Excellent point, and a lot more Western companies would pull out of China if they worked out the total cost. I won’t list all the reasons again… China makes sense only if it is massively cheaper than making stuff back home. By “massively” I mean a factor of several times.
It is also stupid to give business to a country which is 100% no question, not a shred of doubt, your military enemy. They know perfectly well the West will never have any interest in invading them (or Russia for that matter) so why their huge army, navy, air force, and the aggressive posture? You know the answer.
I totally don’t get why a big rich country like the UK has to do joint ventures on nuclear power stations (which are right on this topic of electric cars) with China and France. The former is a military enemy and neither country is even 0.001% interested unless they can make nice money out of it. Maybe I am getting old and been divorced once too often (only once 
) but this is just so dumb. The Bank of England could run their printing press an extra 5 mins each day and pay for all the nuclear power stations the UK needs.
Peter wrote:
China (…) They know perfectly well the West will never have any interest in invading them (or Russia for that matter) so why their huge army, navy, air force, and the aggressive posture? You know the answer.
While I don’t – at all – discount Chinese (or many other countries’, for that matter, even in “the West”) willingness to use force to achieve their territorial claims and serve their interests beyond their currently claimed territory, subject only to judging that the cost/benefit ratio is favourable, and while I don’t doubt that we see ourselves in the way you describe, I’m not sure China sees “the West” as “will never have any interest in invading them”. And they would have quite some reason not to believe that; “the West” has been doing exactly that, to them, merely a century ago. The most powerful state of “the West”, the USA, has been doing that (albeit not to China, but in its self-proclaimed “turf” of the whole of the Americas) half a century ago.
The USA have a stated doctrine of invading the Netherlands (an ally, and a NATO member, whose safety against major invasion, realistically, relies on the protection of the USA) if one of their citizens is tried by the International Court of Justice, haven’t they? Without even going into “Ussama Bin Laden”-level of enemies, I wouldn’t put it beyond them to run a military operation to “bring to their notion justice” the likes of Chelsea Manning, Julian Assange or Edward Snowden, if they were in a neutral country without a military force, like the early, WWII-era drafts, of “United Nations” envisioned nearly every country to be.
France does quite some intervention in “Françafrique”. Not sure you can call that invasions, but it definitely militarily asserts its influence, and its choice of what regimes run some of the independent countries in its “sphere of influence”. Close to China, do you have any serious thinking that France would not have continued into the 21st century a “Françafrique”-like “influence” in (parts of) South-East Asia, e.g. Indochina, if it hadn’t been massively outgunned and been thrown out by might?
Peter wrote:
why their huge army, navy, air force, and the aggressive posture? You know the answer.
Taiwan…
so why their huge army, navy, air force, and the aggressive posture? You know the answer.
Just in case we are not living in another planet but there is already a cold war China vs USA with Japan + Taiwan in middle
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/04/world/asia/china-japan-taiwan-missiles.html
For now it’s about few rocks & Isles,
https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2022-us-china-cold-war-risk-rattles-japan/
PS: this is far more serious than Russia vs Ukrain as the former is dying super power with zero chances vs OTAN…about 1,000,000 more in scale
The EV issue for me isn’t about range, infrastructure, incentives or anything like that. It’s about cost and capability.
My primary vehicle is a tool. It gets me about in the local area, sometimes carrying other people too, and quite often carries large, heavy and sometimes dirty/awkward loads. I have a dog, and it’s very muddy around here for six months of the year. Unpaved surfaces must be dealt with from time to time. A few times a year it does longer trips, often to the coast when we take a week away.
It does all these things very well, at about as low a cost as can be achieved. It’s a 2009 Honda CR-V 2.2 litre diesel which gets about 40mpg and which I bought in 2016 for about £7k. There are presently about 110k miles on the clock, and I do about 7k miles a year. The only repair it’s ever needed was a new aircon compressor, which cost £600. Apart from that it it costs about £30 a year to MoT, £275 in road tax, and about £250 to insure. Tyres and brakes I go through slowly, not doing many miles and driving sympathetically, but they are a cost of some sort no matter what you drive.
The UK has an excellent used car market, probably as a result of half the population’s penchant for buying new cars regularly. If you’re mechanically-minded, can do your research and know what you’re looking for then you can get excellent value on a vehicle for just about any purpose. The key is basically to pick the most capable and reliable model for your particular need and then let someone else take as much of the depreciation as possible, acquiring it at some point between 5 and 10 years old depending on your requirements and how long you think you might keep it. Unless my circumstances change enough to change my mission then I keep them until they become uneconomical to repair, which can be a surprisingly long time. Modern vehicles simply don’t rust, and if you buy reliable models and avoid fancy tech then major components don’t fail either.
I cannot see myself replacing the CR-V for at least five years, in all probability closer to 10. It may even be longer than that.
Given that I have something that works so well for me and costs so little, why would I pay some large five-figure sum for an EV? The used EV market has yet to really define itself, especially in the UK.
Graham wrote:
The key is basically to pick the most capable and reliable model for your particular need and then let someone else take as much of the depreciation as possible, acquiring it at some point between 5 and 10 years old depending on your requirements and how long you think you might keep it.
I have followed this most of my life. It’s definitely the least costly way to own a car. And it’s rare that a new car of any sort will be cheaper than the one you already own.
Maoraigh wrote:
When governments give contracts, should energy cost as well as money cost be considered? And audited.
I suspect we’ll see a version of this in the future. Some countries (particularly so in Europe) are pushing to decarbonise quickly while others are doing it as slowly as possible. Obviously this can create a competitive advantage for those countries who are slow, so long as fossil fuel is cheaper. (Obviously fossil fuels may not always be cheaper).
I suspect we’ll see that once a number of significant countries get closer to zero carbon, that a duty or tariff will be imposed on imports, which relates to the amount of carbon in the product being imported.
For example, if you make widgets in a carbon neutral country, and someone wishes to import them from a country that uses a lot of carbon, you might find a tax on the import based on the amount of carbon in that product. If you can certify your supply chain showing that while your origin country is ‘dirty’, you have in fact done your manufacturing using zero carbon, then you can avoid the import tax.
Doing so will remove any competitive imbalance and encourage companies in ‘dirty countries’ to clean themselves up, despite their own governments lack of action.
Maybe this won’t come to pass, but I’d be really surprised it people high up in the EU and the UK weren’t thinking about this. Otherwise manufacturing & farming (and services) in those countries would be at a big disadvantage as those countries push for ambitious carbon reduction programmes.
Zero carbon = cooking the books
I am always surprised at how cheap you can buy a used car in the UK. Here they hold their prices much more. A lot of Brit residents used to bring cars over and re register them here. It was a bit of a faff but worth it. Nowadays, not so much and of course you still have the steering wheel on the wrong side adding a degree of risk for certain manouvers.
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. A lot of Brit residents used to bring cars over and re register them here. It was a bit of a faff but worth it. Nowadays, not so much and of course you still have the steering wheel on the wrong side adding a degree of risk for certain manouvers.
Yes used ones are dirt cheap !
Likely not much these days as you get +20% VAT (TVA in French) and maybe +3% duty on some makes/models ? although, for UK/EU residency changes there is an exemption from these subject to conditions for bringing private vehicles (aircraft, car, boats), lot of paper hassle tough and takes lot of time (about 11 months for aircraft and 7 months for car which exceed 6 months max for temporary usage but everything was slow with corona crisis)
There is not much of an issue with steering wheel on the wrong side? aside from
- My left hand side passenger gets yelled at when playing with her phone (people think she is driving and texting)
- It’s a nightmare to enter car parks or motorways (credit card attached to selfie-stick avoids having to walk)
