Offer a car at three times the price of a normal run-around, with the acceleration of a one-legged squirrel and the range of an inebriated slug, and what do you get?

Well, despite the government offering £5,000 of our money to every idiot who is prepared to buy one (excluding the corporates who are using other people's money), you end up selling just 308 models during the third quarter of the year. Just 465 electric vehicles were registered in the first quarter, and the number more than halved to 215 in the second.

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You see if they'd supplied the electric cars with a little gas burner to keep the driver warm, then they could use all the leccy to go further. Seems obvious really.

My car's engine will run on E85 fuel...all eight cylinders of it.....

God I feel righteous and warm.....

I am penalized for driving it...so I don't want to be criticised as well.......

Carlos Ghosn, who leads Renault and Nissan, has said electric cars could account for 10% of new car sales by 2020.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-15134136

Ghosn must be a double agent for other car manufacturers, tasked with the job of bankrupting Renault.

Maybe it just demonstrates that people are not so stupid that think they can solve a widely perceived problem (heat and air pollution) by exporting it to the hill tops…

Forcing everyone to abandon their coal fires and local power stations in the 1950-60's merely led to acid rain and a massive waste of generated power, by sending it hundreds of miles along inefficient cables. More power has to be generated, more coal, gas, fuel rods, wind (ha ha), to provide less power at the point of use.

In the same way, encouraging people to abandon the local generation of power for their personal transport looks just as inane.

Funny that politicians can't see that?

The moment the govt introduces a subsidy for something that they see as a 'good thing' that 'thing' is f****d. Or maybe it wasn't a good thing in the first place?

Electric vehicles have had their place for years, forklifts, golf buggies, mobility scooters milk floats (are they still around?) and no doubt a few other bits and pieces including an electric vehicle for personal transport see golf buggies and mobility scooters above. But to try and replace the motor car which is designed around, and mainly evolved around the internal combustion engine is daft. I know the govt is daft ( actually 'daft' doesn't quite cover it) but I would have credited car manufactures with more sense, or is that the subsidy monster raising it's head.

need you ask?

http://www.businessgreen.com/bg/news/18 ... ch-funding

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2 ... california

http://www.epsrc.ac.uk/newsevents/news/ ... hicle.aspx

http://www.thegreencarwebsite.co.uk/blo ... -research/

http://www.city.ac.uk/news/2011/sep/cit ... es-forward

Jon Petersen seems a bit undecided - at least the title is ambiguous;-)

http://seekingalpha.com/article/289828- ... the-corpse

For some reason there are lots of Toyota Prius s around here. I frequently get stuck behind one (not the same one). They are invariably driven slowly and erratically. I am not sure if this is due to the hybrid power chain or the driver(s).

I guess Toyota got their market research right?

So possibly two hundred and fifty private individuals bought these cars. I'm actually surprised they could find that many.

Green concerns are a mile wide and an inch deep. People are prepared to vote Green because deep down they think it won't affect them. They claim to care about the polar bears because we've created a social situation where you have to be prepared to be thought of as a bad person to do (or at least profess) otherwise. When it comes to putting up their own money and experiencing the inconvenience of an electric car in their own lives in the cause of saving the planet from plant food, they get a sudden case of common sense and buy something practical.

Are we being sent the message that battery operated vehicles don't require an energy source to keep them on the move?

I was under the impression that to charge – what must be enormous batteries – would require a little help from the National grid. How many additional power stations would be required to satisfy the increased load on the grid to charge these batteries, if all vehicles were exchanged for electric?

They are going to be recharged overnight from solar panels ...

They are going to be recharged overnight from solar panels ...


Of course they are - we are negotiating a deal with our Antipodean Cousins that they will send us leccy from their SPs ('cos their sun shines when it's dark here)

It will only be vastly ineffecient, probably not technically possible, cost a trillion trillion of whatever currency the deal is denominated in and be abandoned after the first trillion is spent anyway.

But what the hell, the gormless in Westminster will love it, it will provide endless hug-a-polar-bear soundbites, it will be an excuse for the Beeb to take on at least another four correspondents/roving reporters and provide hours of airtime. And .... finally, it will be paid for with EU money, which as everybody knows is not the real sort of money that we bust guts to earn but a sort of magic stardust money that the EU gets from the Good Fairy.

Lunacy !

When was Westminster made a gorm-free zone? Was that EU too?