It probably will reach saturation, but I don't know at what point that will happen - and the more I think about it, the harder to give a number it is. Some people will be very reluctant to change. They may have been misinformed, or for any one of a number of reasons, but no doubt many will eventually get to the stage of realising they could always drive a BEV, The point of this argument being to point out that there will be an asymptote, but it will take years to get there. There will be some who genuinely won't or can't deal with a BEV in the reasonable future (and that may be for simply wanting to drive a classic sports car, say).

Purely guessing, I imagine the saturation figure will be in the 80 to 90 percents, this century at least. So perhaps a related question would be to estimate where the inflection point occurs, when the uptake of BEVs starts to slow down, and at what rate it "decelerates".

Just in passing, I think the market for secondhand cars is very different is different to that for new ones. Like your Passat, beyond a certain point, prices can fluctuate for numerous reasons that change over time. That's happened to me too.

 

30% of households do not have off-road parking, so would rely entirely on public charging which currently is quite expensive and inconvenient for day to day motoring in many communities. That will put in place one ceiling to EV adoption, until there's significant improvement both to public charging availability and pricing.

 

I think at some point even with expensive charging and the inconvenience many will reluctantly move to EVs just because of the cheaper prices of secondhand cars.
Be that cheap Chinese cars or more premium brands. A 22 plate Etron 55 is £20k and a 22 plate Q8 55 diesel is £40k.

 

Harry coming out with his usual nonsense about e-fuels and hybrids being the answer and spreading FUD fed to him by the legacy OEMs about them not being able to turn a profit selling EVs. He's really leaning into being the sad old petrolhead.

 

Totally agree - I used to subscribe to the channel and enjoy his videos but unsubscribed a year or two ago - his turning point seemed to correlate with a lot of Toyota press events but perhaps I’m just being a bit cynical there!

His anti-EV stance is laughable, he/his family are beyond the ideal candidate to have an EV and yet he insists that a PHEV Range Rover with mediocre range is the best solution for them.

I think his main issue is conflating the enthusiast car market and culture more widely with the glaring reality of car ownership and use which is through necessity where the vast majority of people are not bothered about the issues that he is, they just need safe, affordable mobility.

He would do well (imo of course) to step back a bit and focus on enthusiast cars and not worry so much about other stuff, but sadly (very sadly) I think these videos will get his viewers more riled up and write more comments etc so he is really leaning into it now like you say. His recent video with Clarkson was similar and miserable, missing the point etc.

Ho hum, thankfully no one is forcing us to watch his videos!!

 

See Norway?

 

Harry's Garage....this guy is providing paid for content. He is pretending to be an "ordinary" kind of guy but this cannot be further from the truth. He gets paid for creating specific content. It is obvious from his presentation on the subject, any subject. He is millionaire few times over, so he is not just another guy making videos.
When he started it was interesting because was something new. Now he is just another anti EV channel.

 

Harry's Garage....this guy is providing paid for content. He is pretending to be an "ordinary" kind of guy but this cannot be further from the truth. He gets paid for creating specific content. It is obvious from his presentation on the subject, any subject. He is millionaire few times over, so he is not just another guy making videos.
When he started it was interesting because was something new. Now he is just another anti EV channel.

The relevant substance there is the collage of news reports he gathers, not his opinion per se, regarding pleas of manufacturers to reverse the mandates.

What my OP presented is that the ICE market prices are booming and the BEV prices are crashing.

This is a fact. One of those hard, problematic facts that people who prefer 'narratives' to 'reality', so as to stroke their cognitive dissonances, struggle with.

The fact is that ALL car buying is down, so small increases in one is still way behind what it used to be. People are just keeping their cars.

 

“Saturation” is said as if it’s a negative term and not an inevitable one so the choice of language is inflammatory. Diesel and petrol sales effectively reached “saturation” years and years ago,

You can ask what is a realistic market share, an£ is it ever going to reach 100% like the government mandate, but that’s an entirely different question.

There are very few people worth watching on YouTube or any form of social media, and the sooner people realise “social media” folk are often ignorant and wrong the better, why would anyone pumping out a weekly video from their spare bedroom actually be more insightful than a guy down the pub. And for that matter why is my opinion any more or less valid…

Harry’s an ex motoring journalist so you’d expect him to know how to do it, but he stopped being objective years ago as he now voices his opinion through the lens a very wealthy guy living on a farm whilst thing he’s representing the masses. At least with the other very wealthy ex motoring journalist living on a farm there’s been no pretence at objectivity for years.

 

“Saturation” is said as if it’s a negative term and not an inevitable one so the choice of language is inflammatory. Diesel and petrol sales effectively reached “saturation” years and years ago,

You can ask what is a realistic market share, an£ is it ever going to reach 100% like the government mandate, but that’s an entirely different question.

There are very few people worth watching on YouTube or any form of social media, and the sooner people realise “social media” folk are often ignorant and wrong the better, why would anyone pumping out a weekly video from their spare bedroom actually be more insightful than a guy down the pub. And for that matter why is my opinion any more or less valid…

Harry’s an ex motoring journalist so you’d expect him to know how to do it, but he stopped being objective years ago as he now voices his opinion through the lens a very wealthy guy living on a farm whilst thing he’s representing the masses. At least with the other very wealthy ex motoring journalist living on a farm there’s been no pretence at objectivity for years.

I just watched a YouTube video - from a guy with a climate science and policy masters degree - and he makes the same point about a guy down the pub in this video.

 

Donald, "What my OP presented is that the ICE market prices are booming and the BEV prices are crashing."

And that in a nutshell is why EVs Nos. will increase and ICE decline. New EVs at the end of 2025 are at price parity and used ones cheaper than ICE. Also the cost of running a EV is a fraction of the ICE.

At the moment the manufacturers are playing the market selling enough at a price (not RRP) to reach their legal commitment. They always make more profit from the old because the costs have already been accounted for and therefore the marginal cost of producing yet another ICE car is cheap and very profitable unlike EVs where the development costs still have to be recovered.

 

Donald, "What my OP presented is that the ICE market prices are booming and the BEV prices are crashing."

And that in a nutshell is why EVs Nos. will increase and ICE decline.

Maybe so.

I was presenting the present case, not how it may unfold. I'm neutral on what 'should' or 'will' happen, I was just mentioning the current state of things.

Actually, I think I have seen BEV values inch up slightly, over summer. I keep looking.

Was it Edison who said in the future only rich people will be able to afford candles? We're probably there already, but I think this is probably true of ICE in the future, too. I think I was right when I bought the Passat to keep it forever and it's value will just go up and up. Oh well, too late, I had to spend all the money, which is why I sold it.

What happened to that lottery ticket?

 

Last post, "In a moment" .... or maybe I am posting in the future, again?

 

As a contribution to this discussion I saw an article about van drivers 3/4's of whom are prepared to go electric. I confess that it surprised me at first but thinking about it when your livelihood is tied to the costs of transport it can have a galvanising effect on any preconceived notions stoked by so called "journalists" looking for clicks. I don't know what the penetration of full BEV is in the Taxi game, my Cousin is married to a Taxi driver and he has just bought a Tesla and I see many taxi's that are going full BEV too, but I suspect it is rapidly growing even if for only those purely economic reasons.

This trend is interesting to me because I'm a great believer in word of mouth as the great driver, and conversations down the Pub are some of the best. Now I know Pub's are dying on their arse but they are still gathering places where conversation often turns to "cars" etc. If you have Taxi drivers and van drivers extolling the virtues of EV's that to me is an interesting turn of events.

 

As a driver of a car variant of a small BEV van, I'm not surprised. Considered as a car, my e-NV200 is entirely acceptable, not exciting, far from outstanding. But by the standards of a van, it is by a good margin the nicest I've ever driven. As an old design with a short range, it has its drawbacks and newer products are no doubt better, but if my business or employer were paying for it and the work fitted the charging opportunities, I'd be choosing an electric van far ahead of any diseasel.

 

So one can buy a 1.5L Golf for c £24.5K or a ID3 for the same/fractionally less.
The ID3 accelerates nearly 20% faster and has 50% more power and Torque.
The running costs of the ID3 are a fraction of the Golf.

And the Golf is manual, hard work,noisy, polluting !!!!

I am amazed that anyone is saying a ICE is better than a EV and on a EV forum of all places.

 

ID3 can't take roof bars so not a valid comparison, lol!

 

Approaching saturation…

EVs At A Record 98.4% Share In Norway — KGM Musso Arrives - CleanTechnica

August saw plugin EVs at a record 98.4% share in Norway, up from 95.7% year on year. BEVs alone took 96.9% share.

cleantechnica.com

 

The CO2 overhead of building a BEV is way more than an ICE, as BBC Sliced Bread explained a couple of years ago.

 

True, but it even on a coal powered grid it will still emit less carbon, including manufacturing, within a few years. Less than that on a cleaner grid. And it isn’t all about co2 - also particulates, which are less damaging outside of a city. Ella Adoo-Kissi-Debrah: Air pollution a factor in girl's death, inquest finds

 

Agrivoltaics anyone?

 

Yeah, our old £20 VED Golf diesel seems to be going up in value too. Although, it's been replaced with a nearly new car [wife's] it's being kept in the family. In fact just come out the home made spray booth, lol! After having cars since 17 I've opted out of car ownership with the sale of the Leaf last year. No plans to ever get another.

 

Well we can expect to get about 500,000 kWhr / hectare from solar. Whereas we can get perhaps as much as 1400 litres of rapeseed oil so 14,000 kWhr. So even a 40% efficient diesel running on rapeseed oil (ignoring agricultural inputs, losses processing energy etc) would require something in the order of 70 times more land than a BEV running on solar. An 80% efficient diesel engine plus supply chain (not particularly realistic) would require 35 times as much land.

If we take the UK which apparently has 6.8million hectares of croppable land...
Say we used it all of it for rapeseeed oil every last hectare (i.e. completely stopped growing any other food)
...we could get about 95 TWhr of energy.
[So still less than the 98 TWhr we already get from Wind and solar in the last 12 months.]
Although realistically we currently get a yield of somewhere in the order of about 20% useful energy services from fossil fuels including production and use losses so even that 95TWhr is in reality far less useful than the 98Twhr of electricity.

 

Well we can expect to get about 500,000 kWhr / hectare from solar. Whereas we can get perhaps as much as 1400 litres of rapeseed oil so 14,000 kWhr.

Yes, this is the key point, although if anything this is too optimistic.

Claims that biofuel will amount to anything much depend on some kind of 'advanced biofuel' able to get close to 100% carbon efficiency e.g. from woody biomass. Still only gets you ten percent or so of the UK's energy needs, given that people want to grow food in the UK, and you certainly wouldn't want to waste it in cars.

 

Could use the solar energy to create de novo hydrocarbons from atmospheric CO2 and water which could then be transported by vehicles using some of the created hydrocarbons to be stored, and then used by other vehicles reliant upon those hydrocarbons.

That's what my mate Heath Robinson says.

 

Propaganda as ever…..as you say to create uncertainty we see the technique used in so many ways these days sadly.

 

Erm and caterpillar + Li ion batteries definitely does =BEV FWIW.

https://www.cat.com/en_US/by-industry/mining/surface-mining/surface-equipment/mining-trucks/electric-drive-trucks.html

 

If you did want to grow crops for energy for road transport, it would be radically more efficient to use the fuel to fill in gaps in wind/solar supply than in cars.

That way, you wouldn't need inefficient oilseed crops, you could burn anything. And you only need to supply some small fraction of the energy.

Burning wood in a power station is a pretty bad idea, but about an order of magnitude less of a bad idea than burning food oils in a car.

 

No 'one answer' is true.

Sure, burn some biomass for electricity.

But 'BEV' is not the best solution for everyone.

 

Where are we going to get any farmland for oil crops from, anyway, when "food security" means that the 1% of land needed for solar is apparently "too hard"? Even though sheep can still munch around panels (OK, maybe the grass won't grow as fast, but at least the sheep have somewhere to stand out of the rain).

The actual answer at the moment is mostly places like Malaysia. It isn't like orangutans have bothered writing in to complain.

The palm oil companies are mostly marketing this as 'waste' palm oil but the quantities don't add up; somehow the vast majority of the oil is ending up as waste.

 

I found Hannah Richie’s new book “Clearing the Air” fairly dull because I already knew almost all the content, but I would say required reading for many people on this thread because it effectively rebuts many of the arguments with good data. There’s an entire chapter (I think 10 questions and answers) on BEVs.

She’s far too pro nuclear ☢ in my opinion but otherwise pretty good.

 

RE now produces more than 50% of our electricity and wind is the largest source of electricity in 2024

There is no need or case for anything but electric vehicle transportation. That turning point is behind us now and as always waiting for the sheep/masses to catch up.

One could drive London to Glasgow non stop in 7hrs in a EV, who wants to do that as against 2 x 1/2hr stops for refresh etc and charge.

 

One could drive London to Glasgow non stop in 7hrs in a EV

One could not. Pre-requisites exist.

'One' could also divest a billion pounds of 'one's investments and pay a chauffer service to provide a fleet of vehicles for 'one' to never have to think about cars again.

'One' is talking unrealistically about a population whose needs and resources are diverse, and do not have the economic resources of this 'one'.

 

ICE engines will be needed for many years to come. Are we expecting every area of this planet to be well supplied with solar/wind powered Rapid chargers on nice 13A sockets?

Always going be be a need for long-ish range vehicles in areas with minimal/no infrastructure. Think 3rd world countries, disaster-zones, ...

Acc to google, combustion temps inside a diesel engine can be phenomenall high, reaching 2500C. Call this 2800K. Carnot cycle efficiency dictates that the max efficiency possible cobverting diesel to mechanical power is therefore (2800 - 300)/2800 call it 90%. So no diesel as we know it is ever going to exceed this limit. I believe current diesels are more like 60% efficient.

Slight problem - diesels running at these temperatures will ?burn? ?decompose? the Nitrogen in the air, producing NOx nasties, so best not have diesels in the first place if possible. Nicer to burn this agri-diesel cleanly in an external-combustion Sterling cycle engine at steady speed & run a small genny off that, a much lower temperature to avoid NOx problem. But if that means 1000C temperature, the max efficiency possible drops to (1300-300)/1300 = 77%. Just needs a nice Sterling cycle engine design, rather non-trivial.

 

In a previous life, I regularly drove long journeys of 5 or 6 hours non-stop. I had no need for regular comfort breaks beyond the occasional splash and dash, nor any problems staying awake and often went straight into the workplace for a few more hours. At the time a BEV would have been quite irritating.

Now I seldom need to drive for longer than 2 or 3 hours and am happy to stop on route on the odd occasion. A BEV suits my current driving needs and helps reduce pollution in towns and cities; I am not sure that, with my relatively low milage, my CO2 use over the life of the car will make much difference to global warming etc.

I agree that a BEV and the charging infrastructure can now meet the needs of most drivers, but still not all. Encourage those that can, but don't berate those who can't.

 

There's a not-too-useless reason why the law for truck and bus drivers requires a break or breaks totalling at least 45 minutes after no more than 4 hours 30 minutes driving. And driving such vehicles on larger roads is, if anything, easier than driving a car (towns, country lanes and manouevring are certainly much more difficult).