Random EV thoughts.....

I think it would be foolish to discount the practice of price walking in the insurance industry, which is as alive and well today as any other time.

My renewals are typically 10-15% higher than going in as a new business quote with the same company. As a result, I go in as a new customer every time

Pricing in insurance is supposedly based on the risk and costs of repair or replacement, but half the time the prices seem to be picked from thin air

Impact 😆😆

Part true. My refurb battery shipped from the Netherlands to Tesla Sandyford via truck and boat because of weight and hazard presumably. That meant I had a Model X loaner - worth the guts of €100k - for almost 3 weeks. With free tolls and fuel too 😁

Brought to you by Shell.

Look over there pls.

I heard there was one over doing promotions, guess that must be the one

Don't show @ELM327 that Rivian. He'll be sick with envy 😁

Saw it on FB this morning. Between that and the lewis motors F150 being a fair bit out of budget (I think it will come down in time as he's building in a wedge of profit according to my maths), this has been a week filled with envy in the ELM327 house. 😁

Sounds like adaptive cruise control was on and he could not turn it off nor brake. It's very unlikely the brakes failed and the cruise control could not be turned off. Also holding the start stop button should turn off the car.

I expect it's driver error, maybe a floor mat stuck under the brake pedal but the article is unclear on what was done to try stop car and how it was eventually turned off. Errors after the fact may be related to the crash.

More EV trucks (the articulated kind)

Towards the end one of the prototypes was setting out on a longer range journey:

-40 tonnes fully loaded

-1,000km roundtrip

-1 charging stop

Electric trucks are here to stay 😁

EDIT: I'm trying to put some cost comparison of an electric truck to a diesel one. Quick look at Google tells me a fully loaded truck consumes 30l/100km on average. At €1.85/l that's €55.50 for a 100km journey

The Mercedes truck seems to consume 120kWh/100km fully loaded. Assuming they're paying Ionity subscription rate of €0.50/kWh that's €60 for the same journey

Cost is comparable, but still not exactly a clear winner for the electric. I assume part of the sales pitch is that companies can charge them at their own depots at night for a cheaper price

I can see an incentive of free tolls for trucks to help adoption. I also suspect there'll be a ULEZ proposed for Dublin at some point which electric trucks will get an exemption from

There's also the V2G argument, but I'm not sure it sells as well for HGVs. A truck that's sitting idle is losing money, I imagine the likes of DHL will swap drivers and try to keep their trucks moving 24 hours if possible

Looks like a much smoother ride when stopping and starting vs an oil burner.

Yeah I wonder if that'll have a knock on for driver health. Driving a truck is well know for being a very bad job for physical and mental health.

Long hours, the need for constant concentration and sometimes living worse than a homeless person all combine to some pretty bad health outcomes

It's part of the reason that not many younger people are taking it up as a profession, the money just isn't worth the hassle

Driving a much quieter and smoother truck might take some of the stress out and improve driver health

Hopefully the EU's new rules around charging networks might also have some guidelines for rest stops added on. They could really do with including proper lounge facilities for truck drivers to relax. Shower and changing rooms and maybe some exercise machines to combat the otherwise sedentary lifestyle would also be good

Back on the insurance situation in the UK, thought this video was an interesting chat on the topic

Seems insurers have lost a lot of money there over the past year and are trying to recoup it

There's a lot of people in the comments talking about how all of there insurance has gone up by 30-40%. Doesn't seem EV related, it's a general increase across the board

Hopefully it doesn't spread here. I did a quick quote there for my ID.4 and it's within €15 of when I renewed in January, so the situation seems stable for now

Slight correction to the article, the weight is 510kg, not grams

If they'd managed to pack all that into half a kilogramme then those lads are wasted on campervans, they should be working for SpaceX 😂

More expensive than pure heroin 😱

At least, I assume it is... 😂

These new casting techniques seem to offer a lot of advantages in reducing complexity and weight, which should in turn benefit the consumer with lower prices (assuming cost savings are passed on). But I do wonder what happens when these elements are damaged in an accident and can they be repaired economically or does the car become a write off?

Reminds me of how over the last couple of decades passenger 4WD design migrated from a ladder chassis to monocoque design to relfect the fact the majority of these cars never (or very rarely) went off the blacktop.

Big improvements in on-road handling and weight and hence fuel economy, but if you actually did use them in the rough stuff off road, they often suffered stress related damage and much more difficult (and costly) to repair.

I love how Sandy, having gone to the trouble of putting on a full face visor, forgets to lower it half the time.

Bjorn versus The Sun (the rag newspaper, not the fiery orb in the sky)

TLDR, the sun spliced footage from two of his videos and misrepresented a load of quotes to make it seem like the car ran out unintentionally

Unsurprisingly, the whole thing is BS

Bjorn pointed out that they didn't link to his channel at all so there's no easy way for any readers to confirm anything, and he also doesn't make any money because they chopped footage from his videos and hosted them on their site instead of linking to the originals

So his strategy now is to make some money by trolling the sun, pretty funny response IMO

I think most sane people realise the sun is an absolute garbage paper which invents 99% of their "articles". Pretty much everything on the site now is just reposting YouTube or Tiktok videos and some idiot contract reporter talking nonsense about it (probably for the equivalent of £1 per article)

Unfortunately there's a strong cohort of people who believe the garbage and regurgitate this BS to others. Bit like how there's often posters drifting in here saying they read some article about how EVs are bad. Or maybe Mike down the pub told them about how he was reading up on this stuff, and since Mike can barely read it must have been serious

Moral of the story, don't believe Mike and the sun is a rag. If you're visiting the sun website, ideally don't, but if you do then use an adblocker so they don't make any money from you 😁