Sales of EVs and hybrids have fallen.

[TheOstrich]

When I was in Saudi there were loads of smaller buses, 20 seater jobs, and they were everywhere. You could buy a day / week / month pass in most shops and supermarkets and just flash it to the driver as you got on. The buses ran everywhere and were always full - day and night. The other interesting thing was that supermarkets became hubs for different routes. There were no direct cross town buses, but you could get one to the supermarket, hop off and get on another. It took some getting used to, but it worked.
Here in Leeds we also have hubs dotted at shopping centres or large supermarkets in the suburbs. Smaller buses come in from the outlying towns and villages then the big buses go into the city centre. The big buses run every ten minutes so there is never a long wait. It's not perfect for everyone, but it works for most, and the buses are clean, well maintained and well used throughout the day.
We also have day / week / month and year passes (individual and family) and the cost is based on a zonal system - inner suburbs, outer suburbs, towns and villages. With a £4.50 day rider ticket I can get from Leeds city centre out to Wetherby, Harrogate or even Skipton.

ROFL, we done all that, over 30 years ago! - 1984, Devon General, Harry Blundred, and Exeter was the pioneer City. We used to live in South Somerset back then and Exeter was a focal point for shopping, so I remember it well.

http://www.exetermemories.co.uk/em/_tra ... inibus.php

Yes, those 16 seater Minibuses were everywhere, running at roughly 5 minute intervals, and by gum were they popular. Cheap and cheerful, the trouble was, they totally clogged up the town centre (see picture of High Street in the article) . You couldn't move without falling over one! Goodness knows what the pollution rating must have been ……

Bus usage went straight through the roof, and inevitably minibuses were replaced by midibuses and then by double-deckers. But double-deckers are expensive beasts, there weren't so many of them, and the bus services then declined. Other cities tried it, notably Oxford, but Exeter was the greatest success.

The key to it all, as you've mentioned in your post regarding Leeds, Frank, was the frequency.

[Suff]

I read these articles and I really hate the way they spin it.....

Because if you look, the headline and the reality are not the same..

Sales of cars with alternative fuels – including battery electric vehicles and hybrids – were down 11.8% in June compared with the same month last year, the first annual decline since April 2017, according to the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders (SMMT).

If you take the real view, then it is a very different story.

Battery electric vehicle sales continued to rise strongly, by 61.7% year on year, but sales of plug-in hybrids, which combine a combustion engine with a battery that can be charged externally, halved compared with last year.

Reality is this. Hybrids were OK to start with but are the worst of all worlds. They use NIMH batteries which are huge polluters and have to be very carefully recycled. They, used properly, give you around 100mpg (equivalent).

BEV or Battery EV's, strongly on the rise, only have 5% vat on their electricity and return a net cost of around 160mpg. At current prices.

My daughter has a boss who has an i3. He was telling her about how "wonderful" it was. She told me she was considering one. However when I told her about the fact that he probably had a charger at home, that she could not get a charger for her off street (but not on driveway), parking on her new build estate, then it came down to availability to charge as her chosen EV would have a range of just over 100 miles.

Chargers available? 5, all 7kw, none at work or near home. Charging time for her mileage on 7kw? 4 hours per day.

At which point the demand died as she drives around 70 miles per day and could not do 3 journeys in one go.

Now, of course, there is the Tesla Model 3 Long Range. Fantastic car, 340 miles range, charging could probably be done twice a week and the savings on fuel would be worth it.

One little problem. The LR variant is not quite available yet and when it is available it will cost around £30k more than the i3....

Early days. It is coming. There is battery tech which claims it can quadruple the power density of Li batteries, effectively giving a 600 mile range for a Tesla style EV. Also the current battery packs have a 500 - 1,500 full cycle range. It means, in reality, around 250,000 miles for a Tesla Long Range before it degrades, which sort of kills the longevity issue. It would mean that my daughter would be able to charge, once per week, for around 1h:30 minutes (with a trip to a supercharger), with the new tech. Also the new tech has a 50,000 cycle rate taking the effective lifetime of the EV battery far beyond 1M miles or the excepted life of the car. Meaning that the batteries could function for decades as house supplies to buffer solar. Unlike most of this "pie in the sky" new tech, this current Li one is actually working in a first model and is so good it has become the primary go to for electrical grid switching. It is slated for volume production at the end of 2020. We shall see.

The press is doing what it does. Making sensational claims for their own ends.

There are issues. The biggest one I see is that the more renewable energy we generate the more the capacity of the grid diminishes. In order to power all these EV's, we're going to need to double the grid at least. Fancy a wind farm at home??

On the recycling thing, modern Battery EV's use Li+ with low cobalt. The Lithium is fully recyclable and is not really a polluter. The same cannot be said for the Prius' of this world which are humungous polluters and have to be very carefully recycled. Just as well the sales are slowing.