Random EV thoughts.....

Skyworth / Skywell 1st look around the Q, K, Concept Y and HONGTU van. I'll not start a separate thread on this brand just yet...🤣

I suspect we will all be driving Chinese EVs soon. There is no sense to 80/100k becoming the price for a half decent Audi/vw/bmw/etc. the previous justification of quality or driving dynamics doesn’t even hold water anymore; they are all as anodyne as hell.

I don't see it happening, The EU (Germany) are suffering because of these Chinese cars

80k is still close to top of the range stuff in fairness and vw dont have anything that price as far as i know ….plenty available in the 30s and 40s from vw, Renault, Peugeot, kia, hyundai, cupra, skoda, tesla, ford just recently, all very good cars. A few brands lagging behind however.

The Chinese though are welcome additions to the competitive landscape keeping them all honest. Some of them are really nice too, we've only seen a taster of what they have to offer so far.

The end of cheap energy and cheap money in Germany has definitely exposed the car manufacturing there.

Ignoring the click-baity headline, Sam Evans seems to espouse a serious problem on the numbers he is seeing.

Although I dont necessarily subscribe to the end of the Germany Auto Industry, it might just take a crisis for them to undertake radical structural reform on how they do things.

Sorry I didn't even read

I'm sorry I didn't even read Luna84's comment correctly- re he can't get an EV charger. I was just thinking that having driven a Civic for a good few years I would find it hard to justify the increased spend for it over a good EV like the Born. As I've mentioned before if I was to go back to an equivalent ICE car like a Golf I would have to spend over eur 45k spec to spec.

I'll be honest if there was a decent selection of public chargers nearby I'd still consider and EV without home charging

You're paying an extra €15k effectively to not need to charge but you do need to visit the petrol station

Depending on your driving patterns, you could go 3 days or even longer between charges. If you local supermarket has a DC charger then that fits neatly into a shopping trip

While public charging is expensive, how many kilowatt hours will it take to bridge the thousands extra for a hybrid? By some quick math, the price difference will cover around 200,000km of driving on the 42c subscription rate from Ionity

That's not counting the cost of petrol, which the self charging hybrid requires

To be clear, it isn't for everyone and there's a lot of factors to consider. But I wouldn't immediately count an EV out

Vampire drain is a reality and it varies around with different cars. I've never actually measured the ID.4 but the main consumer is likely pre-heating the car every morning. It's a bit wasteful on days I'm not driving but it stops the cabin getting mouldy so I'm willing to make the sacrifice

I'd recommend using Plugshare to get an idea of the chargers in the area and maybe stalk them online for a bit to see how busy they are

I assume you've onstreet parking so I'd recommend speaking to the management company to see about installing chargers for residents. There's a few folks here who have lived off public charging so might be worth talking to them. I think @liamog was for a while?

Take the 3500 grant off and also the cupra booster grant of 3500

You're still only down to 35k though, maybe some garages are giving a discount because I've seen this 33k figure used a few times here

No it isn't, I've left my Born parked up for 2 weeks while on holiday and the battery percentage never changed. The only car I've ever owned that had mould was a rotted out Cortina so there's certainly no need to waste electricity heating a modern car.

I've never had a car get mould even in lockdown where one car hardly moved for the year. Even old cars that take forever to demist they've never got mouldy.

On the road figure included in the table above. Was quoted for finance on the ROTR figure minus the Cupra 3500 sales incentive - final cost 33,255. The difference that is not obvious is the VRT adjustment.

At 33k the Born e-boost is remarkable value.