It’s long be known that more energy goes into the creation of a car than that car will use in it’s lifetime. If old cars weren’t being crushed in high volumes whilst still repairable, turning them into overpriced enthusiast pieces a viable option would be to just get an old car and run it till it was beyond repair.
But, that ignores the local environment improvements and improvements in health that not having a bunch of ICE belching exhaust into the atmosphere. That’s measurable and provable.
ICE engines are also only roughly 33% efficient. 33% of the petrol you use creates the momentum that turns the cranckshaft et al. 33% is turned into heat, which you need a cooling system to remove and 33% turned into noise which you need a muffler system to reduce.
ICE requires everyone maintaining their cars perfectly which we don’t.And which doesn’t stop the air pollution, heat pollution and noise pollution. Think of the “turn on recirculating” air signs in the tunnel entrances.
Electric vehicles, even if powered by electricity generated by a coal powered power plant are a lot more efficient at turning power into momentum, they remove noise, air and heat pollution from our streets. More than 33% of the coal burnt becomes electricity and the air pollution is much more easily controlled. And if we replace coal power with renewable …
Oh, and electric cars shit all over ICE cars from a performance point of view. Faster, quicker, better balanced. Just lacking that noise pollution that wankers like. A Tesla S class is a 10 sec out of the box at like $70 grand. You need to get into special edition Porsche territory for that performance.
The actual real answer is the destruction of urban sprawl, 15 minute cities and vast, vast improvements in public transport. But we’re not getting that, so electric is a better answer than ICE in our current paradigm.
An uber picked me up in a performance model Tesla, after chatting about the car a bit, I asked the driver to give it a squirt as we entered the open road. I was blown away by the acceleration on it. It accelerated in a single gear up to around 160. It was ridiculously quick and felt more like a roller coaster than a car because of no gear changes. I wanted one straight away.
I can’t remember the details exactly about the car but I remember him explaining that the model he had was capable of going quicker but he would need to get the software upgraded to unlock the capability, kind of in the same way that you can download an app for free or pay a subscription to remove ads. He mentioned other capabilities that required software purchases. This instantly changed my mind on the car, the idea that it’s capable but has locked features like a demo on a video game or an app.
Wow. Imagine paying for a car that has heated seats, paying again for a subscription to unlock the feature, then something goes wrong with the heated seats so you need to pay again for repairs. I mean, it’s frustrating enough when cars have electrical issues let alone paying a subscription on top.
That article hints that when you sell the car on, all subscriptions are wiped, meaning you can’t add value to the car by buying the features. Mental.
The A3 is a compact sedan, 1.4L turbo petrol. It’s small but can fit my family of 3, and the rear seats are still like business class seats in terms of legroom for my 5 year old. It’s economical (‘cylinder on demand’ technology shuts down 2 cylinders when cruising), easy to park in tight spaces, and looks nice.
The X1 is 2L turbo, but guzzles petrol (12L/100km average, nearly twice that of my A3 which is around 6.7L/100km). For this reason I only drive the X1 on road trips or longer journeys. I don’t want to know how much petrol an X5 or X7 uses.
These two are hopefully my last ICE cars. Just waiting for the prices of EVs to come down.
As soon as you do that you kiss your warranty goodbye. Maybe not so much of a problem with a $1,000 phone but I’d imagine people will balk at doing so with a 70/80/90k+ car.
Every company wants to turn their products into services so that payments are ever ongoing.
I’ve asked my Merc dealer where the paperwork explaining that some of the features I thought I’d bought were subscription based. I have complimentary access to them for 3 years, so next year they want me to pay for things like remote engine start, car finder and a few other things, $500 a year, they’re all bundled together so I can’t pick and choose things that matter, like weather and traffic updates.
I wasn’t told about this when I bought the car, never agreed to and don’t see why I should accept it. They apparently sent an email in January updating the terms of ownership to allow them to do this and if you didn’t respond by Feb 8th they considered it acceptance. I never saw the email, it went to spam.
Will be interesting to see how they handle it from a Fair Trading ACCC perspective, Australia has pretty strong Consumer Protection laws so we’ll see how it goes.
My Old man has a 2 series BMW. He bought it new but it wasn’t one of the expensive ones. Maybe about 55k. Anyway he has had it only 5 or 6 years and done approx 50k kilometres. He is an old fella so drives it VERY softly. Late last year he gets an error message pop up, something to do with the drive train. The car still felt perfect but he takes it into BMW anyway to get it checked out. Apparently they need to replace something and it will cost him 25k!
Cue a stressful couple of weeks of him having a whinge at BMW and also going around to every mechanic he could find asking them if they could fix it instead. Surprisingly he had trouble finding 1
Anyway he really didn’t know what to do, he couldn’t justify spending 25k in repairs on a car that is probably not worth much more than that now. A few weeks later BMW rang back after a few weeks of silence from them and they said they will cover the parts as a gesture of goodwill. He just had to end up paying the labour costs. He was stoked as you can imagine.
The reason they are so expensive apparently is that they don’t actually try to fix the component that is broken, they just replace everything. The funny thing is a couple of mechanics he took it to said they couldn’t actually see anything wrong and it is probably a false reading or something.
Any way moral of the story, if you get a German car try to sell it before the end of the warranty period if you can I guess
I have a bicycle and now a second bicycle with a baby seat. And soon I will probably have a third bicycle with a baby seat and an electric motor. And actually forgot while writing that that we also own a Prius that I hardly ever see unless it’s raining and I need to go somewhere obscure and another older Prius that I hardly ever see because it’s always on loan to one friend or another.
What’s frustrating close to the city is having nowhere to store bicycles while people can store massive cars on the street for practically nothing. I’d happily pay the token fee they charge for a car permit to have somewhere secure to store my bikes, but instead I have to pay a few thousand dollars a year to rent an extra half a bedroom.
So I reached out to the dealer I got the car from and he says he’s dealing with a LOT of complaints from people with 2-4 year old cars finding that they’re getting slugged for $500 a year for shit that was part of the deal when they bought the car.
Mercedes are hiding behind this statement in their 2020-2022 brochures and the email from January which I never even saw saying “we’re changing some terms and conditions” if you don’t object it counts as acceptance.
I really don’t think they can get away with suddenly telling owners that services are now chargeable when that wasn’t the deal at purchase and their caveat in the brochure says nothing about pricing.
Once you pay for something, you own it. If you want to change the terms post purchase then you should be able to re-negotiate the sale price. That’s pathetic.
If that was allowed, they could technically charge an ‘ignition fee’ every time you start the engine, or make the parking brake or the wipers a subscription service.
Thankfully my cars are new-ish and I won’t be in the market for a new car for hopefully 5 years, but I’ll be avoiding any car with any kind of subscription service, out of principle.
Whilst I would love to be able to drive a high-end European vehicle, they’re unfortunately out of our price range.
Before the babies were born, we were looking at the IZUZU MUX. 7 seater, evertyhing under the hood is the same as the D-MAX ute. Would enable us to go off-road a little bit (although one could argue driving around Sydney is off-road with all the pot holes/craters/tunnels to nowhere). Pre-COVID they were looking alright at <50k for a non-base model. Courtesy of COVID and chip shortages etc we’re now looking at $70k, which has blown us out of the price range.
The missus has brought up the Chinese vehicles that are now entering the market at somewhat decent price ranges. I vehemently refuse to purchase a Chinese owned MG. It’s not a fucking MG.
Had a look at the Haval range (GWM - Great Wall Motors). Look like they’ve improved a bit since they first came onto the market, but I’m not convinced they’re any good.
Currently we’re driving as a “Suzuki Family”.
The mother in-law currently has a Swift Sport, I’ve got the Suzuki Baleno (which is now the wifes car because the car seats are in it) and the wife (now my car for commuting to and from work) is her shitty little base demo model Suzuki Alto, which now has a bright blue bumper on it courtesy of my little collision a few months ago.
I can get a lease vehicle through work, and I think (will have to confirm) that we get (or at least got before the world went to shit) 19% off new vehicles in the VW group range - which if we’re still applicable for would be something I would look at heavily
