from 50 minutes to 90 minutes and waiting around in all kinds of weather getting frozen stiff in winter. And then to think that they want to get us all out of our cars and to walk, cycle or use buses or even trains if going further afield is just stupid in my view.

All you electric car owners, can you confirm if this article is factual or not? https://www.petrolprices.com/news/electric-car-insurance-proves-54-more-expensive/

Maybe the honeymoon period is closing down and they are trying to recoup some of the lost tax revenue that ICE cars would have generated?

Good result, I've just back after driving 254 miles to Fairford and back on a full tank, with according to the trip computer, 640 miles range left, green score of 84 and 61.9 mpg. That was including 50 minutes of stop start traffic on M25 due to 3 lanes being resurfaced at 10.30pm following an accident which I saw on my out this morning at 5.30am,phew.

Ok, I have done a few trials now, and I'm beginning to wonder if it is more related to how the engine is burning the fuel, i.e., is it being cleaner or not? Given that the TDI has some of its best boost at around 1,500 RPM, you can see from the following photos, all trips were driven with ECO mode programmed in the individual setting, the first 2 were on the same route, different days, but same time and the average speed almost the same. IIRC the fist had more coasting down hill, but the second had more traffic so was more erratic in speed.

Agreed, but that also assumes that they have the infrastructure to plug into, also in the case of ICE, the filling stations are never more than a few streets away and takes minutes to do.

When I was working on T5 at Heathrow when it was being built, it was very common to see the local hire depots around the airport, driving the cars across Bath Road into the Shell garage opposite the terminal, among others.

Phew, they are pretty sharp over there then, thank god that is not how things are here in the UK. Some of the large DIY sheds like B&Q for instance do operate a short term hire of a van (by the hour) in order to get big bulky things home, but there are no filling stations on their sites, you are free to get fuel anywhere, all you have to do is to return the van with the fuel gauge needle in the same position as it was when you took the van, just as @Stonekeeper said, and that is the same for all the hire vehicles I have ever had, from, cars, vans, trucks, lorries and minibuses from many different companies and locations, never been any different, I assure you.

WTF, I was not even talking about the cost of charging, just the added cost of maybe having to upgrade the power supply to the premises and the cost of having the charges installed in the first instance versus an ICE car on fumes only needing someone to make a short visit to their local filling station with a jerry can to give the next renter enough fuel to get started and drive to the filling station. Which I was suggesting maybe one of the reasons why Hertz was requesting that BEV cars are returned with SOC around the 80% mark, to save them the additional costs of carrying out the work as mentioned above, and suggesting that maybe Europcar had made that investment so the SOC on returned cars was not so critical.

Thats always been my experience, both here and in Germany.

The question I posed was so obviously a rhetorical question and not a direct question aimed at anybody, has anybody seen a normal car rental yard which has its own fossil fuel tank and pump to fill its cars up, I certainly never have and I have had plenty of hire cars in my time.

With a bit of luck you get that totally free 😁

Thats true, but right now its very pertinent to EV as I'm not aware of any public chargers that don't rely on the digital payment system and if the reports are true, than there could well be many folk unable to make it back home or to their destinations. London Cabbies are reported as claiming that they cannot accept card payments for instance.

Ok at the risk of being dog piled, I have long been opposed to way that public charging stations are solely reliant on a digital platform for their business model, from the need for RFID cards, account cards / apps and the need to have mobile phone coverage with no way of accepting cash. Indeed the world seems hell-bent ongoing digital, digital ID card etc and many businesses no longer accepting cash, how will this type of thing be affecting BEV owners/drivers needing to get a charge in order to reach their destination if the digital network goes down like it has today? Microsoft IT outage live updates: Worldwide travel and banking hit after cybersecurity update causes IT chaos - BBC News

It was you who was criticising Hertz, not me, I was just suggesting a few reasons as to why they appear so lacklustre. Maybe Hertz's locations are possibly at the end of the power supply and suffer low power availability and could be a reason why they ask for cars to be RTB with a SOC of 80%? Maybe Europcar have addressed that problem and invested in some on site charges and the returned cars can be plugged and charging while the paperwork is being processed and the car prepared for the next customer, who knows. It could also be just that Hertz just has poor management policies, either way that was why I was merely putting some ideas out there for why one should be, from your description, head and shoulders above the other. The point I was making about a fossil fuel pump was in my view highlighting that the need to be having their own on-site chargers was an unnecessary expense that ICE rental companies don't normally have to have because there are plenty of filling stations around and should a renter return a car running on fumes, then they could pop to their local filling station with a jerry can, and then stick a few litres of fuel back into the tank in just minutes at minimal cost. Nothing more or less was intended by me. 🙄

Agreed, but the actual style of the car is generally far more pleasing than many of the modern SUV's etc (ignoring the internal treatment and the windows in the front wings) it is basically just a Mercedes 300SL which was already a very beautiful car.

I was not arguing, I was just say maybe thats was why Hertz are NOT as good as Europcar are. Do you always look to pick a fight?

At a quick glance it has so much better styling than many of the new BEVs but I think they have really gone overboard on the unnecessary bling.

@wyx087maybe they don't want to invest in a whole series of chargers at their depots, that may be because they already have supply issues, or they really don't think that EVs are really here to stay? How many rental companies actually have their own fossil fuel pumps, let me guess, none?

The takeaway with rental companies is that they only have EVs for rent because they probably are in receipt of incentives and because they have been hoodwinked into believing that there is a far greater demand for with rental customers, which clearly is false, and the overriding takeaway is that they are only interested in making money, not in making sure the renters see the cars at their very best to promote a bigger EV take up.