Silvaire wrote:
Japanese manufacturers don’t sell a lot of cars in Europe due to EU import taxes that don’t apply to their locally built competition
Korean manufacturers are selling lots of cars in Europe. Do they really have tax benefits over the Japanese?
No, but Korean cars are designed with a particular emphasis on low cost. That works for the European market where average incomes are not high, taxes on all cars regardless of origin are very high, and it also offsets the 10% additional tax burden applied by the EU on imported cars.
Interesting discussion. However, from what I read, the biggest growth in EV adoption is in China. Now, AFAIK, the Chinese are not exactly known to live in single-family homes with a driveway. Does anyone know how the charging dilemma is resolved there? Do these high-rise apartment buildings have vast underground car parks with chargers?
The Japanese sell a lot in India but many of the Indian manufacturers such as TATA are heavily involved in EVs.
I think Graham misses my point about battery leasing. You buy a car for about half the price of an EV now. So not €30,000 but €15000. The lease of the battery contract will cover all maintenance except tyres and other poss
consumables if any. It is possible that they will do what Tesla did in the early days eg recharging was free.
@Silvaire I have been looking at solar panels here. There are some grants which make it even more attractive. There are several ways to go.
1/ Sell all the electricity to the grid,
2/ Use what you need and sell any surplus to the grid.
3/ Smart batteries to store the electricity you produce that you don’t use immediately.
It works for me on an economic basis although it does have an environemental advantage.
What makes it even more cost effective is that electricity prices here are rising at 10% this year and the crystal ball says they are likely to increase over the next 10 years.
Doing the figures the savings on electricity outperform what I can make by investing in treasury bills. More so if electricity prices continue to rise. With petrol price rises in the future an EV also begins to look like a good investment, especially in Europe not including the UK where it seems the uptake will slow as will the installation of chargers.
Good point @172driver. Would be interesting to monitor how the Chinese cope with that. Maybe it’s easier in a dictatorship to make people shut up and suck up the fact that it’s going to be a little less practical 
They’re certainly putting of lot of time, effort and resources into EVs. But they’re not abandoning internal combustion engines – they continue to roll off the production line and I don’t doubt that resources are going into developing the next generation models. Even if they did stop, it isn’t hard to start up again – they have the expertise, the tooling, the IP, etc.
@Graham I think you’re a bit optimistic about the maneuvering room of these large companies. If anything they want to standardize platforms and maintain economies of scale. If the ICE production volume halves, the numbers start to suffer dramatically. Another thing is inertia. It takes smaller, agile companies to adapt to market needs, not behemoths like VW. And don’t forget that these large manufacturers depend to a great extent on their suppliers. I found it quite interesting that a very important one, Bosch, seems to be betting on H2, and may not wish to click their heels to the ever changing whims of their clients, at least not for free.
https://www.theregister.com/2023/07/13/bosch_goes_allin_on_hydrogen/
Graham wrote:
So let me see, I can continue with a vehicle that cost me £7k six years ago and owes me nothing, is bullet-proof and costs peanuts to run
That’s a valid point of view. Some might even say that it’s environmentally friendly in that it avoids the CO2 emissions of producing a new car.
But it does mean that purchasers such as yourself will have little to no influence on whether EV’s are adopted or not. Because that will be set by the buyers of new cars.
Buyers of new cars choose which cars get made, and if they end up buying almost exclusively electric cars, then second hand purchasers will have little choice but buy them. Nothing else will be available.
You might say that second hand buyers will affect the resale value, but I think that will be very limited. Firstly because nobody buys a new car to worry all that much about resale value (otherwise they’d buy a 1 year old car) and secondly because second hand buyers will have little choice but to buy electric if all the new car buyers buy them. They will be the only cars available to second hand purchasers.
Silvaire wrote:
the Japanese manufacturers don’t sell a lot of cars in Europe
Is that really true? Toyota are constantly near the top of the sales list in Ireland. (Usually fighting it out with VW & more recently Hyundai). They are never far from the top.
Perhaps they aren’t as popular elsewhere in Europe?
@dublinpilot I don’t have numbers but FWIW it used to be rare to see any Japanese cars in continental Europe, especially in Germany and France where there is almost a social mandate to buy from local manufacturers, supported by the 10% import duty. This was in stark contrast to the US where people buy based primarily on value, duty is 2.5% and accordingly where the Japanese became dominant for a while until the US manufacturers regained market share and the Koreans took some too.
Over the last 5 years I’ve noticed a few more Japanese cars in those car manufacturing countries of Europe (I spend most of my time there not too far from the Alps) and it’s interesting because the brands and models that sell in Europe are not necessarily the ones that sell in the US, e.g. Mazda is a small player in the US but does better in Germany when compared to say Toyota than it does in the US.
@dublinpilot Believe me, buyers of new cars fret enormously about the resale value. Those who fritter their money away every three years like this (a new one every three years is what a dealership salesperson will tell you is the ‘best’ way to do things) are strongly influenced by whether they’re going to lose half the purchase price in that time or only a third.
I really can’t predict how the used EV market is going to pan out, other than to say it’ll be different somehow. It is likely that battery life will cause more of a cliff-like drop in value around 5 years old or however many miles, as opposed to the traditional model of losing half the value in the first three years and then linear depreciation until end of useful life. You may be right in that used ICE cars become scarce, and for that reason I will at some point latch onto something that is in my judgement the most durable and easiest to maintain for the longest time. My ’72 Spitfire ticks that box, but does not offer sufficient modern-day comfort.
@Silvaire the UK and Ireland is very different to mainland Europe in that respect – the Japanese brands sell very strongly. Like the US people buy on value and have no loyalty to domestic brands (if such a thing remains – stuff is made here, mainly Japanese, but it’s all foreign owned).
@gallois Really? Renault will sell you a new EV for 15k? I call BS. But its still not an EV for 15k, because its missing the bits that make it work, and those bits cost another 15k, paid for slightly differently.
Even if they did, the consumer is walking into a huge trap. They’ll discontinue the leasing and support for that model and make you buy another one as soon as it suits them.
