Big J

That's such a British thing to say! 😁 Good weather in Britain is defined by the absence of bad weather. I remember sitting adjacent to a couple in a car dealership in Armadale in Scotland (if you've not been there before, consider yourself lucky). They were looking out the window at a gusty, grey spring day remarking on how the weather was 'nae too bad'. It was bemusing!

It's been a winter of lower than average rainfall and higher than average temperatures. The ground is certainly unusually dry. Just wish is wasn't so windy and grey. It's not pleasant weather for being outside really.

It's all on Youtube. Start at the beginning if you can. It's much funnier if you listen to it in sequence.

I'm a great fan of the comedy writer and performer John Finnemore (if you're unfamiliar, do check out the R4 comedy series, Cabin Pressure). He's had his car nicked in Sheffield, which more importantly contained quite a lot of his work. If any of you happen to stray across his car, or indeed any of it's contents, I am sure he'd be very grateful. He posted this on his website: Oh, rats. My car has been stolen. Full of luggage, including several notebooks full of my work. Unlikely, I know, but if anyone sees a pile of dumped bags in the Norton Lees area of Sheffield, please let me know! Or unlikelier still, the car itself: red Mazda CX-30, LL70 GJF.

The parity in cost with heating oil is probably part of that. And the energy security of having your heating bought and paid for at your back door.

Not overlooking it at all, but I understand what you're saying. I'm actually not trying to make an environmental case for them, though the zero emissions aspect is pleasant. I like the idea that they are massively cheaper to run (after a higher 'buy-in' cost) and I can possibly produce my own electricity to fuel them. That energy independence and having less to go wrong is appealing.

That's a very cynical viewpoint! 😁 The subsidies are already pretty meagre. There will of course have to be an alternative form of taxation to cover the lost revenue from the road fund licence and fuel duty, but it's not going to increase the cost per mile. The price of electricity should be coming down now as we transition to renewables, but stupid decisions by the Tories are hindering that. The effective halting of new onshore wind projects for the last 7 years, for example. The UK has massive renewable potential, and with electric vehicles the possibility of fuelling our cars in a zero emissions fashion. Either way, after filling my VW Transporter yesterday in Sweden at £1.91/litre and it costing £154, I am looking forward to getting at least 1 EV!

Yes. From both an animal welfare point of view and a reduction in gambling possibilities POV too.

In the UK? Well not the West Country - have you seen the bloody lanes?! 😆 For me in the UK it'd be Strathspey, around Loch Insh and Kincraig. Lovely people there, beautiful surrounds and good fishing. England is almost all too busy. It's a shame as a fair bit of it is reasonably nice. Full of angry, frustrated English people.

I think I do about 27k myself on average, my wife about 23k. I did 43k in my works van from May 2019 to November 2021, but that included all the lockdowns, and mileage was much reduced for a while. I quite like driving really, if I'm being honest. I drive differently depending on who I'm driving with, or the roads I'm driving on. Sometimes I like to slipstream lorries and coaches to see how high I can push the indicated mpg (72.4mpg is the best I've had in the 2013 Octavia Scout, on 107 miles up the M5) and other times I drive like a teenager (like yesterday on the way up to Dulverton for a site visit by myself in my wife's remapped (not by us) Audi A2). I'm in the process of doing my HGV class 1 licence, and I expect I'll enjoy that too. I just don't really like driving in the UK as the traffic can comprehensively remove your will to live. For reference, my long term average speeds in Scotland were 37mph and in Devon 31mph.

The incentives in Sweden for green tech installation aren't that generous now, but there is about 15% off the installation of a solar panel array. I'm not certain how it compares to the UK, but with the green subsidy, a 13kw array with battery and car charger is about £18k. The battery is about £4k of that, and you can get 50% of that back from the government, but it comes off your tax bill. You have to earn to save it, so to speak. I'm not aware of any kind of feed in tariff in Sweden.

Not really. The school run is effectively 50 miles a day. That's 10k miles just there. My wife probably does another 7-8k on other stuff too. Then I cover most of Devon with work. I've been working at Ashburton lately. That's a 76 mile round trip every day. Our family is in the midlands too, so trips to see them are between 360-420 miles in total. We're flying from Stansted tomorrow - that's 225 miles, but my wife is visiting friends in Norfolk with the girls at the moment. I sell a car near Stansted in the morning and join them. 50k a year isn't difficult to do between two people.

We're looking at a panel array plus battery box system, so some gain will still be had. Also, the slightly longer days (we're on the same latitude as Aviemore) will mean that the panels will be producing before we get up and after we're back home through summer. There is about 50% more sunshine May-September compared to the UK, so efficiency should be good. You can also sell excess kw to the grid (and then buy it back when you need it), but I've not yet had a chance to discuss the economics of this with Svea Solar. We've got a chap coming on Thursday to inspect the house ahead of quoting for the installation, so I can ask him then.

No. EV tax is £30/year in Sweden, insurance similar to here, servicing costs reduced compared to ICE and consumables are similar. We'd do more than 12k a year, so the standing charges like insurance and tax become proportionally cheaper, and adding additional mileage allowances to the lease aren't proportionally more expensive.

Oooh, I like the detail and numbers I reckon that a lot of the economy of EVs is what actual mileage you do. Here in Devon at the moment, we do about 45-50k between three vehicles a year. We'll reduce that a fair bit in Sweden as the school run reduces from 11 miles each way to 550m. But we'll still end up doing 36k I reckon. Once you're up to those sorts of mileages, the unit cost of diesel starts to look pretty brutal versus electricity, even at the UK's silly kwh prices. I also have no interest whatsoever in maintaining my own vehicles. I can just about tolerate working on forestry machines, but everything is too cramped and too tight together on cars and me being the size I am, my hands just don't fit into any nooks or crannies. I wish I did have an interest in it, but I'd rather spend an extra couple of hours forwarding and pay someone else to do it. Something else to consider is that ICE car tax is still very cheap here versus the EU average (especially northern Europe). If the government starts to up that, the balance starts to shift a little.

Touché! 😁 I just get lost in the numbers sometimes. I hate inconsistency without explanation? Why does the same product/service cost very different amounts in different places without obvious cause? Anyway, I don't think any of us can deny that Arbtalk is basically a care group for socially dysfunctional misfits, of which I proudly count myself as one

It's pretty apparent that vehicle leasing is another example of rip off Britain. I compared the MG ZS EV, like for like in the UK and Sweden. Both on 12,000 miles/20,000km a year on 3 year terms, same equipment level. UK price is £430/month with £270 fee initially, whereas Sweden, it's £259/month with no upfront fee. And then, assuming you're charging exclusively at home and at night, your electricity for those 12k miles will cost you £977 in the UK and £500 exactly in Sweden. So cost per mile over three years on 12k a year is £0.52 in the UK and £0.30 in Sweden. You really don't have to go back many years and the UK was one of the cheapest places for cars anywhere in Europe. Not at all the case now. Links to leasing sites: MG ZS EV Car Leasing | Nationwide Vehicle Contracts WWW.NATIONWIDEVEHICLECONTRACTS.CO.UK Join the electric revolution and lease the MG ZS EV from just £194.03 ex VAT a month with Nationwide Vehicle Contracts... MG ZS EV Privatleasing - Holmgrens Bil WWW.HOLMGRENSBIL.SE Upplev helt nya MG ZS EV. En bekväm och intelligent SUV som är helt elektrisk. Just nu privatleasing från 2.495kr/mån.

A colleague down here ended up with an MG5 and loves it. By the time the discount had been applied and the older diesel was traded in, it ended up costing him about £14k plus VAT!!

Interesting that the running costs weren't covered. Could you go into a little detail? From my calculations, running diesels in Sweden would cost us around £0.41 a mile whereas the EVs would be £0.21 a mile. There are a few things that am EV would struggle with (heavy towing, longer distance work) but with over £7k saved annually, it offers a substantial budget for car hire. Additionally, I have friends there I can do temporary car swaps with, should we need to.

That is interesting. I guess it comes down to the vehicle you already have, the mileage that you do and your charging options. As I said, an element of it is that electric vehicles (and indeed many others too) are cheaper in Sweden, and the electricity is a third of the price. That is a factor of course.

There was an interesting programme on Radio 4 this week called 'Sliced bread' (as in the best thing since...) where they explore products/services that are supposed to be all that. Anyway, it was electric vehicles this week. Whether you agree with the environmental credentials or not, the one thing that came through was that they are fundamentally cheaper to own and run unless you do very low mileage. So that got my cogs turning, costing our vehicle options for us when we relocate in July. Without boring you all with the details (though I can, on request ), I did the calculations on us being a two vehicle household, comparing our current vehicles (2007 VW transporter, and anticipated 2009 2l TDI A6 estate) with a couple of MG ZS EVs on a 3 year lease. Both scenarios would involve me charging mileage to my business for commercial use of private vehicles. In short, the total cost for 36k miles in the diesel vehicles including servicing and repair, depreciation and fuel and insurance is £14,800. The total cost of leasing the electric vehicles for the same distance is £9200. This assumes current diesel prices (a touch higher than the UK at £1.95/l) and current electricity prices (much lower than the UK, with a 3 year fixed rate about £0.14/kwh). Now I appreciate that I'm working it out for my personal situation and that with electricity and electric vehicles being cheaper in Sweden, there is a degree of bias, but the cost saving is really quite large, especially considering that there is £10k tied up in the diesel vehicles which would be liberated if they were sold. Another consideration is that when we install solar (which is our intention), the electricity effectively becomes free for most of the year. And the £10k liberated from the sale of the diesel vehicles pays for 60% of the 12kw solar system with battery backup and car chargers. Generating our own electricity would bring the annual cost of running the EVs down to £7700, which is a cost saving of £7100 over diesel. I suppose the reason for this post is to perhaps share my opinion that I think that the financial case is now very strongly made for electric vehicles, especially if you can charge from your own generated electricity. This was the conclusion of the Radio 4 programme too.

As comprehensive and well documented evidence emerges of war crimes, genocidal Putin's days are perhaps numbered. There is an interesting series on Radio 4 at the moment exploring Putin's rise to power and his many years holding onto it. It's very informative.

A lot of stations lacking diesel here again. Both Cullompton and Exeter.

Better insulation is key, not alternative energy sources. Retain the heat you have, rather than just pumping more and more in.