Poor Zoe Has Not Got Much To Offer
By Paul Homewood
Renault Zoe
Following on from today’s news about a likely clampdown on diesel cars, because of EU NOx regulations, let’s take a look at the sort of motor the greenies would like us all to be driving.
The Renault Zoe is one of the latest electric cars to appear on the market.
Te mid-range model is priced at £15043, but you need to hire a battery, which would add £2628 over three years, bringing the total up to £17671. This price is also after the govt subsidy of £5000, so the true price is £22671.
The Ford Fiesta would be equivalent to the Zoe, and starts in £10145, so there is one hell of a difference, much more than any potential savings on fuel.
To make matters worse, Auto Express reckon that depreciation will knock about £10K off the value of the car in only three years. After all, who wants to buy a second hand car with the knowledge that they’ll have to shell out another 3 grand for a replacement battery.
With a range of 60 miles (if you use the heater!), and a recharging time of 15 hours from household mains, poor Zoe does not seem to have much going for her!
There is, of course, the issue of CO2 emissions, for anybody who gives a toss about such things.
Reader Dave Ward spotted the TV advert claiming “zero emissions”, so he complained to the Advertising Standards Agency. They told him that the small print stated “When Driving”, though most people would be unlikely to notice this.
Either way, according to Auto Express again, the true emissions figure is 54g/km, when taking into account producing the electricity in the first place, hardly polar bear saving when compared with the Fiesta’s 99g/km.
It is hard to see any advantage in buying one. I suppose it could have a role as a second car, city runabout, though the idea of owning two cars is hardly environmentally friendly. But based on such low mileage, the savings on running costs would be even smaller.
Still, it’s probably the sort of car that the new women friendly, politically correct Top Gear will be gushing over!
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NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT 
It’s part of the cunning plan – encourage electric vehicles, put higher and higher energy taxes on electricity, and you can subsidise more windfarms, solar panels and, of course, electric vehicles. Which might be fine except it puts the UK’s (and EU’s) costs up compared to the global competition.
I think this kind of spiral effect is, in another context, called pyramid selling and ultimately ends badly, the poor amongst us being worst affected.
The publicity also avoids mention of how environmentally unfriendly the batteries are to make and eventually dispose of.
Don’t try to use these cars for business either – if your biggest client wants to see you urgently he will not take kindly to being told that your battery is charging using that magic electricity that only comes from windmills.
Imagine the entire driving population getting home on a still and frosty winter’s evening and plugging in their cars, while the ovens go on for dinner and the central heating cuts in and the tellies go on.
Nothing will work !
Tesla wants to sell you a battery that can charge during the time you are not home so that when you do get home and start all the things you mention they will all work.
The home-battery will cost as much as the car. It will be the thing to have – get two.
John
The power to charge up is still coming from a grid that will not be able to take it if the wind doesn’t blow. Where’s all the extra magic electricity coming from
when all the coal and gas fired stations close and nuclear isn’t ready ?
$3500 – about 5% of the cost of their current model, with about 1/4 the capacity.
Musk is pushing using arrays to store solar energy for 24/7 use. Could work, esp. in developing countries.
If you need the heater on then it is cold and battery effectiveness downs with temperature so 60 miles might be ambitious.
One of the commenters on Paul’s Auto Express link (TDIPower) notes elsewhere that the Kia Soul EV has a battery heater!!! Am I missing something – you heat the battery to improve its capacity during cold weather, but have to use energy to run the heater in the first place! Lunatics, asylums, running, etc…
Paul, off topic but maybe you would want to highlight this recent study which acknowledges the lack of major hurricane landfall in the US as a 1 in 177 year event!! It’s Hall and Heried:
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/2015GL063652/abstract
The Frequency and Duration of US Hurricane Droughts
As of the end of the 2014 hurricane season, the US has experienced no major hurricane landfall since Hurricane Wilma in 2005, a drought that currently stands at nine years. Here, we use a stochastic tropical-cyclone model to calculate the mean waiting time for multi-year landfall droughts. We estimate that the mean time to wait for a nine-year drought is 177 years. We also find that the average probability of ending the drought with a major landfall in the next year is 0.39, and is independent of the drought duration, as one would expect for a Bernoulli process.
So much for that prediction that we’d get more and stronger hurricanes due to more CO2. I’d love to hear your insights about this.
Renault “Zoe”- pronounced “Crock”.
doesnt the purchase of electricity to fuel it count as tax avoidance? shouldnt we clamping down on it? how come no party mentions it in their manifesto? we should be told
Leaving the CO2 issue aside as pure politics, there is a serious problem of ground-level NO2 and PM2.5 particulates in our cities causing serious public health problems. If engine emissions can’t be reduced significantly no cars should be allowed in towns and cities. This has been the case for years now but is less sexy than saving the planet from “overheating”; it also involves a massive scale of investment which, like wind-power, does not make the UK more competitive, albeit healthier.
Try being ‘healthier’ when your under-employed, undernourished, flat broke, the wind has just blown in more Sahara dust all over Europe, and the electricity is off again because the wind’s too fast(or slow) for the windmills and the dust haze has affected the solar panels.
Oh but at least there will be less CO2 pollution they say. BS! I say. Fire-up the coal generators and start employing people in real jobs manufacturing!
Yep, if the future is green then life will be back to Medieval.
Jack your statement about the 2.5 particulates being a problem is not necessarily so. See article at the link provided. There are others at the junkscience site.
I see the Guardian is deleting a number of posts on their article
‘England faces major rise in record hot years due to climate change – scientists’
Such innocuous posts as this from Maida Comment
“Disagree and be deleted”
Can no longer be found. Apparently it violates “community standards.”
And interestingly the deletions are not noted. It seems the moderators are working over time to get rid of any dissent.
This is also gone.
“ieclark 1m ago
I see some comments by climate change sceptics are being removed.
Which raises the interesting point, now that the Guardian is running a campaign related to fossil fuels and climate change, can it be relied on for objective reporting of the subject?”
Had 3 comments deleted from that article, obviously I was not agreeing with the premise of the article and as such clearly had no idea of what I was talking about.
4 now….
It’s pretty bad when the Guardian is deleting any post that disagrees with their ideas. And it is this lot that decided it had to publish Snowden’s stuff on the excuse we had a right to know, but not it seems the right to disagree with the Guardian
I have had ALL comments, that ‘s every single one, deleted off every climate article published in the Graun. I am, rather oddly, not banned from commenting but my comments starting from today are being pre-moderated (deleted before being published).
@Paul-Apologies for hijacking the comments board here, perhaps you might like to have a look at the lurid claims that Britain is to become 13 times hotter! Than when or what is not quite clear in the article, but it is definitely manmade, ‘cos it says it is.
And Ford of America has put its battery car factory on short time because they cannot sell them. What are being sold? SUV’s and pickup trucks, especially the F-150 the worlds best selling 4×4 truck.
And the news last night was that the new Hinckley C nuclear power station was now looking even less likely to be built !
Add to all the electric cars the push in this country to electric trains (HS2 ?, Bristol – Paddington route ? ) so where’s all this wonderful electricity going to come from when the wind doesn’t blow ? “Ladies and gentlemen, the train now standing at platform 2 will not be moving for a few days because we’ve got a high-pressure system over us so no wind “
Roy Hartwell….. re: ” so where’s all this wonderful electricity going to come from when the wind doesn’t blow ?” …….. Simple dude! We are going to buy it from the Germans and their new batch of cheap coal fired power stations… Talking of HS2…didn’t most of the locomotive power over the past 65 years, across the world, rely on diesel/electric? Where you use an efficient, low revs, high torque diesel engine, to turn a 3-phase generator, which in turn powers multiple motors on multiple bogies? This idea has been well thought through to use in cars, with a small high torque, low revving engine powering a generator which powers a motor on each wheel. It ‘can be done’ for a general performance (commuter?) car saving weight, size and emissions. You could also run it on gas or used take-away oil… Do we still pay new taxes on diesel cars if we run them on gas or are we exempt? Diesel engine = extremely good design. It’s diesel fuel which is bad…
Thanks to Mike Kelly for the link to the US work questioning the PM2.5 issue. My understanding is that sensitisation occurs over a long period rather than an instantaneous effect, but I will now look further into the topic. I am suspicious of a lot of health science as it is hard to do controlled experiments … a bit like global warming in many ways, where a theory can become accepted if it is trumpeted loudly enough.