Audi CEO: sale of ICE cars will collapse in 2026

or people want to, on occasion, go further than the 70kms max range a cheap EV would give them in the depths of winter at motorway speeds.
But you know this, yet……..

At the end of the day each individual owner / driver is different.

What suits you or I may not suit others. I have driven diesel & petrol cars throughout my life because that's what was available.

Now there is also electric to choose from so I choose to drive a Phev which gives me the best of both worlds. I can plug in, charge up & use electric for short local trips & use petrol for longer journeys.

Electric is great if you can charge at home & have enough battery to be able to get back home again on a daily basis without having to resort to public chargers. Outside the major cities & urban area the public charging infrastructure isn't there yet. I expect that with the advances in battery technology & big improvement in the charging network especially in rural areas electric will become very commonplace in the next few years.

However diesel & petrol vehicles will be with us for many years to come.

Another thing to consider is ?

If I buy a diesel or petrol car & drive average mileage then I should still be able to drive that vehicle in ten years time & get similar range.

Will i be able to do drive an electric vehicle for the same time & still get similar range ?

Now if you can afford to change your car every three or four years then it won't make much difference but there are a lot of people out there who for economic or personal reasons can't do that.

It often comes down to pure initial cost & has nothing to do with knowledge or ignorance.

'Ignorant people'

You can be ignorant about a topic without being an 'ignorant person'

Literally everyone is ignorant about the vast majority of things that there is to be knowledgeable about

Saying someone is ignorant about the details of EV ownership is not an attack on their character, it just means that they do not know enough about BEVs to be able to have a fully informed opinion, and for most people, it's not because they're too stupid to understand, it's because they've been misinformed, or they have never cared enough about the subject to investigate it properly.

Comical stuff. A bangernomics EV with a 60 km range is about as useful as an ancient vintage car. Less so really. Even if someone never ventures outside of Co. Dublin, the M50 is 45 kms long each way.

Tiny range EVs are not going to be saving anyone significant money as they are only suitable for very limited use. And for such limited use, maintenance and fuelling costs of ICE cars are also very low. So while you'll save on fuel with an EV, you're saving a high percentage of small number.

They're the very opposite of liberating. You won't be turning on the heater on a cold day and they have no headroom whatsoever for anything unexpected or spontaneous. Unexpected travel happens to people all the time.

As usual we have wild exaggerations. Forget about intercity travel, a 60 km EV can't get from Lucan to Bray or Lucan to Balbriggan and back on a single charge. Hundreds more to tax an ICE? My Megane DCi costs 80 euros more per year to tax than a Fluence ZE, for that I have a proper car with a 1000 km range that weighs >350 kg less than a Fluence ZE and I can turn into a small van in seconds - unlike this rubbish.

The severe limitation of cars like these could actually cost someone money as they can't take advantage of opportunities. Spot a great bargain on adverts.ie but seller is located in the barren wasteland that is Co. Kildare? Ah well, maybe the next one will be within the range of the car.

They're not a perfect fit, they're a very poor outdated product and people are not ignorant of that fact. 5k is a lot of money for people it's a relic, a beta testing version of what came after.

Pretty much the worst way to spend money unless you're an energy hobbyist getting kicks from charging and conservation. Range anxiety every single day and plugging in every single day. It will be out of action charging a lot too.

I don't think I could convince a single person I know to bring one of those into their lives.

Why is this cheap to run BS so entrenched in this country?

Lets wind the clock back to 2006 for a minute, before Gormley and the greens used their green logic to distort the market. Back then I was looking at the cost of ownership with a view to purchase, not the cost to run. I ran the numbers on at least 4 different vehicle makes, using acceleration performance as the main comparative criteria. Back then it was comparing diesel vs petrol.

In every instance the petrol was cheaper to own up to 100-120k km, by which time most people would have changed cars. Why would this be when diesels have far better fuel economy? It was because petrol was cheaper than diesel, which is the natural economic reality of refining oil where you get a lot more petrol than diesel per barrel. But the biggest reason was that diesels are significantly heavier, and so were more expensive to manufacture and so had significantly higher purchase prices - not to mention higher maintainance costs.

Initial purchase price matters a great deal in terms of overall ownership cost. It's also a far larger entry barrier for those on low incomes than running costs.

EV's are todays diesels. They are very heavy and consequentially require a lot of expensive and exotic materials to manufacure and are therefore very expensive to make compared to a petrol ICE. They are a terrible purchase option for those on low incomes who will all have to borrow likely the full amount to purchase. They are cheap to run only if you have a driveway, which in itself might be an uncommon prerequisite for those on low incomes.

There is nothing 'liberating' about an EV being cheap to run when they are so expensive to buy and finance.

Look at this nonsense:

But on a home charger at €0.43, a complete battery top-up would mean
just €0.05/km, slightly more than half the cost of the Astra petrol. If
you could run it like this permanently, you would soon recoup the
additional €3,848 purchase price of the electric model in saved energy
costs alone.

Soon? WTF! That's a difference of €0.04c per km, so 96,200 km to break even. The Irish average annual kilometerage is a bit over 14K, so soon is around 6.8 years.

Call me abnormal, but my definition of soon is a lot shorter than the time for a child to complete their primary education.

As for your ICE costing five times more per km to run claim, a link would be nice.

Any car which isn't maintained to the highest standards will invariably degrade in performance & range.

Some years ago I ran a 15 year old Seat Inca diesel van in my business. It was regularly serviced including clutch, glo plugs, battery etc & it ran like a swiss watch. It never failed to pass its DOE test every year. I used to think the thing ran on vapours it was so economical😏 I was stopped on a back road one night by customs doing a diesel check. There was so little diesel in the tank that he couldn't get a sample so had to go rooting under the bonnet.

I wonder how far a 10 year old Bev will get you on a full charge ?

As i've said previously it's a matter of economics for a lot of people.

Here's an interesting video on an old Leaf.

Some information about batteries etc.

Might be of interest to some.

You only get a cheaper night time rate by paying higher standing charges and higher daytime rates, so you should shift these increased costs over to your EV charging costs.

The reason you’ll need to shift at least 27% is that although NightSaver meters are “free” to install, there is an additional fee added to your standing charge (around €45-€50). As such, you won’t see any benefit from cheaper night rate electricity unless you push for more than 27% of electricity consumption at night.

A NightSaver tariff is a cheaper price of electricity for the nighttime usage. While the daytime unit rate on this tariff is slightly more expensive than a regular daytime rate.