Random EV thoughts.....

How long until we can see this in our houses.

If you can afford any of the top selling cars Tuscon, Corolla, Chr, Rav4, Sportage you can afford an EV

Fair play but how many such EVs are actually out there? As you've said yourself most used EVs are going silly money now even if you could get your hands on one that meets your needs. And even if they were more plentiful there would be some guys who would jump in to make a killing on them. Its bad when you hear lads talking about hoovering up anything reasonable to garage and make a killing from the gullible down the road.

It's all very well describing people as ignorant if they are not straining on the leash to jump on the handful of good value EVs that pop up around the country. In reality the majority of people are not electronics/electrical anoraks so are simply not comfortable assessing the value of such cars.

People will be comfortable moving to EVs when there is a supply of affordable EVs and the industry is in a position to provide decent customer support. Until then the anoraks can continue to benefit from their expertise

Absolutely. Nailed. It.

This is absolutely 100% part of the issue. Look at the top selling cars and they're all in the luxury segments, regardless of engine type

Car manufacturers figured out years ago the profit on SUVs is way higher than budget hatchbacks, so they focus all the marketing on those cars

Most of the European manufacturers seem about ready to ditch the budget segment entirely and leave it to the Chinese and Indian brands

This of course filters down to the second hand market. If the only cars available are high spec SUVs that all got bought on PCP and have a minimum resale value that needs to be met, then guess what, there's no cheap cars

Add Brexit woes and the downturn in car purchases since 2008 then there's not a huge inventory of second hand cars out there anyway

The fantastic leaf on done deal, ''60km in the summer/spring'',

Hilarious.

Ah I know, most people will only go EV once it has 300km 400km 500km 1000km range, even though almost nobody ever does that sort of driving in Ireland in a day and the average car does about 40km

The Leaf in my example has roughly 100km range. The Ioniq roughly 200km

There's a touch of Comical Ali about you unkel 😁..... nothing to see here, no issues, plenty affordable cars.... what's all the fuss about! 🤣

The reality is that most people wouldn't consider buying an "old" Leaf for the look of it or the range of it. And as others said, the argument doesn't scale up yet.... a few affordable Leaf's doesnt serve the market. Its going to take alot longer to adequately serve the secondhand market

Also, the argument about "average daily mileage" is a strawman argument. By definition you dont drive the average everyday but you do want it to handle your weekend driving, which could be significantly more than your average so that 40km average figure is meaningless (even more so to people in rural Ireland... might be fine around Dublin!)

@KCross - "The reality is that most people wouldn't consider buying an "old" Leaf for the look of it "

Well there is that alright. It's one ugly car. But if you're a beggar, you can't be a chooser. It just riles me that people keep saying EVs are only for rich people and they are poor and anyway it wouldn't suit their lifestyle as they need 1000km range like their diesel gives them. I've given plenty of examples over the years (and bought several myself) of affordable EVs that would save a lot of money. Thousands per year even for a cheap EV doing low miles.

But how many cheap/old EVs can fast charge? That's part of the conundrum putting people off perhaps.

The Leaf 😁

In some ways the original Zoe had the best fast charging for its battery size since it could take 22kW AC

So while for most people the only option for a fast charge was a DC charger, the Zoe could do a fast top up at basically any ESB AC charger, which are probably 10x more abundant

To be fair, the original Leaf and Zoe were pretty expensive from new for what you got

You were basically buying a second car for approx €25k as I recall.

So it's a fairly narrow profile of people who had that much cash to burn and were willing to have a car with short range

They were a great saving in the long run if you held onto one for 7-8 years. And as many people say the majority of them are now perfect second cars for most households

I think there's only 2 places my wife hasn't been able to drive to in her Leaf24, and that's mostly down to her refusal to use a fast charger