Europe EV sales rose 70.3% in September, 32.6% of market share
reuters.com
reuters.com
Scotland?
For EVs, the e-Golf has been dead for years but they may bring the name back to electric as an id.Golf next time
The way these past few years have shown the absolute precarity of fossil fuel systems just proves that, preserving a comfortably liveable climate aside, renewables just make more sense across pretty much every axis.
You still get people fear mongering about Chinese solar, as if we shouldn't make the most of the oversupply subsidised by a supposed geopolitical foe. Like, no, they're not going to turn it off, once you have the panel, the light hits it and the electrons jump the gap. Oil/gas can be turned off yet the speaker is somehow glossing over that.
Yes, but the circuit is way more complex than that. You're dependant on the OEM for spare parts, support, software and whatever else, not to mention the problems inherent in putting this junk on the internet (which it will be). I am not fond of the idea of giving the CCP access to our infrastructure.
I am pretty sure a solar panel is just a solar panel, a frame and some wires?
The inverters and all that sure whatever just buy local. Those have not been the bottleneck - the panels have been what has been enabling the boom.
It's a failure-mode only those not familiar with the basics of solar can come up with, but are readoning it out from "first principles".
Just last week I started blocking my Deye from accessing internet since I've implemented local logging.
Also, really? You think that Internet-facing software in inverters is a big deal?
China also manufactures and exports ICE vehicle parts and fossil fuel extraction equipment. No one thinks that's a dangerous dependency.
A panel is just a dumb slate of crystals that shoots out electrons, the wires and inverters and rest-of-system are up to us to design if we're indulging our China-panic. But we're basically being paid to take as many dumb panels as we can warehouse. Whether you believe that oversupply is a weapon, a mistake, or just normal industrial strategy is basically irrelevant.
I agree with you but wasn't the primary takeaway of these past years that there is so much corruption anywhere even remotely related to burnable fuel that one needs not one but two actual wars (key to the fossil rich world) to provide a somewhat level playing field?
Can we move on from climate change and focus on the fact that EVs are better in every possible way.
Somehow I feel buying EV for the sake of climate change is cringe (I know, I am not a good person, but also feel most people who say they care about climate change are disingenuous). Maybe it's change of political climate, maybe it's me who changed, maybe it's the odd hate you get for driving EV, IDK.
I'm not going to worry about climate 100years ago because just about everyone I know doesn't either. None of them deny it either.
Got kids? The way things are going, they’ll live in a barely habitable world. If they’re lucky; otherwise they’ll just die in it.
I’m baffled that anyone is _not_ concerned about it. I suppose if you’re pretty confident that you’re going to die in the next decade or so and don’t care about other people at all, sure, whatever, carry on, but everyone else should be concerned.
But with winter right around the corner, owners are worried that the cold weather. The ID.4 Pro S AWD is rated for 263 miles of EPA range in ideal conditions. The 20% hit to the battery likely brings real-world range below 200 miles, and actual winter condition tests show that the ID.4 loses up 37% of its range in the cold—ouch. https://insideevs.com/news/812129/vw-id4-charge-limit-80/
Plus charging points are everywhere, so it's trivial to just top up for 30 mins or so.
I feel like the range question is becoming more FUD than reality.
Our EV is great for normal use, but my wife had to do a 200 mile round trip once a week for a couple months(not anticipated when we bought it). She quickly went from loving her fancy new car to wanting to sell that annoying POS. A faster charger plus extended range battery would have helped some(Chevy Bolt is weak on both) but it is honestly a pain point for the kind of trip many americans do somewhat regularly.
I mean, seriously, it's a small inconvenience once you realize you don't need a huge range in your daily life. I do wish my EV had a longer range, but I get over 300km on a charge and it's more than enough for everyday use.
In Europe EV's have a positive political support, which means lots of sales, which means "all" European manufacturers have solid (and improving) offerings.
By contrast the biggest EV manufacturer is politically toxic to the very people likely to buy it. And oil companies lobby hard to keep anti-EV talking points alive. Which drives sales down, and manufacturers drop EVs from the range. Banning competition doesn't seem to help with making progress.
And yes, I get the "Europe short distances" argument, but how many Americans are really driving 300+ miles every day?
So, 20 years from now, will US manufacturers exist? Or will products from Asia and Europe be too far ahead?
Everyday? probably not many, but 300+ in a single day several times a year, well I bet it is quite a few. Visiting relatives at Thanksgiving and other holidays, summer vacations, sure some people take airplanes, but most aren't that well off. And if you have children visiting aunts/uncles/cousins/grandparents, the only place I'd want to do a 40 minute charge for the next leg is maybe Buc-ees, which is in a pretty small part of the country.
Will this take me and my family where we need to go is a more important consideration than the daily commute for me, but perhaps that is not as common a sentiment.
Towing things long distances is one of the few EV weak points I can think of, but REV trucks should mostly fix that too.
And this hasn't been a problem in an EV for years. That's a single charge for almost all EVs now. And with fast chargers being almost everywhere, especially along highways, I doubt the actual time taken is very different.
If you don't take a single ~20 minute break in a 5 hour drive, you can beat it. I'm not sure that's healthy or safe though. If you have children this isn't even an option IMHO.
> Will this take me and my family where we need to go is a more important consideration than the daily commute
Totally your decision obviously. It's also why you see so many trucks and all terrain vehicles drive around for the 1 time a year that might be useful. The rest of the year you just pay for that in gas/maintenance/parking ease etc. Again, your decision and I'm not saying you should change, just playing Devils advocate
Especially so for semi trucks too.
It's really not much (if any) inconvenience. If in a gas car you assume you are going to stop to take a piss and grab a drink or a snack or something anyway during the course of a long 300+ mile drive (very likely I'd say, unless you and your passengers are urinating into bottles), you'd still need to stop for gas at some point too when with an EV you are actually spending less time since it's "filling up" while you are in the line waiting for your skinny latte. You don't have to do all that then also stop to grab gas too, because your car filled up without you.
Which highlights the other American failure: dismal rail transportation
Note: I'm not saying "don't build trains".
Speaking as a EV driver myself, the charging network in the US is really lacking. Charging times are fine but the ease of finding an unnocupied and working charger that you can drive up to and start charging quickly still too difficult.
[0]https://www.apocalypse-confidential.com/the-autonomous-chemi...
I'm an EV fan but this is apples to oranges comparison. EV vehicles are substantially heavier than their ICE counterparts. Their instant torque also wears tread quicker. That's just facts and there's nothing wrong with that. The world is not black and white.
Tesla model 3 curb weight: "3,552 lbs to 4,072 lbs"
BMW 3 series curb weight: "3,536 lbs to 4,180 lbs"
> Their instant torque also wears tread quicker.
This works the opposite of how you imagine it does. Because electric motors have a flat torque curve, electric cars typically use a single-speed transmission, e.g. Model 3 has a fixed gear ratio of ~9:1.
Modern ICE cars typically have around 6 gears and the lowest one will have a higher total gear ratio than that, more like 15:1, causing wheel torque to be around two thirds higher in that gear proportional to engine torque than it would be at 9:1, and the engine's torque peak is commonly ~2400 RPM, which translates to as little as 10-15 MPH in first gear.
Electric cars like the Model 3 Performance accelerate quickly because they have >500 horsepower. So do ICE cars with equivalent power. Meanwhile something like a Nissan Leaf has similar power and correspondingly a similar 0-60 time to a Honda Civic.
To put it another way, there are very few modern cars where you can't hit the traction limit of the tires by putting your foot down in low gear, so the limit was never the powertrain to begin with.
Electric cars typically have a faster 60-100 time than similar ICE cars, because then the ICE car has to use a higher gear, but now we're back to the thing where this is hardly relevant unless you're accelerating the vehicle flat out to 100 MPH.
Fossil fueled vehicles are still significantly worse for the environment and health (before you even start considering the wars and bloodshed for the fossil fuels that we're currently witnessing in Ukraine and Iran). Don't accept the propaganda.
I'm not even going to address tire dust. That's just people looking for an EV-related pearl to clutch.
Pickup trucks are heavier than EVs so their tires should wear into dust even faster. No one says jack about that.
People that kvetch about how windmills kill birds and whales don't give a shit about birds or whales. It's a bad faith argument. EV tire dust is in the same category.
It's not like driving an EV has any actual downsides Vs a gasoline car any more? Yes yes I am sure people will reply saying how they need to drive 900 miles every day without stopping once while towing a trailer at 100mph etc. Most people don't need to do that, but hey enjoy spending your life doing that if that's your thing.
The real "problem" is that price-conscious buyers will be buying used, and then you need EVs to be a larger percentage of new cars for a few years before they're a larger percentage of used cars.
There are also other electric cars for under $30k.
...what? For most the world by area (so at least 20-30% of the population, even in Europe) arbitrary point to point mechanical transportation is a requirement for work/life at least a significant chunk of the year. Most will also either flat out need, or find quite valuable: 1) Having that capability on demand. 2) Being able to permanently customize it to suit their needs (be it accessibility, having tools and organizational systems onboard, or most basically having what can be transported along with them match their common/rare needs).
The most economical way to manage that in general is owning your own vehicle. But it's a large capital expenditure upfront. Getting a loan to spread that out over time is one of the most basic purposes of debt. The ROI is in the actual utility, not in some sort of asset appreciation. Which is how most economics is right? I didn't replace all my incandescent bulbs with LED bulbs because I expected to be able to resell them later for more money, I bought them because they deliver far more useful visible wavelength photons per watt, and with more precise tuning and far less toxicity and other concerns then fluorescent. If I needed to replace 10k bulbs and wanted to get a loan for it the economics would be pretty straightforward to pencil out even with the expectation the entire value of the bulbs would go to zero wouldn't it? Taking out a loan for an EV car isn't any different.
It might not be the most economical way to manage that. Often owning a car is seen as a status symbol, and economically it would be more rational not owning one. But I doubt many people do a really thorough honest calculation - they don't have to, they can afford a car. In that way, a car loan is helping them to do the, strictly economically speaking, wrong thing.
> But it's a large capital expenditure upfront.
Yes, which is why in many countries the private owners are not the biggets market for new cars; instead, companies are, because they have the incentives to buy new. And private owners mostly buy on the secondary market.
I just came from my short Euro vacation and majority of EVs I saw at the tourist spots had license plates from countries with above average wealthy people: CH, NL, DK, etc. Germans, Italians, eastern Europeans, etc mostly had ICEs.
You can't mandated all switch to EVs unless you can somehow mandate they all have the same wealth too, which isn't the case.
German car manufacturers make up a big part of the German economy, and they decided a long time ago they'd rather lobby to keep ICEs on the market than invest enough to develop good EVs. So for decades, our "news" media (especially Bild and co.) worked to instill a deep-seated fear in the population against EVs, renewables and co. This is changing slowly since solar got ever more profitable, and fossil fuels got so expensive. But still our current government is actively removing lots of incentives for renewables while throwing money towards the O&G industries.
This is simply not as big of a factor in a country like France, which is not as dependent on fossil fuels.
It's the main factor. Without charging at your house, EV ownership is a PITA.
Driving, no. Buying, yes. I bought a used car for €2600 8 years ago and it’s still going strong. That won’t buy me an EV. I drive maybe 1000 kilometers a year, the difference in fuel costs doesn’t make a dent in the difference in the initial purchase.
for now, but maybe in a few years it will
Suire, EVs might get cheaper in the future, but I also might lose my auto sector job (again), so that's hardly a silver lining.
No need to worry about cam belts or oil changes or spark plugs or mice eating your air filter or petrol going stale in the tank or replacing fuel filters or 12v batteries going flat if you don't drive them for at least 20 mins once every 10 days etc.
Most good electric bicycles I saw cost more than 2,8K. You're not getting a suable EV for that where I live.
Same for me. Also, I live in rental apartment, I don't live in a house with residential charging, which would make me dependent on public chagrin spots which suck and have massive energy prices compared to residential ones, so I'm in no way better off/cheaper with an EV than my gasoline car.
EVs where I live massively benefit the wealthy who own their homes and have charging at home, making EV ownership a slam dunk. Even cheaper for them if they have solar panels. But not for the poor, where TC ICE ownership is so much cheaper overall.
The government can fix this by putting cheap subsidized charging spots across all existing street parking to lead the way, but they aren't, so then we're at the mercy of the "free market" who will just gouge us, and so nothing will change.
I agree to everything except waking up every day to a full "tank". That's only if you have your own house. If not, you'll depend on public chargers, so you'll buy "fuel" at premium prices, possibly higher than petrol, and you'll have to move your car at the end of the recharge in the middle of the night to avoid the parking fee.
EVs are a lot cheaper there than in Europe(same modes), plus way more charging infra, plus much cheaper energy than in Europe.
The first was built one hundred years ago with the modern tech of those times.
To quote the philosopher Bob Dylan "those who are first will later be last".
You'll also have the car's movements tracked in detail, etc.
If China's the 21st century, they can keep it.
With today's AI models, it'd be feasible to analyze massive amounts of video/audio data gathered by the microphones and cameras all around us - as long as you have enough GPU data centers.
In fact if you believe democracy is the superior system of government, it's arguably even more embarrassing that an authoritarian single party state run by billionaire communists is somehow doing a better job as a technologically advanced civilization that a lot of democracies.
Ultimately it doesn't really matter though. The future will at least temporarily belong to those who get there first, regardless of their system of government or other issues. If other countries don't want China to own the 21st century, they should act like it.
After the incentives were cancelled, many of the EV manufacturers simply cut the prices of their cars by a large amount, some as high as the incentive, in the following months and model years. EV sales still fell but are recovering now. It's hard to know how many people shifted their purchase early to 2025 instead of waiting for 2026, where they may have gotten the same price.
Why do the sellers need handouts? See sibling comment about manufacturers cutting prices when the handout ended...
Replaced with trams, which i used extensively when visiting amsterdam. It was such a joy to just hop on/off.
currently YEARLY parking fee in Prague is like 50EUR (for one Prague district where you register) while annual public transport pass cost 150EUR, what a joke, that's one way to discourage people from using public transport, at very least parking fee should cost at minimum same as public transport, where you can't buy some shared family pass, but each member of family has to cough up 150EUR, kids over 15 like 75EUR, so if you have two teenagers it will cost your family 450EUR compared to 50EUR for car all of you can share
If I could buy a type of vehicle that was only 10% thermally efficient but the fuel was practically free, that would be pretty cost effective even if not thermally efficient.
Once EV manufacturing is decarbonised (which is I assume ongoing) this will be moot too.
EVs here make the most sense if you have solar panels on the roof, something to store the energy in and obviously a house.
Most of the Poles don't have a house.
Edit: superchargers map https://www.tesla.com/pl_pl/findus?bounds=60.47900349927211%...
I know it's not about Tesla only, but it says something.
If the energy company didn't buy our electricity, we would be forced to use batteries to store the surplus to charge the EV batteries.
The only disadvantage is that during a blackout, we still produce energy but can't use it. Fortunately blackouts are very rare in my region.
Have they tried making decent EV? They had something passable for few years now, but it's far from _good_.
2. I am somewhat suspicious of this statistic. A 70% jump in one month? I doubt it. Perhaps there was some change in regulation? Coordinated removal of models from the market? Or maybe a collapse in availability of some models or of car sales overall?
See the 5y graph here: https://tradingeconomics.com/european-union/car-registration...
There's always a massive drop in August for some reasons.
But also, the market is hitting a tipping point. In some product categories, even ignoring subsidies, electric cars are now barely more expensive than petrol/diesel, and this is against the background of soaring fuel prices with no obvious end in sight. It would be surprising if numbers were _not_ up dramatically.
But motorbikes are always ignored, even though they would be the fastest and cheapest way for Europeans to reduce their gas usage.
What mid-sized motorcycles and EV cars have in common is superior performance.
But you have to learn to ride, and it demands more from the motorist than driving a car. And yes, there are dangers in form of car drivers, which you can do very little about to mitigate. But when motorcycles become more common, car drivers also learn to accommodate better to them. And I suspect a lot of the accident statistics come from young riders who haven't learnt to risk manage. There's a big difference riding at 35 compared to at 19.
In my opinion hygiene takes priority.
There is so much plastic we could eliminate from our lives before we even worry about that.
First of all, ban synthetics in clothes and footwear except for specific uses: windproof, waterproof, athletic gear meant for actual competitions (not athleisure). Or force full disclosure for clothes, not just main fabric, but lining, filling, decoration, trim, sewing threads, pockets, etc. Ban all false advertising (100% cotton needs to be 100% cotton, not just exterior and then 100% polyester filling, lining, trim, sewing threads, pockets...).
Ban all single use plastics such as bags or mineral water and soda plastic bottles. We are perfectly fine with natural textile bags, aluminum cans (yeah, I know), glass bottles, etc.
Ah, ban plastic plush toys and all massive microplastic generators like fleece. Keep only very limited plastic toy categories (Legos, balloons, etc).
Not sure about that one. The major alternative for footwear, leather, is such a dirty industry that starting new production in developed countries is now essentially impossible, and the existing production sites will become expensive chemical hazard cleanup sites in the future.
And for leather, it would probably be worth it investing in clean tanning and leather processing. It will be a long time before everyone gives up beef & co, so we will have raw hides for a long time. We might as well accept this and use a wonderful natural material that could save us a lot of CO2 emissions, micro and nano plastics, VOCs, PFAS and all the myriad other issues with second generation sytntgetics (polyester, acrylic, nylon, etc).
This, I suspect, is a bit like 'clean coal'; I'm not aware that anyone has managed to make this, like, actually clean?
According to some of the most optimistic doomsayers of the Interwebs, the warming levels we are enjoying as of today are due to the CO2 levels of 30 years ago.