I believe efficiency of all types of cars would be improved if people went back to driving normal (low) height and consequently lower weight vehicles. Savings all round for materials and fuel/energy.
Obviously some people have need of 4wd and bigger wheels and tyres but for the majority it is in my humble opinion all about fashion. Might help to stop a lot of intimidation on the roads too from those drivers who feel their humongous SUVs afford special privileges.
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Hmmm…
World beating as usual hahaha
EV - buy or wait?
Car buyers will be waiting a long time now for British battery powered cars.
Didn’t I also read somewhere that Tesla are slashing prices to stimulate falling sales?
How long now before the UK government annouce a deferred date on the ban of new petrol/diesel cars.
Yes, that went down well world wide with customers who had just taken delivery.
As they always would have done but as britain features absolutely nowhere on the EV market place it doesnt make a shred of difference. Just to assholes like T May who said britain will lead the world in battety and EV’s, Stupid twat!
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Clearly you are not impressed by Teresa May but not sure I want to read what you think of her 
It seems more of Musk’s poor decisions are catching up with him
As they say - “what’s the quickest way to make a small fortune?” - “start with a large one”.
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I think it’s more that the bottom ends and ranges are being taken off the market. The manufacturers are saying components are scarce so they’re putting the components they can get into expensive vehicles rather than cheap ones.
I am not totally convinced by this and think a number of forces, including political, are combining that are removing the ability of bottom end people to buy motor vehicles.
Just seen an article in auto-moto.com saying Lamborghini, Bentley, Rolls Royce and the top end in general are experiencing big increases in sales.
Which is precisely what you would expect - and is happening across many sectors - it’s because of the ‘hollowed out middle’ - the wealthy are getting wealthier, and almost everybody else is getting poorer. But it has to end…
"The solution is plain for all to see. You, our global representatives, have to tax us, the ultra rich, and you have to start now…There’s only so much stress any society can take, only so many times mothers and fathers will watch their children go hungry while the ultra rich contemplate their growing wealth. The cost of action is much cheaper than the cost of inaction – it’s time to get on with the job.”
I’m not talking about ‘bottom end’. I drive a mk 3 Skoda Octavia - quite refined and comfortable. It’s moderately small on the outside but with a huge boot. I was having it MOT’d recently and I noticed one of their SUVs with it’s cycle carriers. How on earth do you attach a bike? Stepladders? All that extra metal, plastic and rubber. All the quite ordinary marques like my own are building bigger cars because of demand. More raw materials and fuel consumption (all types); most of the time they will carry one person just like my Octavia. Are we mirroring the USA?
Since this is the thread for discussing interesting bits and pieces about EVs generally and Tesla in particular, it seems good to park this here:
Yes it illustrates how difficult full self driving was then and still a major challenge now. All CEO’s oversell their products. Air crashes are rare % wise against flights but years ago not so its still a major challenge but I hope it succeeds by the time they think about taking my licence off me.
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Went even better down with customers that just ordered but have not been delivered yet. ::
A lifeline from a foriegn investor.
Giles Coren
Friday January 06 2023, 5.00pm GMT, The Times
As I watch my family strike out on foot across the fields into driving rain and gathering darkness, my wife holding each child’s hand, our new year plans in ruins, while I do what I can to make our dead car safe before abandoning it a mile short of home, full of luggage on a country lane, it occurs to me not for the first time that if we are going to save the planet we will have to find another way. Because electric cars are not the answer.
Yes, it’s the Jaguar again. My doomed bloody £65,000 iPace that has done nothing but fail at everything it was supposed to do for more than two years now, completely dead this time, its a lifeless corpse. I can’t even roll it to a safer spot because it can’t be put in neutral. For when an electric car dies, it dies hard. And then lies there, as big and grey and not-going-anywhere, as the ‘poacher-slain bull elephant’ I once saw rotting by a roadside in northern Kenya. Just a bit less smelly.
Two out of three roadside chargers are broken or busy at any one time. Not that this is unusual.
Since I bought my eco dream car in late 2020, in a deluded Thunbergian frenzy, it has spent more time off the road than on it, beached at the dealership for months at a time on account of innumerable electrical calamities, while I galumph around in the big diesel “courtesy cars” they send me under the terms of the warranty.
But this time I don’t want one. And I don’t want my own car back either.
I have asked the guys who sold it to me to sell it again, as soon as it is fixed, to the first mug who walks into the shop. Because I am going back to petrol while there is still time.
And if the government really does ban new wet fuel cars after 2030, then we will eventually have to go back to horses. Because the electric vehicle industry is no readier to get a family home from Cornwall at Christmas time (as I was trying to do) than it is to fly us all to Jupiter. The cars are useless, the infrastructure is not there and you’re honestly better off walking.
Even on the really long journeys. In fact, especially on the long journeys. The short ones they can just about manage. It’s no wonder Tesla shares are down 71 per cent. It’s all a huge fraud. And, for me, it’s over.
Yet the new owner of my “preloved” premium electric vehicle, fired with a messianic desire to make a better world for his children, will not know this. He will be delighted with his purchase and overjoyed to find there are still six months of warranty left, little suspecting that once that has expired — and with it the free repairs and replacement cars for those long spells off road — he will be functionally carless.
He will be over the moon to learn that it has “a range of up to 292 miles”. No need to tell him what that really means is “220 miles”. Why electric carmakers are allowed to tell these lies is a mystery to me. As it soon will be to him.
Although for the first few days he won’t worry especially. He’ll think he can just nip into a fuel station and charge it up again. Ho ho ho. No need to tell him that two out of three roadside chargers in this country are broken or busy at any one time. Or that the built-in “find my nearest charge point” function doesn’t work, has never worked, and isn’t meant to work.
Or that apps like Zap-Map don’t work either because the chargers they send you to are always either busy or broken or require a membership card you don’t have or an app you can’t download because there’s no 5G here, in the middle of nowhere, where you will now probably die.
Or that the Society of Motor Manufacturers said this week that only 23 new chargers are being installed nationwide each day, of the 100 per day that were promised (as a proud early adopter, I told myself that charging would become easier as the network grew, but it hasn’t grown, while the number of e-drivers has tripled, so it’s actually harder now than it was two years ago).
There are, of course, plus sides to electric ownership. Such as the camaraderie when we encounter each other, tired and weeping at yet another service station with only two chargers, one of which still has the “this fault has been reported” sign on it from when you were here last August, and the other is of the measly 3kWh variety, which means you will have to spend the night in a Travelodge while your stupid drum lazily inhales enough juice to get home.
Together, in the benighted charging zone, we leccy drivers laugh about what fools we are and drool over the diesel hatchbacks nonchalantly filling up across the way (“imagine getting to a fuel station and knowing for sure you will be able to refuel!”) and talk in the hour-long queue at Exeter services about the petrol car we will buy as soon as we get home.
We filled up there last week on the way back from Cornwall, adding two hours to our four-hour journey, by which time Esther wasn’t speaking to me. She’s been telling me to get rid of the iPace since it ruined last summer’s holidays in both Wales and Devon (“If you won’t let us fly any more, at least buy a car that can get us to the places we’re still allowed to go!”).
But I kept begging her to give me one last chance, as if I’d refused to give up a mistress, rather than a dull family car. Until this time, a couple of miles from home, when a message flashed up on the dash: “Assisted braking not available — proceed with caution.” Then: “Steering control unavailable.”
And then, as I inched off the dual carriageway at our turnoff, begging it to make the last mile, children weeping at the scary noises coming from both car and father: “Gearbox fault detected.” CLUNK. WHIRRR. CRACK.
And dead. Nothing. Poached elephant. I called Jaguar Assist (there is a button in the roof that does it directly — most useful feature on the car) who told me they could have a mechanic there in four hours (who would laugh and say, “Can’t help you, pal. You’ve got a software issue there. I’m just a car mechanic. And this isn’t a car, it’s a laptop on wheels.”)
So Esther and the kids headed for home across the sleety wastes, a vision of post-apocalyptic misery like something out of Cormac McCarthy, while I saw out 2022 waiting for a tow-truck. Again.
But don’t let that put you off.
I see in the paper that electric car sales are at record levels and production is struggling to keep up with demand. So why not buy mine? It’s clean as a whistle and boasts super-low mileage. After all, it’s hardly been driven . . .
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Not a good experience 
my mate has sold his iPace and Kia and went back to petrol/diesel due to the same reasons as yourself.
I used it last year for a few days around Tours and had similar problems with chargers and had to go back to his house to charge it in the end.
He has been stranded 3 times on journey’s.
Not my experience, a column in the Times on the 6th of January
It seems like the state of the charging network for long distance travellers especially is going to need serious attention in many places. For a majority it won’t be an issue, most car journeys being under 5 miles and that.
Got a friend who’s on his second EV and now his wife has one as well, plus he has a YouTube channel about it. Says he would never go back. They charge the cars off their solar panels so very low running costs. His biggest beef is some persistent software issues. Despite those he continues to say he loves his EV and wouldn’t go back to a fossil car.
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