Huh: Britons Ditching Their EVs For Reliable Fossil Fueled Vehicles

Some things seem great right up till they’re not. If you look at the URL it originally mentioned EVs being unreliable

I sold my electric car and went back to a diesel – I’d had enough

The maiden voyage of Guy Stenhouse’s new Jaguar I-Pace in 2019 did not go well. His 145-mile route from Glasgow to Sedbergh in Cumbria was lined with charging points – but most would not charge his car, meaning a trip that should have taken about 2 hours 45 mins took seven hours.

“I stopped at every charging station I could, hooked the car up to the charger only to find it wouldn’t work,” he says.” It meant I was only able to use slow chargers and I could only get about 13 miles of charge each time. I got home at midnight.”

Many electric vehicle (EV) drivers will have heard versions of this story, or even had a similar misfortune themselves – as I did when charging problems elongated a drive between London and Cornwall in an electric car last year. It seems, five years ago, that perhaps Stenhouse was too far ahead of his time, and suffered at the hands of an under-developed charging network that is still evolving.

Stenhouse has since switched to a diesel car. That might sound surprising given that he was an early adopter of a fully electric car, as well as solar panels and a small wind turbine (he even had a hybrid car back in 2016). But he’s not alone in turning his back on EVs. According to the UK-wide independent car supermarket Motorpoint, 56 per cent of EV drivers part-exchanged for an alternative fuel type in 2023, with petrol dominating the choice at 30 per cent.

There are lots of factors for this, but, it happens. I’ve seen people buy a car and realize this was a bad idea or things changed. One lady was obliterated on negative equity when she bought a sedan then realized her son with MS couldn’t get in and needed an SUV. Someone just got obliterated when they realized a compact SUV wouldn’t work and they needed a minivan (which is what they were told to start with. Not my customer). I seriously considered going with a ridiculous lease on a VW EV, could use just for puttering around town, but, nah, don’t need a 2nd car. Like I’ve said, an EV would work 90% of the time for me. It’s that other 10% that’s the issue.

Harry Metcalfe, a motoring journalist and co-founder of the car magazine Evo, has also made the swap. After two years leasing an EV and two-and-a-half years with a hybrid electric as the main family car, he’s swapped to a diesel Range Rover Sport (though as a car fanatic, he does have an extensive collection of other cars too). On his popular YouTube channel, Harry’s Garage, he gets into the details of why, and explains he’s “not someone who doesn’t like electric cars”, and he’s another early adopter of green energy, using solar panels and heat pumps. He says that at the moment an EV isn’t suitable for their big drives or for towing a trailer.

Inconvenient.

He also cites the rising cost of EV insurance, along with depreciation: the value of second-hand EVs has dropped 23 per cent in the past year, according to research from the online marketplace Auto Trader. One reason for this is the Government’s Zero Emission Vehicles mandate, which requires that 28 per cent of all new vehicle sales must be EVs by 2025, increasing incrementally to 100 per cent by 2035. It means manufacturers are pushing new EVs on to the market faster than demand is rising, and that buyers of those can benefit from tax breaks that don’t apply to used cars.

Nothing I haven’t noted before. Tires are more expensive. Users are seeing battery degradation early, like with smartphones. Yet, Government is expecting people to keep them 10-20 years.

After that seven-hour incident, Stenhouse tried to find out the cause of the charging problem. “The charger manufacturer blamed the car, but the car manufacturer blamed the charger. Jaguar said the current was ‘too dirty’ with ‘too many spikes’”. As well as the car and charger not liking each other, the range was also an issue. The car is billed as having a 240-mile range, though Stenhouse says his car “always showed the range as 221 miles”.

Unreliable.

(Graphic via The First Street Journal)

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