Is the EV market powering down?
HARRY Metcalfe (the Youtuber) and my good pal Tim both had a decision to make recently, because they have Range Rovers that are coming to the end of their leases. I suspect it was Harry who influenced Tim’s thinking, rather than the other way round, because I doubt that Harry knows Tim, whereas Harry’s eponymous Youtube channel is, erm, rather big!
I might have also had something to do with Tim’s decision, because I told him about one of Harry’s recent videos, which has so far been watched 1.2 million times, in which Harry explains why he’s dumped his out-of-contract Range Rover PHEV and replaced it with a Range Rover Sport D300.
Since the youngest Land Rover in my fleet was made in 1997, and my Range Rover daily driver came out of the factory gate in 1990, the ins and outs of personal contract plans and leases are a bit of a mystery to me, although I reckon they are fundamentally about allowing you to appear to own a car that you can’t actually afford to buy. That’s certainly true in Tim’s case, anyway.
Faced with having to make a final decision, Harry used JLR’S app to find out what the monthly lease charges would be for his new vehicle, based on a £20,000 deposit and 10,000 miles a year over a three-year term. The results were startling: the full-fat Range Rover P460 PHEV would cost £1382 per month, the Range Rover Sport P460 PHEV would be £1025 per month, while the Sport D300 would be £600 per month.
As Harry rightly says, that’s a huge difference, and it was the main reason he chose the D300, together with the fact that he doesn’t really need 454bhp and a 0-60mph time of 5.6 seconds for his family runabout and tow vehicle. The D300 with its 296bhp can still sprint to 60mph in 6.3 seconds and has a top speed that is only 9mph slower than its bigger brother’s. Unless Top Trumps bragging rights are your thing, the D300 offers far better value and is much more practical.
Harry had a Jaguar I-PACE on contract from 2018 but couldn’t get on with it, being irritated by the range limitations, especially when towing, and the hassle involved in finding charging points. These issues continued with the Range Rover, leading him to ponder whether the battery EVS on offer today will ever suit his requirements.
Many commentators have asked the same question, wondering whether governments’ (and manufacturers’) headlong pursuit of EVS is ill-informed. I’ve worried about this as well, and written about it in this column on more than one occasion. But now there are some very important voices entering the debate, including Akio Toyoda, who is chairman of Toyota, which as we all know is the world’s biggest car maker by sales.
Speaking in January at a Q&A session with employees, Mr Toyoda said that battery EVS will never secure more than 30 per cent of the market, with the remainder being taken by fuel cell EVS, hybrids and hydrogen vehicles. Toyota is very much focusing on the latter, while many other manufacturers have nailed themselves to exclusively battery EV strategies. Mr Toyoda called for a “multi-pathway approach”, adding that customers, not regulators or politicians, should make the decision about what’s right for them.
Harry also mentions several other things indicating that the wheels are falling off the battery EV wagon: plummeting secondhand values; high accident repair costs forcing insurers to increase premiums, and a general lack of interest in EVS among car dealers and traders.
Interestingly, he also singles out UK government legislation that offers generous tax breaks to fleet buyers who choose EVS, which incentivises them to buy bigger and more expensive highperformance vehicles. These are apparently generating zero interest when they are moved on, because they are not what private buyers want. Depreciation is therefore huge.
Another worrying factor is battery degradation. We see it with the other lithium-ion battery-powered items that surround us, such as computers and handheld electronic devices, where it is noticeable that their batteries do not hold their charge as they get older.
The car industry is conspicuously silent on this, and no manufacturer seems to publish anything on it, but privately conducted research shows that degradation of 25 per cent is not unusual, and in one case a vehicle was found to have lost over half of its battery capability.
Degradation is seemingly affected by the ambient temperatures that the car operates in, being worse in hot climates, but it is also affected by the mode of charging, with rapid DC charging
“Battery degradation of 25 per cent is not unusual – in one case a vehicle was found to have lost over half of its battery capability”
apparently causing the most dramatic degradation over time.
All of which means that if you buy a second-hand battery EV vehicle you have no idea whether it is still capable of achieving the manufacturer’s declared range, or only half of it. Repairs are totally uneconomical – a new, genuine parts battery electrical module for a 2018 Jaguar I-PACE will cost you £41,400 including VAT. The module on the forthcoming Range Rover Electric will be bigger, and therefore significantly more expensive. Once the battery gives up the ghost, these vehicles are obviously doomed.
My pal Tim does have a bit of a reputation for liking to win at Top Trumps, and consequently always seems to have the biggest and the fastest and the most expensive. But even he has been persuaded of the folly of electric propulsion, and has decided to join Harry in opting for the Sport D300.