Electric cars at peak dull

When I was a kid and going to Newquay for our hols we would put the car on the train at Newcastle’s Motorail terminal and spend the night in a sleeper cabin, waking in Exeter.

So the point is proven that right now rail or even air travel is not viable. Simply put if you can afford that sort of money or even the aforementioned £600+ for a rail ticket, you're probably the sort of person who can afford a car!

What this also shows is that if the government want to get us out of cars to help them reach their goal of net zero emissions they need to make rail much cheaper. This is also needed so we don't make so many domestic flights. At the moment if I'm going to Glasgow or Edinburgh for work if costs less than £50 each way and even including the time to travel to the airport I can still be in either city for half 9. Rail, or indeed road, cannot match that. If the government does HS2 properly it should solve this but alas they seem to want to stop it at Leeds and Manchester.

The reason rail is so unaffordable is the infrastructure maintenance, the vehicle maintenance and the operating costs. When a road is built it is a few metres wide and a number of kms long. On that space you can fit hundreds of thousands of cars with no need to meet any schedule apart from availability. The vehicles are operator owned and insured and the revenue from them to maintain the road is gathered through nigh on unavoidable taxes on fuel and other purchases.

On a train one company (a TOC) pays another (Network Rail) to access the p-way and also a third company (a RoSCo) for the use of a vehicle (the train). The rules are that the train must be maintained by the TOC and the TOC operates the stations, staffs the trains, collects fares and offers a service. To have a viable business model they set their fares to cover these costs and other overheads. Unlike the roads, which are operated by either Highways England for majors or individual councils for all others, there are tremendously strict rules surrounding working on and around the railway. These rules have led to an escalation of costs over the years and an introduction of legal and safety requirements meaning only a handful of providers can even consider working in the rail environment - and they all price accordingly. So Network Rail pays three or four times more to maintain the p-way than a road provider, pass that cost to a TOC and then the TOC passes it on to customers under controlled pricing regulations. The RoSCos lease the trains with a recovery on capital model about one fifth of the life of service of the vehicles. When BR broke up there was a mass scramble to join a RoSCo - they make millions on a monthly basis.

So with the recent pandemic there have been no customers and the models used (by me amongst others) to develop more efficient systems and fare structures are bollocks because passenger numbers are unlikely to recover to pre-pandemic levels (when they were already in decline due to newer flexible working regulations) in the next decade. Meanwhile road vehicle use has already matched 2019 levels in most areas.

The era of personal mobility is here for the long haul. The era of same-country long-medium mass transit is dying on its arse.

These people always define 'wealthy' as slightly richer than them. And it comes across as envy. 

I'm not exactly rolling in it, the current and future rent increases will probably stuff me royally but I have a tent at least I think I do. I have never been well off but when we (Royal WE) behave like this, what on earth is the point of going into debt in university to learn enough to then learn a trade? Where is the incentive to do anything more than bugger all? We are on a slippery path to irrelevance anyway unless we get a bloody grip and improve the country and it's educational/business acumen. If we really want the PRC to step in and run the country we are on the right path. Extreme? Possibly but either way we need to organise ourselves to build the country up rather than tear it down. Sorry, I'm not exactly a wordsmith today, word finding is bloody annoying but hey it's Hasda Be today and I am really looking forwards to that great experience.

Alas I fear you are probably spot on with that one. We'll end up back in the dark ages in terms of travel with long distance being the preserve of the rich and most of us plebs living a life where we rarely leave our village and visit the world through our virtual reality headsets.

I'm lucky that Bess will after another do over (Yes I know,already) be as much car as I need or can afford. Nothing wrong with that. What is the chances that there will be a growth of trade for exotic car hire? What would exotic car hire involve in a world reliant on electric cars? Golf GTi's?

I cannot, live anywhere else. Like most people my age and the limited means available to me I am here until I go in the ground. WHat are the odds THAT rent goes up too? I know.

Just to get this kind of back on topic rather than start another similar one: I really like the look of the Kia EV6 in the adverts on currently. I know, I need help, but it's a similar sporty looking SUV/estate thing with a long roof line and sleek low windows to the iPace, the only previous EV that I liked the look of at all. I mean I'm not in a hurry to buy one, I'm far too addicted to the sound of carbons flying out of my exhaust in an almost aggressively loud way, but it's a nice piece of design, and I just had a look and the reviews seem decent too...

It was Kia (and Hyundai) I was referring to in my post with the EV6 and Ioniq 5. Both on the same platform with a lot of tech sharing as you’d expect but different enough from each other to provide choice in both styling and, it seems, driving style. By all accounts they have leapfrogged the more ‘established’ manufacturers in the EV space and are leading the way on most fronts. In many videos Ive watched they are being compared favourably against the likes of BMW, Mercedes etc which is a huge change from a few years back.

If I was in the market for an EV right now I’d find it hard to look beyond these options given the price, range, tech etc on offer. Not cheap by any stretch but certainly competitively priced, somewhat future proofed from a tech perspective and interesting, if marmite, styling!

The idea that there’s not enough electricity to power cars is a myth. Every driver in the country could switch to electric tomorrow and there would be more than enough grid capacity to charge them overnight when there’s plenty of surplus electricity.

That rather goes against what we usually hear so what or who is perpetuating this myth and why?