Yeah, if you're buying a new car, electric makes sense if at all possible. But a lot of people are not buying new cars, because new cars are not cheap. There's a saying that a new car loses half of its value the moment it's driven away from the dealership.
But I agree, operational costs of an EV can be much lower, if you can charge at home rates.
We're looking for a new car. I'd love to go electrical, but there are a few problems:
1) I have no garage and no parking space next to my home. I can't charge it.
2) We have no trustworthy garage for repairs. It turns out the garage regulations require a separate space for electrical forcsafety, and nobody has room to expand.
Apart from that, electricity in Belgium is expensive. I did the math on swapping our gas heater for a heat pump, but I'd pay more for energy even of the amount of watts is so much lower.
Define affordable. A €40k Seal is anything but affordable. Eastern Europe (and I don't put Slovenia in this case here, they are much closer to Western Europe in every sense) will not mass change to EVs suddenly when everyone is shopping for 10 years old diesels from Western Europe for maximum €10k
New cars have questionable affordability for most people. Particularly when you factor in dubious design choices and expensive marketing. Cars and driving are expensive. If that was a barrier there wouldn't be many people on the road.
Also, the Electric polo is supposed to be released at around 25k Euros. Given the lower running costs that seems like a good deal relative to legacy designs. For all those people will to spend 40k on a car you could put the money into solar panels instead.
Thanks for the nerd snipe! I just found the Citroen e-C3, for a couple thousand more than the Spring. Both look fine. They should just be station wagons, but this is our timeline.
Yeah a lot of noise in there. Zooming in on the COVID price spike and then recovery trying to suggest it was renewables - nice try.
Fact is if you zoom out 20 years Spain's prices have trended up. Your link just proves my point that while there has been an increase in the blend, it hasn't reduced prices.
> Decoupled: how Spain cut the link between gas and power prices using renewables
> Spain has some of the lowest wholesale electricity prices in Europe, largely owing to the country’s strong solar and wind growth which reduced the influence of expensive coal and gas power on the electricity market.
