2024 Irish EV Sales

How much would something like this cost, would there be any change out of 150,000 €, plus charges to park up in a designated area

There is plenty of lithium around. Large deposits in some European countries like Portugal, Germany and Czechia. Portugal is the only country currently producing it. The high cost has nothing to with rarity (it isn't that rare), it's the cost of extracting it.

There are also battery technologies being developed that don't use lithium. Sodium-ion and graphene-aluminium are just two examples currently being developed.

maybe of interest in the 2024 EV sales numbers:

they are down 27% overall, but they are only down 18% in Dublin, where over half the sales happen (EVs are a Dublin thing? 😉), whereas they are down by over 33% across the rest of the country, where you’d assume there’s far fewer home charging issues, but perhaps here’s a public charging network issue.

Or - people outside the commuter counties have seen or heard about EVs and decided it isn’t for them

70k, 5 year finance at 14k a year plus interest, so about 1300/1400 a month to live in a van. Plus associated costs. And being treated like a traveler being told to move on everywhere you go.

I suppose you'll have some residuals and sell it on but it's lose lose every way you look at it.

Buy a clapped out van for 5k would be a better idea of it's to save money. And still nobody does it .

A proper campervan now, that you could actually live in, would cost north of 100k. But they don't give mortgages for campers, so you would need that cash upfront. Who , from the subset of folks that can't afford a house, has 100k+ in the bank?

I like the idea (and I have a 1989 Dodge Dayvan that I'm turning into a day-camper hybrid) but you'd need a lot more space even than that.

I regularly drive all over mainland Europe and I can assure you, there ain’t the volume of EVs that you’re implying.

Using France as an example, April sales were 60%+ petrol or petrol hybrid of some sort. What is noticeable is how low diesel sales are.

Germany is considerably worse, and that's with VW, Mercedes and Tesla all manufacturing domestically.

And unlike here, the MY dominates the market over VW and the others.

The German BEV fleet is considerably larger than France. Must be close to three the times the size by now. Was over twice the size two years ago.

Also cheaper public charging. There was a post here a few days ago about IECharge (French network that tends to install in suburbs but generally accessible from motorways) dropping their price from 30c to 25c/kWh from now until the end of August. And their chargers are generally in the 160kW+ range.

most EU countries have EV market share similar to our 13%, with Italy at just 3%(!).

https://www.electromaps.com/en/blog/sales-of-electric-vehicles-in-europe-in-the-first-quarter-of-2024

Just back from the south of Spain, as I’m sure lots of us do, and its surprising how rare an EV is; esp compared to my Dublin commuter area, where they are literally a few on every street.

i would consider those numbers to be pretty decent, they are certainly in a much better place than we are and going in the right direction…and what i mean by right direction is france's yoy 45.2% increase in ev sales compared our -41.6%.

saying that, randomly picking out one country is hardly the best way to counter what i'm saying. now just look at our contemporaries. the netherlands, BEV's made up 31% of new registrations last year. they alone have 58000+ public or semi public ev charging points in a country the size of munster. ok… the population is triple irelands but do we have 20,000 public or semi public chargers? i think we both know the answer. belgium has seen a similar increase in ev sales as france, in denmark 1 in 3 new cars bought are ev, sweden is smashing it out of the park as is finland and norway even more so. of all of our contemporaries only germany & austria recorded disappointing ev figures.

what all these countries have in common are governments who are backing the transition to ev with free road tax or no sales tax as is the case in the netherlands. we on the other hand withdrew incentives when in fact we should have been expanding them.

car companies are transitioning fast. the issue is in a country like ours with no car industry the international car companies call the shots. ev's are coming, the irish need to get used to the idea and the government needs to make it an urgent priority to ramp up support (more than they already do).

I agree that “EVs are coming and Irish people need to get used to it”, but in reality things are far more nuanced.

the majority of people will never buy a new car in their lifetime. Indeed almost all new cars are bought by the same small fraction of the population - Manufacturers selling to the same individuals every 3-5 years.

Also we’ve a national fleet of 2.5m vehicles. The tipping point is many many years away still, with most transactions in the car market happening in the €5-15k price point.

so yes, EVs are inevitable, however the rollout period is far more protracted than people think - and it has nothing to do with some ‘anti EV agenda’ 😀

Do you think the rollout will take a similar time frame as horse to petrol?

World War II delayed things a bit with the rationing of petrol, but by 1950 cars were more common than horse drawn transport especially in urban areas. (Although up until 1982 I used to go with my grandad when he was drawing timber from the bog with his donkey and cart, so outliers remained, but they were outliers)

The first car imported into Ireland was in 1898. In 1904, 38 motor vehicles were registered. This rose to 5,058 by 1911 and 19,554 in 1914. Not sure if that is total or per year, but either way, BEVs are now in the same place as petrol cars were in pre WWI days. So I'd be confident that within 30 years they will be ubiquitous. And by 2040 I would expect a lot of urban areas to have restrictions on ICEs.

I think in 5 years time there will be plenty of 2nd hand EVs for sale at 15k and under.

In theory, once 100% of new vehicles are EVs, then it should take 20 years to completely replace almost all ICEs with EVs (obviously a small % will remain forever). Also a significant % will be hybrid.

The elephant in the room is self driving cars. Will people bother buying a car if you can just subscribe to a service that's cheaper than running a car.

I think car sales will begin to drop when this happens. It might only be 5 years away.