Silvaire wrote:
has other people buy the energy for his 60 mile daily round commute. He doesn’t have a charging station at home, and drives the wife’s BMW for long weekend trips. On the other hand, it does motivate him to come to work daily versus ‘working from home’ so I’m all for it
I wouldn’t be willing to waste 90 minutes of my life stuck in a car every day for a few dollars of free electricity! That kind of commute is so destructive to your health, even if you really enjoy driving.
lionel wrote:
Since EVs are heavier than comparable size/class ICE vehicles, they also emit more tyre dust.
Electric cars are also noisier due to tyre roar – at more than about 20 km/h, tyre roar (a particularly unpleasant sound) becomes predominant over propulsion noise. Electric cars also don’t solve the space inefficiency of cars, nor do they remove the danger to vulnerable road users; over use of cars of any type absolutely ruins our cities.
Electric cars are fat because of the batteries. We will never see a nice little practical hatchback which is electric (VW Golf, etc). And because size “scales” usefully in 3D, electric cars tend to be big because everything gets easier. So the countryside here is full of Teslas and other tanks, often not leaving room even for me on a bike to get past.
Electric cars to make sense though for short journeys. You aren’t bothered about heating or aircon on those.
gallois wrote:
I am always surprised at how cheap you can buy a used car in the UK. Here they hold their prices much more.
I believe it’s because of the British fetish for buying new cars, which exists amongst a certain large chunk of the aspirational (but financially illiterate) middle classes. They buy a new car every year or two, mostly on credit, because they are obsessed with appearing to have the latest. The phenomenon is known as ‘keeping up with the Jones’s’, where the Jones family are the ones across the street who have a newer car. The way the credit systems are structured keep the most obvious indicators of how much money they are wasting out of the customers sight. Perhaps French buyers are more savvy and less concerned with appearances – it would not surprise me.
This means that the UK market is flooded with used cars, which trickle down through various undefined ‘tiers’ of used car buying – the 1yr old, 3yr old, 5yr old, 7yr old, 10yr old etc, ending with the fact that for less than £1k you can easily buy something which will last you a couple of years. The effect is now amplified by how long cars last. Build quality improved enormously around the year 2000, and while 10 years was once taken to the be the natural life of a car (and one approaching 10 years old was a ‘wreck’) the natural life of a car produced e.g. 10 years ago is probably more like 25 years. Galvanised bodies, high quality paint, bullet-proof engines and gearboxes, etc.
The lifespan may of course move back the other way now, with more complex systems to go wrong and a move towards planned obsolescence. I feel that in a drive for quality in the last 25 years (no bad thing of course), car manufacturers forgot the importance of planned obsolescence to the consumer goods business model. If lifespans do reduce, the effect on the used car market will be obvious – although it will take quite some time to trickle through. There are a lot of cars on UK roads now that will remain useful for a very long time to come.
Peter wrote:
Electric cars to make sense though for short journeys.
Bicycles make much better sense for short journeys. My quality of life went up, and my energy usage went down since doing nearly every routine journey on a bike. With a trailer you can carry all sorts of stuff too (most recently, a massive lead acid ‘house’ battery for a boat and a companionway door) easily and it makes you stronger.
Helps you keep your flying medical too.
Perhaps French buyers are more savvy and less concerned with appearances
Dead right. “Fancy” cars are pretty rare in France, compared to UK or US. Here in Nice, it would be crazy – the roads are narrow and twisty, parking spaces are narrow, people drive fast. It’s rare to see a car that doesn’t carry some scars from all that. (I’ve scraped the paint on mine more in the last year than in my previous ~45 years of driving and car ownership – and given up worrying about it).
Even well off people drive relatively small cars and keep them for several years (with exceptions naturally). Driving something “fancy” – say a big BMW or Mercedes – attracts all the wrong kinds of attention. If you see a truly expensive car here – say a Bentley – you can be 90% sure it will have Monaco plates. For some reason none of the above applies to Monaco.
Yeh French driving is a law unto itself, especially in the cities where rules of the road are cast to the winds. Even in thr small towns the vast majority of vehicles have dinks and dents, although in this case usually received in supermarket carparks. Any top market vehicles around here tend to be classics or voitures de collection and only go out on a Sunday, in convoy and where possible making sure other vehicles can’t get near them🙂
Bicycles make much better sense for short journeys.
Sure, but it is like the debate about flying with bikes. 1-2km is easy, 5-10 is doable, more than that you need to be quite athletic + not having just eaten something 
That’s where e-bikes come in but still if the distance takes say 1hr, nobody will bother, except for fun or fitness (I mountain bike 1hr most days, so “can” but have better things to do with my time than sit in the kerb on a fast road, with a high % of stupid drivers trying to kill me).
Helps you keep your flying medical too.
For sure but as you can see that debate is largely wasted on pilots One might as well debate religion, or certain aircraft brands with a chute
“Fancy” cars are pretty rare in France
That’s because a) French buy mostly French cars and b) French mfgs don’t make a lot of “BMW/Merc” type of high-end cars. Wealthy French people buy mostly foreign cars. How this translates to electric cars, I don’t know, but Teslas are expensive.
I believe it’s because of the British fetish for buying new cars, which exists amongst a certain large chunk of the aspirational (but financially illiterate) middle classes
Funnily enough I think a lot of people all over the world do that, but maybe the effect is more powerful in the UK. Not sure though… once upon a time (before the EU type approval junk got really tight) there were many Japanese imports. I had a Toyota/Lexus Soarer for 7 years. To get in under the wire all had to be pre-1995 or some such, but back then most were pretty new, reportedly because the Japanese bought a 50k new car every 2 years. Partly because they were not allowed to buy a car unless they could prove they had somewhere to park it, they bought few cars but bought high-end ones.
Again, how this will map onto electric (the topic here) is interesting. It will depend critically on how the battery life situation is covered. This is a big chunk of a car’s value. I don’t think we know how the end-life situation will pan out. It is a lot of batteries to scrap…
That’s because a) French buy mostly French cars and b) French mfgs don’t make a lot of “BMW/Merc” type of high-end cars. Wealthy French people buy mostly foreign cars.
I think even very well off people buy modest and mostly French cars. (Not talking about the seriously wealthy, who don’t need to go to the supermarket themselves anyway). It’s “mal vue” to have something ostentatious, and will probably get your acquaintances wondering about the size of your genitalia.
France does make some high-end “berlines” (saloon cars) but you don’t often see them. I think they’re made so government officials have something French to ride in, and then incidentally sold to the public, a bit like homologation specials in the world of competition.
The “top 20” list of cars sold in France is pretty much exclusively French. The Golf and Polo sometimes creep into the bottom end. There is just one exception: the Toyota Yaris. Which is made in France (Valenciennes).
When we moved back to France last year, I spent ages pondering what car to get, thinking along the lines of Rav4, Disco Sport. Then friends told me to buy a Dacia Duster 4×4, which we did. It is absolutely the perfect car for France – inexpensive, holds it value, you don’t mind if it gets dinged, will go anywhere. And as a bonus, it fits in my garage – whcih the bigger cars wouldn’t, they’re too wide.
Teslas are rare in France, though not unknown – unlike California. Other all-electric cars are pretty rare too. For one thing most people live in apartments where charging is a problem.
I think the above few posts do show the differences across the channel, but I wasn’t really getting at Brits buying particularly high-end of ostentatious cars.
The sub-set of the UK population I was referring to was those who regularly buy new but fairly ordinary cars on credit. E.g. Ford Focus, Vauxhall Vectra, etc. These sell new in enormous volumes, in fact in volumes that I’m willing to wager aren’t seen (per capita) in the rest of Europe. That part of the population mainly plays in that space but does of course push into the less mainstream and more exotic / high-end when they have the money. For instance round here the roads are full of the various Land Rover products, most pretty new, nearly all bought on credit.
It would be interesting to see new car sales per annum per head of population in different European countries, broken down by manufacturer. The UK phenomenon I describe is concentrated in the mainstream, but is probably noticeable in all sectors. My guess is the UK would see the most sales, proportionately. For the kind of second-hand market that we have to exist an over-supply is required, and an over-supply of used cars requires an excessive sale of new cars.
johnh wrote:
Dacia Duster 4×4, which we did. It is absolutely the perfect car for France – inexpensive, holds it value, you don’t mind if it gets dinged, will go anywhere.
Similar criteria for my used CR-V purchase. I really am not into worrying about depreciation, so I need something where I don’t mind it being dinged or the interior becoming tatty. I cannot imagine anything worse than having to worry about the condition of my white leather seats or huge alloy wheels because I need to preserve the resale value.
Until a few years ago I also ran a 2007 BMW Z4 as a summer toy. I probably had it for about 5 years, bought it for maybe £6k and sold it for £3.5k. The lady I sold it to immediately spent some large amount of money having the alloy wheels refurbished to as-new condition. I couldn’t wrap my head around this – on a £3.5k car!
