Renault Zoe- Joke Of The Year
By Paul Homewood
I think it’s time we all deserved a good laugh – we need it!
Last Saturday the Daily Express reviewed the Renault Zoe electric car.
Colin Goodwin begins:
After reviewing the car, he relates his charging experience:
So you can leave it in a supermarket carpark overnight, assuming there is a space available, walk half a mile home and hope your car still has four wheels the next morning.
Or, you can sit in the car for four hours at a public charging point, with a queue of angry drivers building up behind you.
Or, you can take it to Jack’s!
What an absolute joke.
And the price? Well, that’s a joke on the buyer.
£29 grand for a Mickey Mouse car, the sort you could buy for half the price with a proper engine in it. And that includes the government discount of £3500, so the real price is £32620.
And this is what the government wants to force on us.
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NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT 
He also mixes up power and energy, as many do.
He spent close on 30 grand for a car he can’t even charge at home at his convenience?
What a numpty! As our American friends tell us – you can’t fix stupid.
He didn’t – he’s a motoring journalist!
He is a car reviewer, he did not buy it.
Worse still, he’s stuck with it till lockdown ends!
When my current deal ends in a coupe of years I will consider an electric car, if the price is right. I’ll be able to charge at home and since it will be my second car range limitations aren’t an issue. Fear not, I do not subscribe to the carbon reduction nonsense. If an electric car makes sense to me I will leave my options open. I fear the window of cheap operating costs of electrics compared to petrol and diesel will close however. The UK’s insane energy policy will drive electricity prices ever higher and the benefits will be short lived.
I could be wrong of course…
At some point there will be “road charges”, that is taxes. Where we live, gasoline (petrol) is taxed to pay for new road construction and maintenance. The department of transportation has a couple of studies going on to see if there is a good way to get EVs to pay a share.
We may get to the age where owning a car is not a good idea. There may be an electric golf cart-like beast in our future. The race is on.
Dc, please check depreciation before you buy. It is astronomical unless you buy a Tesla, which suffer less. On a Zoe you would likely lose 75% in 5 years. Try looking on a car trader site for second-hand small electric cars!
You’ll notice that the battery on the Zoe is fitted with a cooler to stop it overheating and catching fire. This has been a small but significant problem for energy storage allied to wind/solar farms. S. Korea banned them for a while until there were assured that retro fitted coolers would make them safe. I don’t know if they will solve the problem but its another piece of kit that could and, over time, probably will breakdown leaving the battery to it’s own devices. I hope they have built in alarms but my advice to you is don’t charge the car anywhere new where a fire could destroy your house.
Having travelled around Iceland in 2 electric cars …..I have an understanding of the problems….No ,radio,heating or electric mirrors or even acceleating out of dang
Second car is just about its limits until a major brake through happens!
This is surely the point, that they need to make the transition from a second car to your first and only car. That means it needs to be reasonably priced have a good range and not be worried about carrying 4 adults and luggage on holiday, up hills, with headlights, heating or air con operating, windscreen wipers going, radio on and the ability to open windows and a sun roof electronically. Equally to the point no family will want to hang around a charging point for 5 hours midway on their journey
I got a Renault as a second car runaround. A 2002 Clio for £400 from my sister. 32 grand is effing insane.
If the ‘government’ – aka – the St NHS/the St Science – leads us in such a way on Covid19 it speaks volumes about how they have been leading us regarding AGW (will no longer call it ‘climate change’). They are unqualified on both counts. ‘The science’ most of all.
Oh Harry, I really agree with you, every single thing the Government and their useless civil servants tackle turns into a giant cock up!
Via GWPF, this is a must watch film from the Michael Moore stable. Moore can hardly be described as a “right wing AGW denier”, but this film brilliantly exposes the green scam, including the environmental damage from EV’s, (out of sight, out of mind), takes apart Al Gore, Richard Bransen, Bill McKibben, Jeremy Grantham, bio-mass (Drax etc), destroys solar, wind and more.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelshellenberger/2020/04/21/new-michael-moore-backed-documentary-on-youtube-reveals-massive-ecological-impacts-of-renewables/?
Pierre Gosselin has also covered it. https://notrickszone.com/2020/04/22/michael-moore-film-may-splinter-green-movement-calls-green-energies-a-delusion-billionaire-bonanza/
Watch it through, well worth the time, just over 1.5 hours. Every MP should be made to watch it. Still has the theme of over-consumption, too many people etc, but the green expose is the thing. Maybe the penny will drop that these scams are only possible because of the false AGW theory and they could do a follow up!
Yes, thats exactly what people need right now. A superexpensive tiny car that will take forever to charge if you cant do it at home. People are out of money – we are in a real crisis now. They don’t have vanity cash to throw out of the window now. And COVID-19 has shown us what all those models are worth. They are the only justification for all this money destruction.
Hi Rudolph! Not exactly a correct use of this splendid site. You will have noticed a lack of comments from me on Linkedin. About a month ago my account was suspended coincidentally right after I sent a message of support to Gregory Wrightstone to not be too affected by that bully Tingay’s objectionable personal comments. I wrote to Linkedin asking why I had no access and they replied saying I had contravened their very vague terms and conditions for posting which is a list of ill defined possible scenarios. I requested that they show me the post(s) which I had made which allegedly contravened their rules and bizarrely they have never done this instead they have sent a series of strange mails in reply to my repeated request for them to provide evidence of my wrongdoing one of which said they would not divulge the nature of their security systems! I continue to write politely if ironically asking for them to provide evidence of my wrong doing and all they do is to keep asking me to write a statement to confirm that I will follow their rules of posting in the future. I have refused to do this as they have shown no evidence of any crime because what they ask is an implicit admission of guilt Interestingly I was re reading the Gulag Archipelago at the time and regaled them with quotes from that great book to try to point out the dangerous precedent they were following all to no avail so I am in a Mexican Standoff. Regards Jonathan Scott jonascot@online.no
Leave it on a supermarket car park to charge overnight? Where I live supermarket car parks have a maximum stay of 2-3 hours with a hefty fine if you stay longer, Now that doesn’t make economic sense does it?
When they break-down or run out of storage on the UK roads they will not be recoverable as the sponsors have stopped road development so that the recovery vehicles will not be able to reach them.
The only battery powered vehicles that I would buy are the electric-assisted bike and the electric scooter (when they are allowed by the nanny state).
Perhaps you should check out the rise in incidents of head trauma where the nasty electric scooters have been allowed, that’s if you don’t get killed first.
Our local Waitrose carpark (local authority one) has one charging point which has been out of order for a whole year – installation cost was £70,000.
It was a mayor of Brighton who hired one of these golf buggies and went to a meeting 30 miles down the coast in it. He had to come back by taxi!
The astronauts on the Apollo mission seemed to find a leccy car great on the moon and they never seemed to have to get it re-charged!
Wasn’t it fuel cell powered?
The Moon buggy batteries were non rechargeable silver-zinc potassium hydroxide units.
They achieved a top speed of just over 11 mph and range of just over 50 miles. And all of that was under lunar gravity only. They also cost several millions in today’s money!
Thanks. Didn’t know that.
Charging points are being installed – two – in our local townlet Bishops Waltham. Enquired of our councillor who is paying and how much per kWh. No reply. What’s missing from the above report is how much per kWh. If like hi end Euro company system IONITI it’s 0.68 euros. £60 for 170 miles
Electrive claim its 79ct/kWh, est 47€ for 200 to 350km…. compare that to you diesel
https://www.electrive.com/2020/01/16/ionity-launches-new-pricing-structure-based-on-kwh/
For my petrol small petrol car and at current price 350km costs somewhere between 25 and 30 € for fuel.
Charging points are being installed – two – in our local townlet Bishops Waltham. Enquired of our councillor who is paying and how much per kWh. No reply. What’s missing from the above report is how much per kWh. If like hi end Euro company system IONITI it’s 0.68 euros. £60 for 170 miles
There’s a couple at our local mall. I think they’re about 35p/KWh, ie twice the domestic rate
There are a couple at our local Tesco, taking up parking spaces. People are now using them as parking spaces again.
Yes and still not paying any kind of tax compared to Fossil Fuels.
What I find so annoying is that we pay for them with absolutely no say in the matter at all.
Hic conclusion seems somewhat different to what mine would be.
Looking it up, we’ve a 3-door mini car. Looks like a Clio, to me.
They start at £14k.
£14k buys an awful lot of fuel.
Yup – you can get a top-of-the-range 1.2L Hyundai i10 for £16K with a 450 mile range and 3 minute refuelling time. With the spare £16K you save off the Zoe price you can buy enough petrol to cover 174,000 miles in the i10. Based on those figures you’d have to be bonkers to go for a Zoe over an i10, unless it’s to virtue signal.
Buy a Sandero. £24 K for fuel…..
The Hyunsai I20 is the correct comparison size wise.
The Sandero is a Renualt by another name.
A couple of months ago the Mail reported on the scheme to provide kerbside charging points outside every house that only has on-street parking — about 25 million of them. This needs to be done by 2035 when all new cars sold will by law be electric. Let’s hope this pandemic confronts our government with life’s realities and they ditch this ruinous scheme.
And where is the power going to come from? ‘ Electric ‘ cars are coal fired.
Gas, Chas, gas, and some nuclear. Haven’t burnt any coal in the UK for several days now. Oh, and a bit from burning American trees. But fickle wind is AWOL again today, and there isn’t much solar to be had at night when we are supposed to be charging these things up.
Burning the gas at 50% efficiency (being kind), losing another 10% on route and another 10% charging up the battery (again, being kind I think) doesn’t make for a very efficient use of the gas. There were about 1.5 million compressed natural gas vehicles on the roads in Europe last year from memory – I don’t know why we don’t have them here in the UK. I suspect they are better than EVs in terms of CO2 emitted, except in France (nearly all nukes).
Stu. Just put the gas straight in the car. Sandero dual fuel.
Bring back the Renault R8 Gordini. Forget about EVs.
There is too much “Keeping Mum” when people see the absurdity of the supposed solutions to the (non) crisis which are in engineering terms as well thought out as the claims made regarding climate change! People should be screaming out when they see that the Emperor has no clothes or this situation will just get worse and worse with more absurdity and asininity protected by a cloak of silence.
So even if most of lived 15 minutes from a Waitrose, that’s 30 minutes wasted each day – 15 minutes walking to collect the car in the morning, 15 minutes walking home in the evening.
And when we all want to use Waitrise what’s going to happen?
There has been quite successful propaganda around electric cars. I agree that the lack of pollution since ‘lockdown’ is really good. But the lack of activity, personal and commercial is not. The government should be incentivising industry to develop technology to replace the internal combustion engine. But they never have. They have been panicked into pushing technologies that aren’t mature or actually inappropriate, but serve our masters at Climate Change scam HQ.
There is no ‘lack’ of pollution. The lockdown shows vehicles have little effect on pollution.
What lack of pollution do you speak of? https://notrickszone.com/2020/04/19/lock-down-exposes-diesel-ban-folly-as-air-quality-fails-to-improve-other-factors-in-play/
To put some real world numbers into the picture……..Jaguar Land Rover estimate that there are over 8 millions cars on the road in the UK whose owners do NOT have home parking availability, work time parking ability nor dedicated roadside parking. In other words this motoring journalist’s current position is actually quite normal. Think about that number (8,000,000+) then consider the plans for roadside charge points!
We shouldn’t be surprised. This articles comes from the same people who for years were ramming diesel down our throats to the exclusion of everything else, including much inherently cleaner petrol engines.
They will shamelessly promote whatever their paymasters (the car manufacturers) tell them to.
You can’t blame the car makers for following government mandated laws. They were instructed to push diesel and now electric cars while throttling ICE sales or receive punitive fines – so that’s what they’re doing. It’s incumbent on buyers to do their own sums to work out how expensive and useless electric cars are.
I would suggest that the car industry lead government legislation rather than vice-versa. They are huge employers and have a significant role in most countries economies giving them huge influence, they are generally also much smarter and steetwise than any government.
In short, In my opinion the motor industry lead the politicians around by the nose!
Pay a lot of money for a very heavy battery, then use it to haul itself around. Imagine if your tank of fuel was half the weight of the car – ridiculous.
What’s really sickening about this article is how ‘on message’ all journalists are with the narrative nowadays – not a dissenting voice to be heard.
If you want the cars to “Review”, you have to play the game. Remember when Clarkson said that the Toyota Corolla was “dull”, the company banned him from test-driving their cars.
Via the GWPF today:
“Daimler ends hydrogen car development because it’s too costly”