I don’t think that’s actually true. Big oil spend billions on lobbying and the ones that take the money are those leaning right. It’s an observation, not a mindset. Most of the money is easily followed. And it’s kind of natural selection - the donors that have certain views donate to parties that match their views. We see this all the time, on every side there is.
Are EVs the way forward?
- Thread starter The Flying Scotsman
- Start date
The other thing people generally don't appreciate is that to actually replace entire batteries is unnecessary.
With the original i3 more than a decade ago, BMW designed the battery so that it can be opened up and faulty banks of cells, or even individual cells, can be be idenfied and replaced individually. All their electric models since have been the same, and now most manufacturers have followed suit.
Unless the entire unit has been physically quite badly damaged there is never a need to replace the entire battery. Gone of the days of the mk1 Leaf, which was a brave but woeful design, with no battery charging management, no thermal management, and a battery unit that was essentially one great big brick that was not officially repairable and had to be replaced as one giant item. Most folk don't realise things have moved well on from there.
In 2024 a wonky battery can usually just have the faulty cells replaced. The hysterical stories in the Mail forget to mention that.
Is there anything you’re not an expert on?
That’s politics now
As well as
EVs
Climate Change
Meteorology
Oil
Car insurance
Volcanoes
Even breeding boxer puppies FFS
It's like the house of commons, except we all have vans.excellent, more bickering...
Public relations.
So, are EVs the way forward? This thread is making my head hurt
For the consumer, it depends. In many situations they work well, but if you need to travel bigger distances with the convenience of adding 500 miles of range in 5 minutes, you'll need a proper car as well.
Ok...so I have made a decision after listening to all the facts on this thread. My next vehicle will be electric. It will be a mobility scooter, hopefully in Candy White 
Renault 5 EV pictures online showing one on the road in Hertfordshire, biggest battery is supposed to give 250 miles range and possibly will appeal to younger readers and sell by the shed load as regardless of power plant it's a cheeky little scamp. 
How many buyers need a 250 mile range in a city car of all things? That extra capacity looks nice but serves only to push up the price. I fear manufacturers are chasing Daily Mail misdirection rather than the needs of actual drivers, the average of whom does 23 miles a day.
23 miles.
Cue folk who claim to do 1900 miles a day, every single day, in a Clio. They're not out there in real life but they'll indignantly appear on the Internet when summoned.
The other downside is the mass that capacity brings. Both the 5 and the forthcoming Alpine will be slower than the recently deleted Cooper S Electric (timed at 6.1 to 60 by multiple magazines, Road and Track, Autocar, Car and Driver), so they're making the sporty Alpine slower than a rival that has already been replaced by an even quicker one.
It all looks like fun, but if the ink on paper is to be believed Renault, who have a grand history of fast hatches, could have done so much better.
23 miles.
Cue folk who claim to do 1900 miles a day, every single day, in a Clio. They're not out there in real life but they'll indignantly appear on the Internet when summoned.
The other downside is the mass that capacity brings. Both the 5 and the forthcoming Alpine will be slower than the recently deleted Cooper S Electric (timed at 6.1 to 60 by multiple magazines, Road and Track, Autocar, Car and Driver), so they're making the sporty Alpine slower than a rival that has already been replaced by an even quicker one.
It all looks like fun, but if the ink on paper is to be believed Renault, who have a grand history of fast hatches, could have done so much better.
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I'm not sure that'd be such a bad thing.
By a complete coincidence, a friend of mine sent me these on WhatsApp this morning.
I think this is what’s annoying most people, whatever we do in this country is going to have virtually no effect on the climate yet we’re having all kinds of costs and regulations imposed on us when this sort of thing is going on in other
countries around the world.
I think this is what’s annoying most people, whatever we do in this country is going to have virtually no effect on the climate yet we’re having all kinds of costs and regulations imposed on us when this sort of thing is going on in other
countries around the world.
They will be leaving room for a ‘turbo’ version at a later date.
Think we are going round in circles.
Globally we will only have a small direct impact on climate change, but by being able to influence countries like China we will play a part in a much bigger impact in the long term (for our kids and their kids, not us).
Locally we have made big strides. As an example, central London is a much, much nicer place to be than the gridlocked version 15 years ago.
The bottom pic sums up how dull many people are. Turn the bottle by 90deg and the problem goes away.
A lot of that is on the consumer though - people buying stuff China produces. We don’t build phones, laptops, plastic tat etc in the UK yet we buy a lot of it and it needs making somewhere. If you divert manufacturing elsewhere because of things like productivity and price targets then you must expect ‘elsewhere’ will need more power. And that’s what we have seen for a while. As someone posted earlier we don’t like to pay for quality these days.
But these images floating about, cherry picked to suit one side of a story, don’t tell you the whole picture. China is rapidly moving toward cleaner power. Coal powered stations are being built but at nowhere near the rate they were. Older ones are going offline too and China is banging out clean energy production plants at a rate of knots - building more clean power production capacity in a matter on months than the UK uses in a year. That’s a success right there but you won’t see that pedalled by people as it doesn’t fit their narrative.
If people that choose or resend these one sided photo messages spent time looking into the subject with an open mind rather than just assuming it’s the whole picture and completely true and forwarding them around their ‘friends’ they might surprise themselves. They might not be so angry too.
