Volvo Cars to be fully electric by 2030.
 

Volvo Cars is committed to becoming a leader in the fast-growing premium electric car market and plans to become a fully electric car company by 2030.By then, the company intends to only sell fully electric cars and phase out any car in its global portfolio with an internal combustion engine, including hybrids.

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All good & well, but what happens to the second hand market/or cars with petrol/diesel engines already on the road?

Will they be worth nothing, or taxed to the hilt to remain on the road?

I suspect they may well be good value for a while, but certainly expect tax rates to increase.. But then tax free on electric will disappear once they become more common.

The money the government needs has to come from somewhere!

I agree Paul, the lost revenue from VED and fuel duty will need to be recovered from somewhere, road pricing is the most likely I think?

Paul

Why did Volvo buy Polestar? Aren't Polestar all about engine management?

They were but Polestar has been spun off as a separate brand and is all electric. Like the C40 they can only be purchased online though servicing is done through the Volvo network.

I think that cars with petrol/diesel engines will gradually go out of production and people will simply stop using them. In my subjective opinion, by 2040-2050 there will be exclusively electric vehicles. Unless, of course, Putin starts a nuclear war and the world collapse :angry_smile:

One selling point for electric vehicles is that they cost considerably less to 'fuel' than those equipped with an internal combustion engine.

One internet source that I checked this morning yielded the following informaton:

Average domestic electricity rate in the whole of the UK is about 28p per kWh**. Fully charging a 60kWh electric car will cost around £15 (depending on where you live) and give you about 200 miles of range.18 Feb 2022

That is equivalent to 7.5 pence per mile.

If we assume that an equivalent petrol engined car would require 5 gallons of fuel at £7 per gallon to travel the same distance, the cost would be £35, equivalent to 17.5 pence per mile - an attractive saving, yes? :regular_smile:

Given that today sees the largest increase in the cost of electricity in living memory, one which all the pundits say will continue to escalate, that differential can only decrease - making EVs less attractive compared to their IC engined cousins.

That also assumes that we have the necessary infrastructure in place in order to produce the increasing amounts of electricity required to 'fuel' the growing number of EVs projected over the next decade or so, which I doubt.

I, for one, am not convinced that this is the best way forward. It is redolent of the push a few years back to get us all into Diesel cars, which are now seen by many as being the Pariahs of the automotive world.

Seen by others as 'the best thing since sliced bread', will EVs suffer a similar fate in a few years, and we will all go rushing headlong down anther path.

I will not be buying an EV produced by Volvo or any other manufacturer any time soon. Instead, I will continue to run my 22 year old V70 for as long as possible. I've had it for nearly 6 years now, which is one third of the time that I owned my last 745, so it has a ways to go yet! My (rolling average) fuel cost may be approaching 20 pence per mile, but in all other respects it owes me nothing.

Are E.V.s the present day equivalent of the Emperor's new clothes?

Regards, John.

I read that Hertz has commited to buying 000's of Polestar EVs as well as Teslas.

Given that they are broke I think there may be some PR spin going on but EVs are the way to go.

What ****es me off is that the poor sods lower down the food chain who can't afford an EV are being taxed to buggery to subsidise EVs for the people who can well afford them

I recently, and very briefly, owned an BMW i3 REX - 17 reg. (with the 2.4gallon petrol tank to charge the battery too). Currently, it was the only way to survive owning an EV. On half a dozen occasions, I had no means or time to charge the car, so just filled the car with petrol (3 times on one trip).
Superfast chargers (50K) are great, but few and far between. I could only get the local one to work on 50% of my visits. I found that 40 mins would charge to 80% and give me maybe 80-100 miles range, but also cost £7. A gallon and a half of diesel would cost similar with a similar range and takes 3 mins to fill.
At weekends, I have a 130 mile round trip, so most of one day was always taken with the thing connected to the granny plug. I didn't own it long enough to get a 7K home charger.In South Wales, there aren't enough chargers and too many inconsiderate non-EV parkers. Then there is the issue of non-working, non-connecting or other issues. The Motor museum at Yeovil has chargers, but I couldn't use them without my own type 2 cable (£130-£200). Maybe in 3 years, this govt will get their act together and subsidise charging properly to encourage it. For now, I own 2 thirsty petrol cars, which appear to have few other vices.