Monthly Archives: June 2016

Electric cars dominate Driver Power 2016, the UK’s biggest car satisfaction survey

Electric Cars, Model S, News, Reviews and Comment, Renault, Tesla, ZOE

Tesla Model S tops Driver Power 2016 with highest-ever satisfaction rating, with Renault ZOE in second and four hybrids in the top ten

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British car owners who’ve taken the plunge and bought electric cars are raving about them, according to Driver Power 2016. This year’s car ownership survey – now in its 15th year – is dominated by electric and hybrid vehicles, with Tesla’s Model S taking first place in seven out of ten categories as well as the overall number one position.

The survey covers the issues that really matter to motorists with owners rating their vehicles over ten categories including reliability, running costs, practicality and in-car tech. This year, Driver Power received nearly 50,000 responses, with 32 makes and 150 models ranked.

This year’s winner, the Tesla Model S, received a highest-ever satisfaction rating of 97.46%, which included a 100% satisfaction rating in the Ease of Driving category – the first time any model has received full marks in the history of the Driver Power survey.

Brian Walters, Director of Research and Insight at Driver Power, said:

“With seven individual category wins it’s hard to dispute the appeal of the Tesla. This is the first time this manufacturer has appeared in the Driver Power survey, but with results like these I’m certain we’ll see more of it in the future.

“The in-car tech has raised the bar for other manufacturers, and the growing network of rapid-charging points that are free for owners to use makes it the number one for running costs as well. The only area for concern is build quality, but if Tesla can sort this out then I think it’s going to be a tough brand to beat.”

As well as the ZOE in second place, Renault took third spot with the new Kadjar SUV. Last year’s number one brand, Lexus, took four of the top ten positions with its IS, GS and RX (marks two and three) models.

Read more: AutoExpress

Tesla Model 3 (Image: Green Car Reports)

How do we jam the roads with Teslas by 2030? Just ask Norway

Electric Cars, Energy and Climate Change, Model 3, News, Reviews and Comment, Oil, Sales, Tesla

Last week, I explained a dismaying reality for planet-savers everywhere: Not even mega-blowout sales for Tesla’s new Model 3 sedan are enough to substantially green and decarbonize our global transportation system. There are simply too many cars on the road and too many new cars sold each year — the vast majority of which run on gasoline, not electricity, and will for some time.

Tesla Model 3 Unveil (Image: Tesla)
Tesla Model 3 Unveil (Image: Tesla)

What this means is that we’re probably now at the beginning of a gradual, rather than rapid, electrification of the transportation sector. Yeah, it’ll help out when it comes to greenhouse gas emissions — especially as the electricity that powers Teslas and other electric cars also becomes greener — but it probably won’t do so fast enough to save us in the critical two decades or more when all the big decisions about the planet’s future need to be made.

So how is it possible to scale up faster? Well, one answer may come by looking at the example of a country that has already done just that: Norway, where electric vehicles were fully 18 percent of new cars sold last year.

In a new paper in Applied Energy, Måns Nilsson of the Stockholm Environment Institute and Björn Nykvist of the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm examine the policy moves that made this kind of high growth possible, using Norway and several other examples from around the world to drive their analysis.

The gist? You essentially need two things — public policies that address the current higher cost of these vehicles (through tax breaks or rebates) until those costs decline, and then other public policies that do something else: Get past people’s psychological blocks when it comes to driving electric vehicles. That’s a very big issue when people are used to pumping gas rather than charging, and so develop ‘range anxiety’ — the fear that their EV will run out of juice far from a recharging station.

“When you start to change some of the economic incentives, you get the first movers,” says Nilsson. “But then what we have seen is this norm change, that it’s like a cultural shift in certain pockets, typically certain communities, it could be certain suburbs, certain cities, where the electric car becomes the norm.”

Read more: Washington Post