Char.gy is leading the first wireless electric vehicle (EV) charging trial to be open to the general public in Marlow, Buckinghamshire.
Nine additional trials across Buckinghamshire and Milton Keynes are to take place, with the trials a collaborative effort between Buckinghamshire Council, Milton Keynes Council, the London Borough of Redbridge, the University of Warwick, the Open University, IPT Technology and hiyacar.
The trial has seen 10 Renault Zoes with aftermarket induction charging kits provided by hiyacar, with members of the public able to book the cars through the hiyacar platform for £1 per hour or £5 per day, plus insurance.
The improved Renault Zoe has a longer range and posher interior (Image: Renault)
Char.gy’s wireless charging technology has been installed into a dedicated parking spot in Liston Road Car Park, allowing EVs to charge via an electrical induction charging pad installed in the ground.
The trial – which has secured funding from the Office for Zero Emission Vehicles and Innovate UK – is to last 12 months.
Read more: CURRENT
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September was the best ever month for sales of battery electric vehicles (BEVs), according to the latest figures from the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders (SMMT).
Sales of BEVs reached 32,721 in September 2021, a 49.4% increase on the same month in 2020. These sales figures were, in fact, just over 5,000 off of the total number registered during the whole of 2019. It meant BEV sales represented 15.2% of the market share, surpassing diesel sales for the fourth month in a row.
New car registrations as a whole plummeted in September, falling by 34.4% to 215,312 compared to the year before. This is the weakest September since 1998, with the ongoing shortage of semiconductors impacting vehicle availability.
This year to date, 125,141 BEVs have been sold, an 87.9% increase on the year before. This is also higher than the total number of diesel vehicles sold so far this year (117,605).
Mike Hawes, SMMT chief executive, praised the “rocketing uptake” of BEVs, but said that in order for all drivers to make the switch, “massive investment” in public charging infrastructure is still required.
However, figures from Zap-Map show that two key areas of the UK’s public charging infrastructure have grown significantly since the end of 2020. The number of ultra-rapid charging devices in the UK has increased by over 50% since the beginning of year, with there now being over 1,000 ultra-rapid charging devices in the ground alongside 3,750 rapid chargers.
The number of slow chargers has also increased by 66%, from over 3,670 at the end of 2020 to more than 6,100 at the end of September, Zap-Map’s data shows.
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Consumer parcel delivery specialist Hermes has underscored its commitment to an emissions-free future by placing a huge order for 168 fully electric Mercedes-Benz eSprinters.
The zero-emission vans should all be on the road before the end of the year. They will be assigned to Hermes’ popular ParcelShops service, which operates from more than 5,000 convenience stores and other locations nationwide.
Hermes has commissioned Pod Point UK to install charging points at its network of depots. This work is already underway, with the focus initially on those in London and other cities that have introduced low emission zones.
Hermes plans to undertake all ParcelShop collections with electric vehicles at the earliest opportunity. The company has only ordered the diesel vans to ‘tide it over’ pending completion of its infrastructure programme and the introduction of next-generation battery-powered variants.
Nissan e-NV200 electric van (Image: Nissan)
The company relies on a core fleet to service its ParcelShop business. This currently stands at some 450 units but is growing, and supplemented with rented vehicles during busy periods. The owned fleet includes 30 smaller electric vans that work from a depot in East London, while French-built diesels will be stood down to make way for the eSprinters.
“The transition to a zero-emission, electric fleet is integral to our ESG (environment, social and governance) agenda, and we’ve been keen to take the next, major step forward towards this goal,” said David Landy, Hermes Head of Fleet.
“However, we are under no illusions… this will not be an easy journey. From a purely operational standpoint, and given the current state of the technology, whichever way you look at it – whether in terms of range, payload or volume – a van with an internal combustion engine beats an electric one hands down.
“Only when it comes to tailpipe emissions does the battery-powered vehicle outshine the diesel. So we know there are constraints and compromises to make, and we recognise that this is going to put extra pressure and increased demands on those colleagues out in our depots who are doing a difficult job, day in, day out.”
“We’re at the very beginning of what is going to be a long and challenging process,” continued Landy. “This is new technology, so product support will be crucial. There are electric vans out there that offer a longer range than the eSprinter, but any electric vehicle is going to break down, and it’s going to do so in new ways too.
“When that happens we want to know there’s an army of people out there who are fully clued-up and able to get us back on the road as quickly as possible. Mercedes-Benz Vans gives me that confidence.
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At around £6k the Citroen Ami is the most significant EV breakthrough moment for Brit consumers, says Mike Rutherford
How’s this for a run of events? Last winter, the Citroen Ami wins its first major trophy: World Vehicle of the Year. By early summer it’s got the Auto Express Technology Award. Then, in August at the British Motor Show, car nuts queued to see the most talked about and photographed vehicle there.
Citroen Ami (Source: uk-mediacitroen.com)
A few weeks later came the happiest story of the year: Citroen will sell the Ami in the UK. It’s expected to have a cash price of about £6,000. Plus, the firm told me that although mobile phone-like, circa-£40-a-month contracts may be offered here as in France, such deals require deposits of a grand or three. Low or no-deposit contracts appeal more to Brits, even if this means payments of nearer £80 a month. Either way, this car at these prices is the most significant EV breakthrough moment ever for Brit consumers.
We never did have the cash, or hunger, for the worthy but ugly original Nissan Leaf launched at £30,000 a decade ago. A few years later the smaller, prettier VW e-up! at nearly £24,000 (almost twice as much as the basic version) also failed to hit the spot. And although today’s mid-sized pure-electric family cars from firms such as Hyundai, Kia and Skoda are credible, some of ’em carry £50,000 price tags. Ouch!
Though very different, the stripped-out Ami’s imminent arrival in the UK means long-overdue change (and then some) for pure-EV accessibility and affordability. Bucking the tradition of EVs being almost twice the price of their ICE equivalents, the new-tech Ami is poised to start a price revolution by wading in as THE least expensive new vehicle on the market, period.
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Over the last few years, a war has been brewing between Toyota and battery electric vehicles, particularly those produced by Tesla.
Toyota president Akio Toyoda (grandson of the company’s founder) has been openly vocal in his criticism of Tesla and its upstart nature compared to the traditional incumbents. Most recently, though, the rhetoric has taken a more desperate tone, and a much more worrying one for the future of the Japanese giant.
Akio Toyoda has now widened his criticism from Tesla to the whole plan surrounding the transition to electric vehicles as a means to reduce carbon emissions. His argument isn’t about the environment, however. It’s about how many jobs will be lost in the Japanese car manufacturing industry from a switch to BEVs. He seems to be basing this on what Toyota in particular manufactures – fossil fuel vehicles made a little greener with hybrid drivetrains. Battery-electric vehicles require fewer laborers to make and have fewer parts, so the third-party supplier ecosystem is smaller too. Also, Toyota hardly makes any of them.
It is a valid concern that the switch to BEVs can have a major impact on employment. German car companies have been having the same concerns. This has been worrying German auto labor unions and this is one reason cited for BMW’s hiccup in its plan towards electrification, which had started so well with the i3. But the growth in BEV sales worldwide, particularly in Europe and China, has convinced vehicle manufacturers in Germany and France that this is a bandwagon they need to be on for existential reasons, whatever the short-term costs. Toyota, in contrast, has only released one BEV so far, the Lexus UX300e, and merely teased further BEVs such as the bZ4X, with no clear launch date.
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The BMW i4 is available to order with a starting price of £52,000. The i4 will most likely reach showrooms in 2022 and be a rival for the Tesla Model 3, which is more than £10,000 cheaper.
BMW i4 EV (Image: BMW)
So it’s not a bargain, but the i4 is the German carmaker’s first attempt at moulding everything you like about a modern BMW – stylish design, luxurious interior and sharp driving dynamics – around an electric powertrain.
Stylish design? Well, we’ll let you decide.
Upfront, you get the love it or loath beaver-tooth grille that first appeared on the new 4 Series. It’s not as striking now and, on the i4, it gets a flush finish with a panel that can open to provide cooling to the motors when needed. Aerodynamics feature a lot in the design.
Thus, the BMW has a slippery profile with a coupe-like roofline reminiscent of the Tesla Model S and door handles that sit flush in their housings. You can also go for 17-inch wheels with plastic inserts that help them cut through the air more easily and add 6 miles to your total range. Standard 17, 18 and 20-inch wheels are also available.
Around the back, you’ll find a rear diffuser that’s stuck on the end of the BMW’s completely flat floor, which again helps lower drag. The diffuser, lower section between the wheels which houses the battery and the opening grille are finished in iBlue highlights to press home the i4’s perceived eco-friendliness.
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As in, more than five times the usual number of people were putting gas in their diesel cars and vice versa. Here’s how we got to this point.
eing a truck driver in the United Kingdom is really not a great job right now. Classed as “low-skilled,” European Union workers were denied visas to be truck drivers after Brexit, and combined with horrific port backups and 10,000 drivers getting stranded in their trucks last Christmas, weirdly not a lot of people are that keen to take on bringing stuff to this ungrateful little island. And right now, that’s creating a major crisis for anyone who requires gasoline from time to time.
Petrol stations across the country are running low on fuel, causing long lines at the pump, rising prices and panicked drivers who fill up more than they should to stock up. It’s not unlike the gasoline crises of the 1970s in the U.S., but this time it’s happening for different reasons. In the U.K. this time, it’s about truck drivers. Specifically, the lack of them.
The U.K. is reliant on truck imports, a lot of which—99 percent, in 2019—come from EU countries. Which is complicated, if you haven’t brokered a particularly good trade deal. Of course, non-truck imports like sea freight also get distributed around the U.K. by truck, which is complicated, if 14,000 truckers who are EU citizens left the country last December. In fact, there’s now nearly 100,000 total fewer truck drivers in the U.K. (236,000 from 330,000) compared to 2016. As the New York Times noted this week, British truck drivers are getting older and retiring, and any younger ones lining up to replace them face delays in licensing due to the pandemic.
That’s not, necessarily, directly causing the U.K. fuel crisis that’s got cars queueing ’round pumps and people threatening to stab each other over 10 liters of unleaded. A lot of what’s happening is down to panic buying that’s causing localized shortages but haulers say there is an issue with not enough freight and although the government says there absolutely isn’t, they have made the army available to drive trucks. Just in case.
Because there’s nothing we can’t work really hard to make that little bit more farcical, after a few days of unreliable supply people just started putting whatever fuel they fancied in their car. As in, more than five times the usual number of people were putting petrol in their diesel cars or vice versa. This means a recovery vehicle has to be called out, the fuel pumped and wasted and your car might not really run the same afterward.
You’d think, as a smug electric vehicle enthusiast, I’d be chuckling to myself about how this would make everyone with a 2013 Nissan Leaf suddenly the absolute baller of range. Nope, because now we have problems involving electricity. Because not only are we out of petrol, we’re out of gas. Which we use to make electricity. Oh, man.
There are people making the argument that energy crises are going to hit all European nations this winter because of massively increasing gas prices. That’s gas in the EU sense, as in natural gas and not gasoline, which there’s a pretty major over-reliance on to generate electricity. EU countries are in a strong position to negotiate, as a large trade bloc and also to share electricity between their grids—something we have been heavily reliant on France for, the share imported actually increasing after the Brexit vote in 2016.
All that’s amounting to a situation where, say, overnight electricity prices are suddenly more than tripling and it’s possible that peak home charging might get banned. This isn’t a directly reactive concept to the current situation but does show the weirdly unnecessary problems we’ve heaped all over ourselves by failing to address them. And by “we” in this context I mean the people actually in charge who can do anything about it, whose leadership has been as consistently inspiring as it’s ever been.
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Electric cars now cost less to insure, on average, than petrol and diesel cars – and the cost to insure an EV is continuing to fall.
New analysis from car insurance comparison site GoCompare reveals the average cost to insure an electric car in July 2021 was £484. The average cost for a petrol car was £489, while for a diesel it was £534.
It is the continuation of a trend that started in 2019, says GoCompare.
During the first half of 2020, an electric car typically cost £515 to insure. A year later, the cost over the first six months had fallen to £450 – a £65 decline.
Ryan Fulthorpe of GoCompare said: “As the popularity of the EV increases, it’s great to see the insurance costs coming down alongside this.
“Insurance companies are now getting used to evaluating the risks associated with these cars and so we have seen a slow but steady decline in premiums for EVs over the past two and a half years.”
Most popular EVs to insure
GoCompare is also keeping a track of the most popular electric cars insured by its customers – and it’s another win for the Teslerati:
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Motor Fuel Group (MFG) has constructed a new dual-fuel station with eight dedicated 150kW electric vehicle (EV) charging bays.
This is alongside eight traditional petrol pumps, with the former petrol station on the site located on the A3 in Putney, south west London, having been demolished.
MFG has also developed 1,500 sq ft of retail space, with the site containing Costa Coffee, Budgens and an Amazon drop box and home delivery location.
Milton Keynes ‘Mushrooms’ Charging Hub (Image: T. Larkum)
“This is an important site for us as we see Putney as the industry-leading blueprint for the future of UK forecourts to achieve a practical transition from fossil fuels to electrically powered vehicles,” said William Bannister, CEO, MFG.
The development is part of MFG’s £400 million EV investment plans, with around £40 million committed for EV charging hubs in 2021.
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From 2030, sales of new petrol and diesel cars in the UK will be banned. It’s a huge, game-changing moment that’s less than a decade away, so it’s no surprise that manufacturers are already turning to EVs in earnest.
From being a relative novelty to present nearly everywhere, electric cars are fast creating a revolution. So to make sure you don’t get left behind, we’ve compiled a list of all the EVs that are currently on sale in the UK.
We’ve not included the button number, flight-of-fancy hypercars but instead concentrated on the machines that we’ve driven at Autocar and that you could walk into a dealership today and test drive before putting down your cash (or in Volvo’s case clicking on ‘pay now’ in its virtual online store) before driving away.
Audi
E-tron
It’s probably no surprise that Audi’s first foray into the world of EVs had a very SUV flavour. Available in standard or rakish Sportback guise, the E-tron was deliberately designed to look as ‘normal’ as possible, so as not to put off buyers nervous about its high-tech underpinnings – although its door ‘mirrors’ that beam pictures to screens in the cabin are fairly futuristic. Comfort is the order of the day, with soft suspension and excellent refinement. All variants feature twin motors and four-wheel drive, while the larger-battery 55 claims up to 261 miles of range. The tri-motor S packs 496bhp, a 0-62mph time of 4.5sec and greater agility.
E-tron GT
Sharing its underpinnings with the Porsche Taycan, the E-tron GT is in many respects a better all-round bet than its cousin. Sleek four-door coupé styling helps it stand out, while on the move it effortlessly blends blistering pace and back-road agility with long-distance quietness and comfort for impeccable grand touring credentials. The 637bhp RS version steals all the headlines for raw performance statistics, but with up to 523bhp available in brief spurts of overboost, the standard E-tron GT is no slouch, claiming a 4.1sec 0-62mph time and a longer (298-mile) range. Better still, 800V electrical architecture means a full charge can be achieved in as little as half an hour.
Q4 E-tron
Audi’s entry-level EV is arguably its least convincing battery-powered offering. Based on the same MEB platform as the Skoda Enyaq iV and Volkswagen ID 4, it delivers arguably the same driving experience and range (up to 316 miles) yet charges you more for the privilege. Only the second Audi (after the R8 RWS) to offer rear-wheel drive, the Q4 is also available in twin-motor Quattro guise. Both are capable and composed to drive, but neither are inspiring, while the spacious interior feels no more special than that in the Skoda or Volkswagen. Still, the eye-catching Sportback version adds visual appeal, plus any Q4 can rapid charge at either 100kW or 125kW.
BMW
i3
It’s hard to believe the innovative and quirky i3 has been around for the best part of a decade now. Designed from the ground up to be battery-powered, the tall and narrow compact hatchback still looks and feels like nothing else on the road. It features a light and strong carbon-reinforced plastic structure, suicide doors at the rear plus a minimalist interior packed with sustainable materials – although it seats only four and its boot is cramped. Despite skinny tyres, it’s good to drive, particularly the more powerful i3s, but its age is starting to show through its maximum range of 192 miles and 50kW rapid-charging limit.
BMW i3 120Ah (Image: BMW)
i4
On paper, the i4 is essentially an electric version of the new 4 Series Gran Coupé, but there’s more to it than that. It has been heavily re-engineered to take the 80.7kWh lithium ion battery and either one (rear-drive) or two (four-wheel drive) motors, while inside it gets bespoke digital instruments and infotainment set in a large curved screen set on top of the dashboard. Near 50:50 weight distribution front to rear means engaging and agile handling, while a slippery 0.24Cd drag figure helps the entry-level eDrive40 Sport deliver a 365-mile range. The 536bhp M50 will crack 62mph in just 3.3sec and is BMW’s first ever M-badged EV. Crucially, every i4 is capable of 200kW rapid-charging, which can add 100 miles of range in just 10 minutes.
iX3
Like the i4, the iX3 uses existing ICE architecture, in this case the X3. In fact, apart from a flush-fitting front grille and some natty blue trim inserts, it’s largely the same as its fossil fuel-fed cousin. Curiously, it’s rear-drive-only, the 282bhp motor driving the back axle via a single-speed transmission. Still, it’s as good to drive as the ICE X3s, while the typically low noise levels and adaptive dampers make it comfy. The EV drivetrain robs 40 litres of boot space, but at 510 litres, it’s still roomy enough and bigger than that of X3 PHEVs. There’s just the one battery available, but the 74kWh lithium ion pack can be rapid-charged to 80% in just half an hour.
iX
Few recent arrivals have stirred as much controversy as the iX, BMW’s flagship EV. Beauty has always been in the eye of the beholder, but surely even the most ardent BMW fan will struggle to put forward any praise for the slab-sided and awkwardly proportioned iX. Loosely based on the brand’s CLAR scalable architecture, it mixes the i3’s CFRP with aluminium, while the battery (a large 100kWh on the range-topping 500bhp xDrive50) is mounted low in the floor. Motors front and rear deliver four-wheel drive, while versions with that big pack claim an impressive 380 miles between charges. Air suspension means comfort is the order of the day, plus the interior is vast and lavishly finished – and at least you can’t see the exterior when you’re sitting in it.
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