27% of New Cars in France Now Plugin Electric Cars(cleantechnica.com) |
27% of New Cars in France Now Plugin Electric Cars(cleantechnica.com) |
So the share of electrics is there because only the rich early adopters have bought a new car lately.
Kinda yes. Poor/average people now in France/EU will just keep using their 10 year old cars, for the next 10 years as well.
France has cheap electricity so the class of people who can afford brand new cars will definetly go for electric to save money. I bet most new car sales now are company cars anyway rather than individuals.
What is your definition of cheap?
The best-selling EV in France is the Dacia Spring and it is around €16k after government subsidy. The cheapest ICE vehicle is probably the Dacia Sandero, and it is around €10k.
I don't know if fuel prices would eat up the savings of an ICE car but I do know that electricity is very affordable in France.
But the choice here may be between buying a new electric and a used combustion that costs 1/4 of the price.
Or between buying a new electric and keeping the existing car longer.
Pretty sure that over the next 10 years at least, the latter two are the cheaper options.
It looks rather nice for a subcompact SUV - reminds me a Corolla based Cross.
To me more surprising is that Fiat 500e was higher in the ranking, despite costing more and having smaller battery.
MG4 also has Xpower model, which costs the same as a base model of VW ID.3, but does 0-60 in 3.5s (it's not a real sports car, but it's still ridiculous).
The buy Price tag is not the only thing that people are looking when buying a car.
People do care about maintenance and after sell service. In France, you can be pretty sure that anywhere you are, you are almost sure to have a Stellantis garage within 25km of your home. For MG... probably within 150km.
People care (maybe too much?) about that. This is especially true for an EV under warranty that your random neighbour garage will refuse to touch because he miss the know-how on it.
https://www.transportenvironment.org/discover/how-clean-are-...
It also lets you change country and various other parameters e.g. compare with diesel or hybrids.
Two other interesting things I noticed:
1.It lets you choose where the battery is made (China Vs EU average Vs Sweden) and it has relatively little impact.
2. It lets you choose solar panels instead of a national grid, and France's grid almost exactly matches the figure they use.
There is a tax in France called "malus écologique" that depends on CO2 emissions, and it keeps raising. In 2024, it may become more expensive than the car itself, up to 60k€.
But for plug-in hybrids (>50km range), you don't have to pay that tax. So if you want a gas guzzler, buy the plug-in hybrid version.
Being cheaper is a nice bonus.
https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/france-raise-regulated-...
Google tells me 1 MWH = 105.26 liters of gas [1]
Math that out and it's basically 1 EUR per Liter of Gas
Gas seems at least 1.75 EUR / Liter, so a pretty good savings? [2]
0. https://tradingeconomics.com/france/electricity-price
1. https://hextobinary.com/unit/energy/from/gasoline/to/megawat...
A decently efficient EV is about 250Wh/mi (it’s closer to 220, but 250 makes math easy), so 105 EU of power can travel approximately 4000mi.
By comparison a decently efficient ICE (in Europe) gets about 5L/100km, roughly. So, to travel 6430km (4k miles) you’d need about 320L of fuel. At 1.75EU/L that would cost 560 EU.
It’s a very substantial difference, assuming your pricing is correct on fuel and energy cost.
Consumers rates will be at least about twice that.
A good heuristic to tell you are looking at a rate is that is not a consumer rate is that if it is quoted in units that are per MWh it is probably not a consumer rate. Consumer rates are almost always quoted per kWh.
What happened in 8/2021 that caused a huge spike?
USA average shows $0.23/kWh
Also, please don't mix units.
Some others folks in the EU have chosen others means with lesser or unknown EROEI. But hey, their sovereign choices, their consequences. It's not like France is preventing them from doing nuclear.
I guess we'll see in a few years; but CfDs going over decades and being backed by governments I think it's safe to plan around this price.
This is why targeting new car sales, instead of fleet composition, is the best strategy. Despite the latter being the closer input to emissions.
ICE vehicles at and above EVs, in price and capability, should not have a market. Those EVs should then have the opportunity to decrease in price through both economies of scale and learning curves, on one hand, and the emergence of used vehicles, on the other hand.
Beyond demand pressures on the interconnected European market due to secondary effects of the heat and the COVID rebound, it’s likely nuclear output was reduced as the cooling potential of water sources was reduced - I vaguely remember articles on this before the cracking issue stole ‘headlines’.
Reduced nuclear output in France results in increased demand for less cost efficient national or more-expensive-than-nuclear international (interconnected) generators.
It is mostly to protect the ecological system, nothing to do with any technical problem. They calculated that after going through the cooling process the water would be too hot and thus, they didn't restart the reactors.
Because that is second important part, this alone wouldn't be news worthy because reactors could be running in other parts of France and electricity shifted around. But the thing is that after a lack of care/maintenance for its nuclear industry (due to political powers and belief that we could do without in the long term) after the lockdowns of COVID, France had a lot of reactors that needed repairs/inspections/maintenance; all kind of compliance for regulatory approval. So, the heatwave problem was doubling down on an already reduced capacity but most of the time it shouldn't be a problem at all...
0: https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/frances-edf-takes-13...
The decision now is for 5-10-15 years.
This may well increase with electric cars being more reliable, but other failures (rust, collision) won't change much.
So 99% is too high. VEH1107 shows that 22.5% of cars in the UK were 13 years or older.
[VEH1107] https://www.gov.uk/government/statistical-data-sets/vehicle-...
The cost of replacing an old battery pack quickly exceeds the value of the car. You might be able to get a few extra years refurbishing it but that’ll be expensive and require niche battery work that’ll be hard to find.
So there will always be more demand. It's the mainstream media that has it backwards: they're the ones always saying peak demand and that's misleading.