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There is another short term problem that has to be resolved before we get to EV cars in Europe. The E.U. car market is in a bit of a holding pattern due to Brex

There is another short term problem that has to be resolved before we get to EV cars in Europe. The E.U. car market is in a bit of a holding pattern due to Brexit. This is cramping the style of the European manufacturers even if they have no components coming from little Britain, no manufacturing plant there and no customers there. You would think companies like FCA (Fiat) or Mercedes would be exempt but they are not. I am an evangelist when it comes to EV cars however I don't think that everyone is so keen, particularly in the cynical UK. Relatively speaking Americans are falling over themselves to buy Tesla cars, Tesla being a great American success story, even with Elon Musk upsetting people in his own special way and the prices being so high. With the European brands there are tells, if VW come out with a new car there is nobody asking where the EV version is. Same with other makes, that is just not on most people's radar, exhaust note matters more. I think it is a sad state of affairs. There are promises that they will be fully electric/hybrid by such and such a date and then they launch a 'G-Wagen' type behemoth with a monster ICE engine in it. It is like they are hooked on heroin and promise they will give up next week. China is showing leadership and it is about their domestic market and having cleaner cities. You can't get permits to drive an ICE car into some cities now, unless you live there and already have an ICE car then your only option is EV. That is fantastic. The Chinese know that they really will be conquering the world with their EV cars. We may mock their cars as not being crash worthy and rip-offs of European designs but we said that about the Japanese and their sub-compact cars. And the Koreans. It is not rocket science, just poach the design team from another company and get styling from an Italian specialist - Italdesign, Pininfarina, there are plenty of good ones. The Chinese cars I am looking forward to seeing are the basic electric cars. When you have a quiet car with no gearbox or vibrations there is no need to make up for having an ICE with cupholders galore, speakers galore, carpets galore and other cruft. People in China have cottoned on to this already through buying second cars - EV cars - to enter the city with. They find that they don't really need that 'luxury' car after all. Once these things enter the EU market the European marques will be doomed, maybe with a few exceptions. The Nissan Leaf/Renault Zoe is a product that is going somewhere but consumers are not that interested apart from evangelists. I also doubt that the insistence on 500 km range will be lasting forever - range anxiety. In China you can have 50 mile range and with a supercapacitor that can be achieved with far less batteries. Anything further just hop on a plane. Can't do this in Europe where it takes four hours to get in and out the airport. The European makes and the European customers had their chance and they blew it. Tough. I look forward to the 5 year plan of China and a flood of Chinese EV Volvos coming over to Europe to be totally taken up by millenials with kids, leaving fuddy duddy ICE addicts to grow old and die off.

bradknowles 8y ago
> It is like they are hooked on heroin and promise they will give up next week. This is pretty much the entire auto industry in a nutshell. Do you honestly think they’re ever going to give that up, unless they are forced to?
- Theodores 8y ago
  Yes. It is quite clear that at motor shows the electric cars have the interest of people that attend. Everything else is boring, has-been, seen-before. Motorsport is where it gets really interesting. You may laugh but Formula E is where the action is. Just ask Nico Rosberg, now a shareholder in it. Or last years DTM (German touring cars) winner who has jumped ship. Or any of the big names in motorcar manufacturing that can't be bothered running teams in F1 or DTM but proudly have their names plastered on a Formula E car. Porsche - now part of VW - have also jumped ship. Sure they will be selling 911s with big v10 engines in for a while but they see their future on the race track and on the highway as electric. They are bringing performance to the charging problem, in a matter of minutes you will be able to charge your Porsche to have a full battery. As for the rest of the VW group the 'ID' range of EVs is happening and the Audi E-tron with 4WD is happening too. Nissan/Renault are fully committed, BMW are making the MINI into their EV. Jaguar Land Rover have the i-Pace. Ford, GM and FCA don't get it. GM want more time to get it right and have had a go with those Bolt things. Peugeot/Citroen don't get it either, however they do have a grander vision for selling mobility services rather than actual cars, with a view to re-enter the US market unencumbered with dealerships. It is easy to dismiss noises and efforts made as green-washing but it isn't. Ships don't turn on a dime plus it is quite hard to make money from cars, hence in the US there are trucks, with the financial incentives that go with making trucks (Chicken Tax etc.) The reluctance of 'petrolheads' to show enthusiasm reminds me of the time I excitedly showed my father the internet when the Mosaic browser was what you had. That was circa 1993 and he was underwhelmed. I thought it was 'must see', he only saw the lack of speed and didn't think it would catch on. Oh how I wish I had a video of that now - I could post it to him on WhatsApp, which has replaced the phone for him. He still reads a printed newspaper and still watches the TV when the news comes on, but has accepted the internet for eBay, YouTube instruction manual things, maps, search and everything else. I think 'petrolheads' (not a pejorative term) are attached to car noises, manual gearboxes and the smell of petrol much like how my father clings onto his printed newspaper. The printed newspaper isn't such a bad analogy, there are understandable rituals that go with it - Sunday morning leisurely reading is the 'dream', with coffee in hand. But a new generation has come along that get their news from their hand rectangles. This new generation wonder why you would want to get all this grubby newsprint on your hands, go on a special trip to the shop to pay money for this pile of read-once paper and clutter the house with these fire-hazard dead tree things. Even the broadsheet (or tabloid) format is not convenient. Not to mention how do you search, why is it out of date already and so on. They don't have problems paying hundreds for a hand rectangle though. Electric cars are like that, a new generation will wonder why you want an old fashioned 'grandpa' car with unreliability, fumes, noise, that expensive trip to the petrol station, the lack of cabin space, the complication of changing gears and the lack of torque. I would say that the GM electric car that got killed is like the aforementioned 'Mosaic' browser and EV cars seen on the roads (generation 1 Leaf, compliance cars) are analogous to Internet Explorer 6. The Tesla cars are analogous to the first iPhone. Remember how Microsoft genuinely believed that nobody would buy an iPhone, oh how they laughed... So it is a bit like that. Clearly you can still buy printed newspapers but quite a few have gone online only. I doubt that any newspaper nowadays really cares about the print editions, they know their readers are online. I think that in the head offices of all the car companies in Europe they are there already with EV and it shows at the motor shows and with this Formula E racing that petrolheads find laughable. Petrolheads are vocal, however female buyers who have to do shopping, shuttling kids around and put up with town centre driving may be the ones that take the electric car to their heart. Time will tell, but I think women will increasingly love to have electric cars. Petrolhead husbands will be compelled to get rid of the gas guzzler and move over to the EV world but be very happy with it as per Nico Rosberg (former F1 champ with Mercedes). As for charging infrastructure, that will be like the roll out of broadband, it will just happen. You will just be able to plug in whilst you shop, or, if you insist then you will be able to ask your council to install a charging point on the lamp-post outside your house. The petrol distribution will become as anachronistic as how printed newspapers get distributed.

bradknowles 8y ago

> It is like they are hooked on heroin and promise they will give up next week. This is pretty much the entire auto industry in a nutshell. Do you honestly think they’re ever going to give that up, unless they are forced to?

Theodores 8y ago
Yes. It is quite clear that at motor shows the electric cars have the interest of people that attend. Everything else is boring, has-been, seen-before. Motorsport is where it gets really interesting. You may laugh but Formula E is where the action is. Just ask Nico Rosberg, now a shareholder in it. Or last years DTM (German touring cars) winner who has jumped ship. Or any of the big names in motorcar manufacturing that can't be bothered running teams in F1 or DTM but proudly have their names plastered on a Formula E car. Porsche - now part of VW - have also jumped ship. Sure they will be selling 911s with big v10 engines in for a while but they see their future on the race track and on the highway as electric. They are bringing performance to the charging problem, in a matter of minutes you will be able to charge your Porsche to have a full battery. As for the rest of the VW group the 'ID' range of EVs is happening and the Audi E-tron with 4WD is happening too. Nissan/Renault are fully committed, BMW are making the MINI into their EV. Jaguar Land Rover have the i-Pace. Ford, GM and FCA don't get it. GM want more time to get it right and have had a go with those Bolt things. Peugeot/Citroen don't get it either, however they do have a grander vision for selling mobility services rather than actual cars, with a view to re-enter the US market unencumbered with dealerships. It is easy to dismiss noises and efforts made as green-washing but it isn't. Ships don't turn on a dime plus it is quite hard to make money from cars, hence in the US there are trucks, with the financial incentives that go with making trucks (Chicken Tax etc.) The reluctance of 'petrolheads' to show enthusiasm reminds me of the time I excitedly showed my father the internet when the Mosaic browser was what you had. That was circa 1993 and he was underwhelmed. I thought it was 'must see', he only saw the lack of speed and didn't think it would catch on. Oh how I wish I had a video of that now - I could post it to him on WhatsApp, which has replaced the phone for him. He still reads a printed newspaper and still watches the TV when the news comes on, but has accepted the internet for eBay, YouTube instruction manual things, maps, search and everything else. I think 'petrolheads' (not a pejorative term) are attached to car noises, manual gearboxes and the smell of petrol much like how my father clings onto his printed newspaper. The printed newspaper isn't such a bad analogy, there are understandable rituals that go with it - Sunday morning leisurely reading is the 'dream', with coffee in hand. But a new generation has come along that get their news from their hand rectangles. This new generation wonder why you would want to get all this grubby newsprint on your hands, go on a special trip to the shop to pay money for this pile of read-once paper and clutter the house with these fire-hazard dead tree things. Even the broadsheet (or tabloid) format is not convenient. Not to mention how do you search, why is it out of date already and so on. They don't have problems paying hundreds for a hand rectangle though. Electric cars are like that, a new generation will wonder why you want an old fashioned 'grandpa' car with unreliability, fumes, noise, that expensive trip to the petrol station, the lack of cabin space, the complication of changing gears and the lack of torque. I would say that the GM electric car that got killed is like the aforementioned 'Mosaic' browser and EV cars seen on the roads (generation 1 Leaf, compliance cars) are analogous to Internet Explorer 6. The Tesla cars are analogous to the first iPhone. Remember how Microsoft genuinely believed that nobody would buy an iPhone, oh how they laughed... So it is a bit like that. Clearly you can still buy printed newspapers but quite a few have gone online only. I doubt that any newspaper nowadays really cares about the print editions, they know their readers are online. I think that in the head offices of all the car companies in Europe they are there already with EV and it shows at the motor shows and with this Formula E racing that petrolheads find laughable. Petrolheads are vocal, however female buyers who have to do shopping, shuttling kids around and put up with town centre driving may be the ones that take the electric car to their heart. Time will tell, but I think women will increasingly love to have electric cars. Petrolhead husbands will be compelled to get rid of the gas guzzler and move over to the EV world but be very happy with it as per Nico Rosberg (former F1 champ with Mercedes). As for charging infrastructure, that will be like the roll out of broadband, it will just happen. You will just be able to plug in whilst you shop, or, if you insist then you will be able to ask your council to install a charging point on the lamp-post outside your house. The petrol distribution will become as anachronistic as how printed newspapers get distributed.