All-Electric Diesel Car

Very interesting Ed, keeping my eye on that.

Here’s a thought to help get EV into the mainstream: there are 200,000 Motability vehicles leased by customers every year. Right now in 2019, around 684,000 on the road. If the price of E Vs were to be reduced to the point of the DLA/PIP allowance, how many Motability customers would ask for an EV? My guess is a lot, including myself. Atm, there are just a very few E Vs on Motability. Two examples:

*Hyundai Ioniq 100KW Premium 38KWH auto, £1795 advance payment.

*Renault Zoe  80KW 40 KWH. £2,499 AP.

There are a LOT of Toyota hybrids, a few from others, and all carry an AP. Would it not advance the EV cause, and consequently the environment, to have some repeat volume sales from a ‘captive’ market?

I wouldn’t want to go back to a pure petrol car (I’ve never owned a diesel so can’t comment). My Golf GTE (well, previous firms, but my company car) was fantastic. I loved the pure electric mode (though it was 30 miles of range).

We had to go for a Toyota Hybrid this time when we had to buy the car ourselves as our budget couldn’t stretch to a pure EV (and as we were moving, we couldn’t guarantee that that house we would move to would support charging). It’s not as good as the GTE, but we had to make some compromises!

When I bought the latest car, I looked at a possible EV version. Loads of problems ensued.

1. It was overpriced by comparison, heavily so.
2. They were under-specced, ( petrol versions were similarly so ) compared to the diesel. High specced EV and petrol cars were as rare as rocking horse poo and carried a premium of £2k over comparable diesels.
3. As Tippon alluded to in his post, the most benefit will be had by those with solar panels, and yes, you’ve guessed it, the Government dropped the incentives to get people to have them installed.**

The end result was I now own a highly specced diesel, that suits my needs. Overall mpg for the last 6 months and 3000 miles  of mostly short trips from 2 – 20 miles has been 41.5 and a 200 mile round trip ( 80 mile motorway, 15 m A road and the last 5 around Kingston and Roehampton ) gave me 51.2 mpg.

**Once Brexit is over and done with and the Government can get back to its proper job I look forward to the inducements to go electric, car and solar, in order for them to meet the zero carbon target by whatever date it is that they decide on ( Government flavour dependent!!) – I may then at that stage re-visit my auto choices ( lottery dependent!!)