EVs are great if you're wealthy and have the prerequisite 'EV-compatible home' (with garage/driveway for charging)
But a lot of UK housing relies on on-street parking, and there's flats with car parks where charging isn't currently practical. So far there's very little attempt to solve this, leaving green tech mostly as 'expensive toys for the rich'. Roll-out of public chargers is slow, and they're always going to be vastly more expensive to use compared to home charging.
Similarly, many people are locked out of heat pumps and home solar due to 'incompatible homes'. Most problems the UK faces come down to the excessive cost of housing.
(And meanwhile, the government are quite determined to keep the majority of PLEVs - e-scooters and >250W ebikes, entirely illegal, while illegal use grows rapidly and is policed very inconsistently)
For example, terraced housing with on-street parking can support EVs by allowing homeowners to place cable ducts[0] inside the sidewalk. With large apartment buildings you can incentivize (or even mandate) that whoever manages it supports installing shared chargers. With all other kinds of awkward publicly-owned spaces you can have the local government install shared chargers.
The irony with it being an "expensive toy for the rich" is that EVs are significantly cheaper to operate than ICE. Especially with the upcoming new generation of cheap Chinese EVs, it would be quite possible to have the government offer a low-interest loan where the total monthly cost of car ownership stays the same - or is even lower.
This is already happening. Near where I live there is a newly built 7-home terrace. Each one has both a garage and a cable duct sprouting up from the edge of sidewalk in front of them.
> With large apartment buildings you can incentivize (or even mandate) that whoever manages it supports installing shared chargers
And then the the management company that controls the shared chargers can charge rates that are even higher than the vastly inflated costs at public chargers, as they know the users will pay for the convenience of charging at home :(
This isn't the nice future we were promised, with clean electric cars and plentiful renewable energy. This is the future of late-stage capitalism and the enshittification of everything.
I’d like to think governments would serve the interests of the people but in my experience it’s just been they serve the interests of the corporations.
FYI I’ve only lived in the UK and the USA, both of which are living far below their potential
> This isn't the nice future we were promised, with clean electric cars and plentiful renewable energy. This is the future of late-stage capitalism and the enshittification of everything.
/Exactly/ this! The UK is all about maximising rent extraction, enshittification of everything and profiteering.
Bollocks. We live in a flat in London, we have an EV. Charging isn’t cheap like if I was charging on my home tariff, but still cheaper than gas and there’s lots of options around me. I get a discount as a local resident too.
Your points on home solar and heat pumps are accurate, but people are working on splitting solar and battery across flats, e.g. Negativity isn’t the answer; especially not when there are actual solutions available.
So just a ~£400/yr saving at 10,000 miles, excluding capital investment (assuming 40mpg, £1.45/L). Though if you just do stop-start in London 30 mpg would be more accurate, so ~£1,000/yr in savings.
How much was your car (or, more usefully, how much is the depreciation per year)?
Honestly the car is a luxury for us and a minor tax dodge. I was a consultant with some retained profits in a ltd co so we decided to take advantage of the lease deductions. Got a great deal on a top end VW - £206pm ex VAT.
What are you talking about? £206pm is the low range of the car leasing market, and the price per km is under petrol. Millions of people lease cars in the uk and can get favourable tax deals through their employers. So yes, still bollocks.
Can you explain this more? I have an EV scheme through work where you can get EVs for £200/month on lease including insurance, maintenance and tyres.
Outside of these schemes you can buy a Dacia spring brand new for £10k, or a whole host of decent options second hand. £20k will get you a second hand Tesla with decent range and fast charging.
This doesn’t scream “wealthy” when an ICE Ford Focus is £30k new.
Estimations vary but it seems like at least 50% -70% of homes could support at-home charging.
There's different levels of 'wealthy'. £200/month over 10 years is still £24,000
You can buy an old-but-roadworthy Ford Focus for a tenth of that. And a whole lot of people rely on used cars in the sub-£10k range.
If you've got a £20k+ budget, then yes, the EV options are pretty good. Did browse used Teslas myself recently, but as I can't charge at home I'm pretty much stuck with ICE.
TBF these schemes tend to only be available from the better employers. If you're working a minimum wage job for anything but a ftse100 customer facing company you probably don't get the option of a 'cheap' lease.
Truly rich people would never buy EV as pleasure car, maybe city workhorse but then, they don’t need a city workhorse. Lamborghini have just cancelled their electric car because of lack of demand. People love the roar of ICE
EVs are cars for the masses that are priced like goods for higher class with requirements that only well situated can fulfill. Hence they aren’t as popular as they could be.
There might not be much of a market for true EV supercars, but that market is so small as to be inconsequential anyway, with many models selling 10s of units and many of these cars never actually being driven significantly.
In the 'high performance but actually driveable' toy zone, there are plenty of Porsche Taycan 'company cars' around London. But sports cars are niche. Lots of rich people drive SUVs, and there are plenty of Porsche / Audi / BMW, etc, SUV EVs around outer London.
EVs will keep getting cheaper as China puts pressure on the market and as the number of EVs on the roads increases. In the UK, you can already get a second-hand VW ID.3, a great EV, for well under £15. And new cars from BYD and MG are available at ever more reasonable prices.
I don’t get why someone would want to own an electric supercar. A Ferarri engine is beautiful even if it’s impractical. Electric motors aren’t special even if they are tremendously powerful and efficient.
I could see a market for hybrid supercars if cities go further on being clean air zones, enough of a battery to let the owner drive slowly around Knightsbridge.
> But a lot of UK housing relies on on-street parking, and there's flats with car parks where charging isn't currently practical.
You forget the larger problem less wealthy individuals face: They typically already own a ICE-car and can‘t afford to purchase a new car multiple times in their lives.
The used car market should solve that eventually - so long as battery longevity is there. A reasonably maintained ICE car can last 20+ years of low mileage use. We need battery packs that last that long, or that are modular and replaceable for a reasonable price.
Didn't work so well in my experience: it's about as expensive as petrol (on top of the car being more expensive) and it takes longer than a grocery shop for a charge. You really don't get much benefit unless you can charge at home.
Works just fine for me in Prague, Czechia. The running costs of my EV are exactly the same as those of my previous car (a 1-liter econobox). And it’s a 200hp RWD.
Right, the purpose is to actually arrange for legitimate competition. Ideally, we would split by whatever facets actually make sense; consider something like fighting disciplines where the split is by weight, or auto racing where it's by the class of vehicle, power-to-weight ratio, etc.
The problem is that there is only so much attention to go around, so we cannot have too many splits; depending on the sport it might just not be financially doable. We also don't want the split to be effectively "the best" and "the second best", because nobody is going to fund millions in advertising for the second best. So, a split like men/women is not surprising as a historical compromise to ensure there's still some attention on those competing in a lighter weight class.
Generically changing it to lightweights/heavyweights might be a reasonable compromise as well, or an age line, or something like that; it will depend on the sport and the market to draw that out. I wouldn't at all be surprised if the thing that makes sense is to continue with the existing split, though....
> So you're just suggesting making everything mixed-sex, and having very few women at the Olympics?
Yeah. It would work like video game rankings. Top-ranked players are top-ranked because of skill, and if they happen to be mostly men for most games, so be it.
But I get your point. The crux of the problem is most people don't want to see skill-based matchmaking. They want to see the best man, the best woman, or the best disabled person, etc. The categories are already defined in people's minds as cultural constants. The trans people don't like this because they feel excluded by both male and female categories, so they argue in bad faith that there's no physical difference between females and trans-females or males and trans-males. Our long-term options as a society are to either 1) change culture so that people get used to skill-based matchmaking like in video games, or 2) ignore trans people and wait for this issue to disappear when future tech allows a man to transfer his consciousness into a female body and vice versa.
Since 2) is quite far out technologically, I propose 1).
That's a possible compromise, but a high maintenance one. It would set a precedent for other groups, and then we'd have to add a new category every time people complain.
I think we should just make the Olympics universal and let anyone compete for the title of absolute best in the world, no qualifiers. Detach the existing categories too, like men-only or women-only. Make all category-gated games a separate deal, like Paralympics. Each group can organize their own variant if they want.
Only done very small 2-layer boards for hobby projects, but it's crazy that you can get custom PCBs made and shipped from China for <£10
It seemed like it might be coming to an end when PCBWay suddenly had no reasonable payment options, but JLC has been great so far (and I believe PCBWay has credit card payments sorted now?)
(Just wish I had far more free time to spend on hobbies, there's so many possibilities with 3D printing, microcontrollers, and custom PCBs now all so readily available)
Better than those who just want to burn the system down with no real plan for what comes next, and unable to comprehend the inevitable bloodshed of the 'glorious revolution' that they crave.
You think you are describing the Bolsheviks, but your description is equally fitting for those who want to abolish human labor without providing people alternative ways to make a living.
And no, hand waving about "UBI" doesn't count unless they start actually doing the politics required to implement UBI.
There's a lot of bloodshed going on under the status quo. Why do you think people are 'unable to comprehend' it? Maybe they just want to reallocate it and aren't especially sympathetic to those who who have avoided it up to now.
Do you comprehend the scale of the inevitable bloodshed that maintaining the status quo is bound to lead to? You don't do so any better than those you're chastising.
Most of them fried their brains with stimulants long ago. Thankfully for them, they no longer have to think. An LLM does it for them.
But it’s just the same idiots were rabidly cheering the latest JavaScript framework a decade ago, NFT’s and all manors or ridiculous things anyone with 2 working brain cells saw transparently though.
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