Electric Vehicles

What do you want it for? For cargo?

There are a lot of AWD EVs because adding another motor to the second axle is relatively trivial. You don't necessarily get the ability to spin each wheel independently - you might get that on one axle but not the other. Do you actually need diffs or is AWD sufficient?

(I don't know a whole lot about offroading so happy to be educated if my understanding is faulty)

'Dual motor' usually means AWD.

Most of the current AWD EVs are SUVs:

Autotrader has 9200 4wd EVs:

There are also various vans (Nissan, Renault, now Transit and sone others) and Maxus (LDV bought by Chinese) vans and pickups (quite ropey). Maxus have a new eTerron 4WD pickup, maybe it's better than the older T90.

Theo

Most areas it ( in England, don’t know about Wales ,Scotland an NI ) is tied to the state pension date so 66 for most people. In London and possibly a couple of other places free travel starts at 60 though to be accurate that isn’t actually the National bus pass but something else. Won”t be valid outside the areas, Londoners though also have travel on the Underground and other rail services in the TFL area thrown in.

Younger people tend to be seen earlier or later.

They can be of use if you actually have them but PT cannot possibly serve everyone in the sticks. There is often something available as a last resort like a subsidised taxi to a nearby town to visit the doctors but residents of countryside areas have to accept their lifestyle needs a lot more forward planning once they lose access to a car.

GH

Not sure if I'm missing something, but most of those appear to be VAT payable, plus a c.£1k buyer's fee.

Which makes the few I checked (e.g. at 8.45) more expensive than Autotrader - despite being described as 'good price' on the video.

In England (but outside London or Liverpool) you need to be pension age rather than 60, which I think is 66 for anyone retiring now. Wales and Scotland are 60.

I daresay there are some minor wrinkles in those rules somewhere ...

Its not just people who get to a certain age. :)

I know of someone who moved from the outskirts of London to a rural location. Having purchased a nice property in a small village is when he realised it was a 30 mile round trip to the nearest supermarket, builders merchant, post office, doctors surgery, petrol station etc. or an hour each way to a more cost effective supermarket or to other warehouse type retailers, and the nearest hospital. There is no Uber taxi or delivery for take-aways. Taxis usually have to be booked a day in advance and often not available during school run periods.

Yes, a few of the big supermarkets do offer home delivery in the area.

Salisbury is fine, but Winchester and Portsmouth charge for parking at the P&R. Is it a city or county council decision to charge or not? It's always seemed strange to me that, with its congestion and pollution problems when more than one cruise ship is berthed, Southampton has never had a P&R.

Most car auctions are VAT qualifying, which means you pay VAT on the fees but not on the vehicle, ie the hammer price has no extra VAT. Commercial vehicles are often sold VAT exclusive, meaning private buyers must pay VAT on top if they can't reclaim as a business. This is shown in the listing.

Auction fees are often set high to discourage private buyers, but you can go via an auction buying service who qualify as a high-volume trader and pay much lower fees, even including the fee to the buying service. Can be ~£500 depending on what price bracket you're in.

Theo

Ah gotcha, thanks.

No, these were just passenger cars I was looking at, so no VAT payable on the hammer press I assume.

Thanks - I'll take a closer look come the time.

Fairly early in my career I decided that I wasn't going to commute 30 miles each way to work taking total of 1.75 hours a good traffic day to

I ended up living around 14 miles away from my place of work with the (round) journey taking an hour on a good traffic day and twice as long on a bad traffic day. The travelling times got longer the more years I did it, partly due to the increase in traffic but mainly due to the constant road improvements designed to cut journey times which in fact did the opposite. Since I retired many of these road improvements have been adjusted, with 3 months of lane closures, to improve them :)

I had the option of doing the 14 mile journey by bus or by train and bus. The train bus option would have taken around 2 hours each way and would have included 30 minutes of walking. The bus option was around 2 hours each way mainly because the route wasn't direct, wandering through various A and B side roads with multiple bus stops.

FWIW I've never quite had the numbers stack up for me. You have to pay auction fees, buying service fees and maybe delivery. Meanwhile dealers will be marking up vehicles they bought at auction by X amount. If all the fees added together start to approach X, the value of the auction isn't so attractive. Particularly given at auction you're buying (mostly) sight unseen on the basis of condition reports made by the auction house, whereas with a dealer (or private sale) you can inspect the vehicle in the flesh and test drive it, and with a dealer they're responsible for (some) faults.

For dealers it works because they need to buy stock in volume, they have a tame mechanic to fix faults, and they can take the risk of a lemon among the peaches as it averages out in the end.

But I think there are areas where it can work... eg a 3 year old ex lease car - you know it's being sold as an end of lease not because it's a shed, it's still under warranty which will cover faults, and the condition report covers superficial damage. Or if you're buying something that you reckon most dealers won't touch so hammer prices will be low. Or you buy just before Christmas when nobody is interested in getting new stock so prices are depressed.

It really depends...

Theo

You have seen me on my way into work a year or so back. You probably didn't see all my kit I had with me. I often need to get fairly close to machinery in the woods to repair or service.

In article snipped-for-privacy@news.individual.net>, Jeff Gaines snipped-for-privacy@outlook.com scribeth thus

What you should be a doing in the retirement years is driving the train!

Not cheap but bloody good fun:)

I'm waiting until one of the 3,300 horse Deltic's are up there again the sound of that engine is superb:-)..

If you've got both 1650 HP units running at the same time..

Hmm, most of the commercial vehicles are more for deliveries than offroading.

The Maxus eTerron 9 pickup looks like it'll fit the bill, but it's new and so expensive (£53k+VAT). There are some Skoda Enyaq conversions:

The US has a number of EV pickups but we don't get them.

Theo

As I said peugeot used to make a hybrid that was all wheel driven but I would like something that I could charge at home.

I wonder what happened to those conversions to conventional cars some east Europeans were developing.

It's where much of the more lucrative IT contractor work is/was. Getting to places in Surrey, Sussex and Kent for less money involves a pretty awful daily commute by car. The traffic in the South East is horrendous. At least I could read or snooze on the train up to London Bridge or Victoria.

I actually chose the village where I have been since 1978 because it had a mainline station allowing 'easy' access to London or the South Coast.

Annoyingly, even back in 1983 it was 1Hr 10mins to Victoria (station to station). Today with all the manual signal boxes replaced by computers the fastest time to Victoria before 9AM is 1Hr 20Mins. After then, add another 10 mins.

In 1983 there were two fast trains out of London Bridge to Bognor complete with dining cars in the early evening. Now all gone (dining cars and fast services).

There are Landy conversions:

but they tend to be quite pricey.

There's no real reason why. This chap:

I've not really followed the DIY EV Landy conversion scene but I imagine with some effort welding up adapters you could drop in an EV drivetrain to replace the original engine.

Theo

Not Victoria to Kings X on the Victoria line you wouldn't. That line really belts along when it is running smoothly.

Apart from one occasion when Southlands eye hospital gave me an 8:30AM appointment on a Sunday (yes really), I have always managed to get there by train to Shoreham-by-sea and then walking. Then get the 700 bus back to Worthing and hence up into Sussex. A bit of a circular route but I have all the time in the world.