Vocal Voices

On Friday in the Daily Telegraph David Frost wrote an article about cars.
About how no one had had to mandate the replacement of horses by cars as cars were plainly superior.
If electric cars are superior to ICE cars then people will buy them and the ICE car will just die out. Except it's not happening like that. The manufacture of ICE cars is being banned, end of.

But the main thrust of his article is freedom. The bicycle first allowed people to move from where they lived, then the car greatly expanded that. You can go out whatever the weather, buy food for a week or whatever. The elderly and infirm were similarly enabled by buying a car.
The car will take you where you want to go, when you want to go. Public transport can never match that.

He laments the fact that this freedom is being removed by the likes of Low Traffic Zones in cities. Also by ultra low emission zones, by cycle lanes that narrow roads and by the pedestrianisation of towns.

Essentially what is happening is that the use of the privately owned motor car is deliberately being made as inconvenient and as unpleasant as possible in order to try and force us to give them up.

If you can actually afford an EV you will be tracked wherever you go vie GPS. You will probably have to pay per mile to drive. The time is nearly on us when these cars can be made to automatically slow down to a speed limit.
The old days of freedom are being deliberately removed, and it's a damned shame.

cromwell wrote:On Friday in the Daily Telegraph David Frost wrote an article about cars.
The time is nearly on us when these cars can be made to automatically slow down to a speed limit.

This is nothing to do with EV.

New cars launched in the European Union must now have Intelligent Speed Assistance (ISA) tech fitted by law, and all the signs point to similar rules being applied in the UK.

Many cars in Europe and the UK already have speed limit assistance that relies on info from GPS mapping and road sign recognition, but systems currently have to be switched on by the driver. Under the new EU regulations ISA will be active by default, although drivers will, for now, be able to turn the systems off at the start of each journey.

Emissions have been an issue for a very long time now. Everyone here will, I'm sure, remember the removal of lead from vehicle fuel? The howls of protest. The evidence that inner city kids were being impacted as they grew up.

Then you get into particulate matter and gasses from fossil fuel vehicles.

According to the analysis, in 2019 fine particulate matter (PM2.5) was responsible for more than 33,000 deaths annually in the UK, and nitrogen dioxide (NO2) for 5,750.

Road transport is the largest source of NOX emissions in the UK, contributing 49% of total emissions in 2000. However, emissions from road transport have fallen by 34% between 1990 and 2000. This is due to improvements in engine design and fitting three-way catalysts to petrol cars, to meet increasingly strict European standards.

The importance of road transport is even greater in urban areas, but we expect these emissions to reduce greatly by 2010 (by about 50%, in London, for example, compared with 1999 values). By contrast, we expect domestic and commercial emissions in central London (mainly from heating), which currently contribute 25%, to increase over the next 10 years.

NOX emissions from burning fossil fuels are mainly as NO, but some sources can release a lot of NOX as NO2. These primary NO2 emissions are particularly important from diesel vehicles (especially when moving slowly), and can make up as much as 25% of the total NOX emissions from this source. One reason for this is as a side-effect of measures that have been developed to reduce emissions of particulate matter from diesel vehicles by treating the exhaust using diesel particulate filters.

These primary NO2 emissions can lead to high concentrations of NO2 at the roadside, especially where there are many diesel vehicles

This is why our lives are being restricted, 2,500 people per year, on average, dying because we run ICE vehicles. Why, over and above Global Warming, which will kill billions, the government is finally going to remove ICE vehicles and replace them with EV. Prior to 2010 EV vehicles were simply no available. No point in changing the law and trying to force the change, there would be no vehicles to buy.

There are some dramatic shifts, in the UK specifically, which are going to change the vehicle landscape anyway. Corporate cars are shifting heavily to EV right now. They are buying far more of these than consumers. However the second hand car market is dominated with 3 year old vehicles. As the corporate world shifts wholesale to EV, three years later the vast majority of 3 year old vehicles on sale will be EV. It is as simple as that.

Now if you take a step back and a deep breath, you realise there is no reason for corporates to go EV now because they have more than a decade to start this change. Reality is that once EV's became available in volume corporates shifted because of one simple fact. The three year TCO for EV is lower than for an ICE vehicle. No other incentive required. Companies do not look only at the purchase cost of a vehicle. They look at fuel, maintenance and residual market price of a vehicle. For EV the up front cost is higher, but the residual market price after 3 years is significantly higher. In the middle the fuelling costs are significantly lower. Especially where companies put in charging in their own car parks and change these vehicles on their corporate power plan rather than domestic or fast charging. As for servicing, EV vehicles require less than 10% of the servicing of an ICE vehicle over this period. For some EV vehicles the servicing is as low as tyre change in a 3 year period. One Madrid taxi driver changed 1 wheel bearing in 1m km driven for his Nissan leaf. That was the extent of his servicing.

So whilst it looks like we are being stampeded into something we do not want, the reality is somewhat more complex. As always the press, of course, don't want you to know that. They want you to resist this change just as they told you that resisting controls on smoking was you RIGHT.

cromwell wrote:Except it's not happening like that. The manufacture of ICE cars is being banned, end of.

And that's the key to the rise in EVs. It is not all the other fluff - emissions, servicing etc. it is the ban. EVs are not net-zero, they have emissions, just not down on the road; they are somewhere else - out of sight, out of mind.

Ban anything and something else will take its place, and not always for the better.

It is not only the ban, it is all the other stuff - Low Traffic Zones, ultra low emission zones, cycle lanes that narrow roads and pedestrianisation of towns. These effect not just ICE but also EVs. Personalised transport is gradually being phased out in Western cities unless a) it's roller skates, scooters and bikes, and b) you are rich.

Or people and companies move out of the major cities, leaving it to the Tourists.

I have seen this for decades in Edinburgh. A city which, in the 90's, decided that it wanted to reduce traffic. It succeeded. Jobs, commerce and just about everything but Tourism followed it out the door.

Places such as Leeds, Derby, Leicester, Reading, Slough and most others do not have many tourists, they are work places for locals. Their various Highways Departments are doing their level best to make them car unfriendly, yes, even for the battery toys.

Roads falling apart, pot holes, humps, bumps and chicanes, cycle and bus lanes, they are all part of the plan, along with the ICE / CIE ban.

However, if businesses do move out then they still need somewhere to work from so they build new out-of-town commercial hubs and gobble up more precious land.