Be Excellent To Each Other

If we were ever to swap the RAV4 it would be for the bigger Toyota Land Cruiser.

1,800km to France and back with all the kit in it, the van did a bit over 35mpg which isn't too bad at motorway cruising speed of 65mph. It was very easy to cover the distances though.

We have a snazzy beeper to automatically open the toll gates and bill us. Which makes for horrendous reading.

Ouch. The toll prices.

We travelled across France and back last summer in the campervan. Amazing roads but easily did about eur200 in fees.

£467 to tax the Lexus this year. Bastards.

I'm all for THE GREEN REVOLUTION and saving the planet, think of the squirrels and so on, but my car was built over 18 years ago and a lot of its 'debt to the earth' was paid at that point. I see BMW EV tanks driving around here that must have a bill of a materials to make a rogue Russian billionaire yacht owner blush, paying £65 per year tax. (And that's before we get onto the child cobalt slave miners under the bonnet.)

I clocked the reg of one the other week, checked it out on the IOMG website and then looked it up online to get the model, its STARTING PRICE (i.e. without options), was £120K.

High end electric cars the size of a small planet - tax dodge for rich people, subsidised by us badly behaved normal working people keeping old ICE cars on the road.

Still better overall than the high end ICE tank they'd have bought instead. Definitely need low mpg ICE cars mostly binned off.

I agree, but let's make the road tax on these things realistic, a Nissan Leaf they are not.

I saw a meme a couple of days back that said "Wahh I can't afford petrol.... So I will buy a £60k EV instead".

Hear, hear!

I saw the Cadbury Crème Egg car yesterday. It’s absolutely *massive*. I thought it was a wee little thing.

Here it is! Caged for safety.

I feel like they could definitely have swapped that plate out for "EGG 1" while it's on display or something like that.

DavPaz’s crash helmet.

Is there a preferred "come and.change your tyres on the drive" service as, rather underwhelmingly, one went pop as I was driving along.(it was a knackered one anyway).

Blackcircles or tyresonthedrive

Ta

In the urban past I used both - I had several quid of bonus spends in my blackcircles amount before Halfords bought them out actually - but more recently Etyres (Asda) worked for us once, then the only local independent mobile fitter... stopped.

Countryside life yo.

If they cover your area, I'd always recommend Hometyre.co.uk (and not just because they're good mates of mine, lol)

Lucky me needs to get a wheel welded and two extra tyres fitted.

Get them banded if they need a weld anyway

Just about to start my Driver Speed Awareness course! Exciting stuff

Good luck! Hope you beat your personal best.

Missed this. How's the 6 wheeled car?

Much better to drive, thank you.

Turns out driving too fast is bad. I am now aware of this.

I did a lol

Only if you get caught!

And therein lies the problem

After over three and a half years of trusty service, the old Lexus GS300 (which had its 19th birthday last month) has been replaced with a not quite so old Lexus RX 450h. (This is 2011 vintage.) The 'h' means hybrid so I am now officially an eco-warrior. We'll ignore the 3.5 litre petrol-powered V6 the car also has.

The old Lexus was not deemed to be worth much. At all. The dealer gave me £350 for it and even then said he had no idea what he'd actually do with it.

I'm an old man now, my sporty car days are behind me, from here on forward it's all about the comfort and waftiness.

Also, the hybrid element appears not to be a total con. If you're not going very far, or very fast, it will do the whole lot on battery power (sometimes), the rest of the time it tries to assist the engine with the electric motors where it can. It's self-charging so there's no faffing about plugging it in, but maximum range on battery power alone is 2 miles tops (and that was when it was brand new), so it's very much an electric assist sort of deal, rather than you can drive around on battery power at will.

Still, it is quite nifty to be able to do short distances with no engine running at all, or in stop start traffic it'll just turn the engine off and do it on the battery, that sort of thing.

I was very impressed with the old GS300, but it was getting a bit tired, hence the change, but also sticking to Lexus - as I think they are very good cars.

Annoyingly, this is slightly too big to fit in the back of the van

How about one of these?

Wow that's a grumpy face.

And I do not appreciate the dirty tire marks on the ground in front of the vehicle, poor product photography

Went to drive a Kia ev6 and a Skoda Enyaq coupe. I have to say, I was really really impressed with the EV6.

It is the top of my list for a new car in Jan.

The market moves so quickly for EVs that ones even a couple if years old are lagging behind on range or performance.

Yes. It is why I will lease for a max 3 years.

I’d still look at your typical usage very hard. The infrastructure isn’t there

In the UK if you have electricity at home the infrastructure is there.

If 8-12 hours charging off a 13A plug overnight somehow isn't enough, people who somehow do 300+ miles a day usually need to stop for a piss or a cup of tea along the way or are going somewhere there are chargers.

Anyone else is an extreme outlier and really needs to start questioning their sustainability inputs and outputs. Almost literally now it's a supply chain and investment question not just legislation, even with the level of head-in-sanding going on from government.

You need to have electricity at home AND a driveway. Despite having had one for five years now and being a keen advocate I'd struggle to recommend it to anyone who lives in a flat or a terraced house. Public EV charging prices are an absolute fucking joke, people getting gouged to where it would just be cheaper to run a petrol car.

If you've got off-street parking and can get a charge box and stuff fitted, and your driving pattern fits in with an EV then I can imagine they'd work OK, but I'm still not convinced about the tech. It still feels like first draft territory to me, and I have reservations about battery degradation, residuals, insurance, damage repair and so on. My feeling is that EV Tech Mark 2 will be along before too long, and make the current crop of vehicles effectively obsolete.

This video summed it up very well for me, and this is from a guy who's really into sustainability on a wider note, and EVs.

For now I think PHEV is arguably the sweet spot, or a self-charging hybrid. I've gone down the self-charging hybrid route for now.

Why are they going to be "obsolete"? Our nine year old Nissan Leaf is still by most objective measures the best car I've ever owned. Pence to run and the only thing we've had to spend on it except electricity is four tyres, some brakes and wiper blades (and some paint where it got dinged). All this FUD about EVs. If EVs even with all their current limitations were the existing thing and someone came along suggesting petrol cars as the solution you would think they were absolutely fucking mental.

Yeah, so driving round with a tank full of flammable liquid might sound a bit sketchy and it's true, they will catch fire more than EVs but still mostly they won't catch fire, but yeah they create more pollution, cost more to run and are insanely complicated requiring hundreds of separate mechanical and electrical components.

On the plus side though over a few years of car ownership you're going to get to learn about fuel pumps, catalytic converters, starter motors, alternators, spark plugs, head gaskets, timing belts, oil filters, exhaust pipes and so, so much more, too much to name in fact! It's all such fun! But the big benefit obviously aside from your car now having a soul (more on this later!), the really truly massive payoff here is that filling them up with the flammable liquid will be quicker than charging your EV was, unless you were charging your EV at home in which case it'll take you a bit longer because you've got to drive to a special fuel station and stand there while it does it.

And also yes, they're also noisy and smelly and that might seem a bit shit, but just trust us this is actually a good thing. Over time you will come to love that noise and smell, because it means that your car has a soul. This might not make any sense whatsoever but there there will be an endless supply of middle aged men who identify as "petrolheads" and will always be on hand to explain it to you in angry detail.

Woah chill out there Greta!

Anyway EVs are too expensive, nice ones at least.

I have two hulking great V8 cars, two baby-engined cars and a tractor.

An EV is arriving this month, because I drove one and they're obviously the only sensible choice for a new car - if (and it's a big if) you can charge it at home. If not, they're almost twice as expensive to run as a petrol car (at least in my area), which is insane.

No, they really aren't. Have a look at what you'll get an 18 month to 3 year old EV for. There are some great bargains out there, and we're long past the first generation of mainstream EVs - that was stuff like the 1st Leaf or Zoe.

Which EV are you going for?

I have a 7KW charger at home, had it fitted when I got my PHEV. I would have got another Octavia PHEV, but Skoda have dropped them. The only PHEV will be the Superb and Kodiaq, which are huge. I don;t need a car that big.

I'm confused. Are you for or against something/either/both?

An Enyaq 85x, the SUV-shaped one (the dog won't fit in the boot otherwise).

Everybody needs a car that big! Preferably one of each! Running on filthy petrol!

Fair point on the parking.

In reality almost nobody actually needs a DC charger, just a regular extension cable to juice up overnight. Same as in reality almost nobody actually needs 300 mile range.

Oh no, it might not be at 100% in the morning, how will I commute 30 miles with only 200 of range?!

(The last two places I had to use street parking a 50m extension would've been long enough pretty much any day of the week, though people might not have been impressed, and the car would likely end up flat while someone's electric fire ran for free)

Yeah, people obsess way to much over the range thing without stopping to consider how they actually drive a lot of the the time. Discounting EVs altogether or buying one and spending an extra five grand on battery capacity to save what may amount to a few hours of time spent doing something else while their car charges up and then lugging all that unnecessary weight around all the rest of the time.

I drove one on Saturday. I like the coupe version, but I don't have a huge dog.