I think you’re being a bit pedantic on some points:
- Of course there were mass market EVs around before the Zoe, but from today’s perspective, 2013 is reasonably close to the start of the EV mass market. It’s 13 long years ago, which is a lot further away than the Zoe’s launch was from the Leaf’s launch
- While there are plenty of EVs that haven’t offered heat pumps, my point wasn’t that every EV offered them, just that there have pretty much always been models that have
- 40 min 20 to 80 isn’t *that* far off 30 min 15 to 80. Obviously the latter is better, but c’mon, it’s not a million miles away. I’m not trying to deny that charging speeds have improved, of course they have, and lots, and it’s fabulous. But there’ve always been cars around that have recharged in something not far off half an hour on a road trip. I’ve done road trips for the last decade, and I know 20 is much better than 40, but honestly for either 20 or 40, I’m timing my stop to coincide with a meal and relaxing!

And I disagree on range. Sure, I don’t want to drive for more than 2 hours without a break, but I also sometimes want to drive 200 miles to a place, do something, and drive 200 miles back without having to find a charger at the destination or stop for a break en route. And larger batteries mean much greater battery durability. Early Zoes will see degradation driven primarily by cycles, but last gen Zoes and later EVs will see mainly calendar degradation, potentially extending the working life of cars by a decade when combined with the benefit of fewer moving parts, and thus leading to substantially lower churn in the fleet and lower carbon costs

Finally, I think I’m right and you’re wrong about SSB and range, MG4 notwithstanding. The notorious Donut solid state battery is *absolutely* promising greater energy density: 400Wh/kg! Not delivered yet, of course, and quite possibly never will be. But you said no-one’s promising it, and they for sure are, and solid state is absolutely a method of delivering higher energy densities. The Mercedes EQS SSB prototype doubled the range of the standard EQS, and this was attributed to the SSB. This is a fundamental part of the SSB offer!

It’s not particularly accurate from AI. It will be a bit exhausting to get into all the detail, but for example the devolved institutions are recognised as legislatures of constituent nations with competence over culturally foundational areas such as language, culture and identity policy, reflecting national-status recognition that US states do not constitutionally enjoy. For example, Wales imposing statutory Welsh-language duties across public life.

More broadly, the differences between life in, say, Scotland and England are much more striking than the differences between life in, say, Arizona and Maine.

Peak was 2019, 15.9m. 2025 was 13.3m. The US peaked in 2016 at 17.5m, 2025 was 16.2m. I think the data for both places for both are far too messy to support the PP’s contention that Europeans can somehow not afford to buy new cars (by implication compared with Americans).

I think you have to consider the counter-factual: a world without Tesla. I reckon in the end it had only a mildly accelerative effect, if any, because the Chinese were already committed to the transition at the time Tesla started, and they built the stack, top to bottom. They would have been providing the same push to European OEMs that they are providing right now. There was a time when it could have been very different, but that would have required Tesla to go with the Model 2, not waste time on the boondoggle of the Cyberbeast, make the Semi a reality, and do a lot more with the existing models.

I know he was being a dick, but there really are meaningful differences between the autonomy of the four home nations of the UK and American states or Canadian provinces. The UK is an old and messy place, and it has four constituent countries / nations within a single state. For the purposes of relations with other nation-states, there’s primarily just the UK, but for day to day governance, it’s quite different.

Speaking as a Brit.

1. We talk about British English all the time, when talking about English in the UK vs other places
2. No-one here, not even the most ardent Scottish, Welsh or Irish nationalist, thinks of their countries as having a single native language. For a start, Scotland has both Scottish Gaelic and Scots, as well as Scottish English. Fewer than 1% of Scots have the Gaelic, and Scots exists on a dialect continuum with English. Basically 100% of people born in all four home countries speak English with native fluency.

Too often, these articles have conflated fully electric with all-electric. But not this time: 308,955 full BEVs were sold across Europe* in December 2025 vs 250,449 petrol cars. And it’s the rate of change that’s quite startling: EVs up by more than 100k yoy, and petrol down 55k. If (*if*) we saw the same change next years, we’d be at 400k+ BEV sales and under 200k petrol. That would put BEVs about even with hybrids (381k this year, up less than 20k from last year) and far more than PHEVs (123k this year, up a touch over 30k from last year), assuming their growth rates remain more or less the same. By 2028, on the same trajectories, we’d be above 500k BEVs, under 150k petrol, and it would be blindingly obvious that BEVs were the dominant drivetrain.

For those of us who prefer quieter streets and cleaner air, this is a big, big win — especially when coupled with the other modal shift happening — the rise of microtransportation (cycling, e-bikes including e-cargo and e-trikes/quadricycles, e-scooters).

Of course, there’s a very very long journey ahead. The UK has 34m cars on the road, of which about 2m are now EVs. We buy 2m new cars a year, so even if we were at 100% new EV sales, it would take roughly 16 years for the whole fleet to turn over. And obviously, we’re a way off that. But in 20 years, this transition will be more or less done in Europe, and that’s pretty amazing to think about.

I think some of those items you mentioned, eg, heat pumps for EVs, have been part of the core offer right from the outset. My first gen Zoe back in 2015 had a 400V battery, heat pump, pre-heat, and did 20 to 80 in 40mins. It was, admittedly, a puny battery, but still, it was all of what you described.

I still think there’s a lot of room for innovation and quality. In Europe, in particular, I am convinced that there will be a lot of demand for a supermini with a 300+ mile range. We have a lot of superminis, that amount of range enables a lot more journeys to be done on a single charge to avoid bothering with rapid chargers en route, and this is actually a segment where there’s been stagnation for the last few years — the Zoe I owned back in 2020 already had a 245 mile summer range, and it’s only this year that there’s finally a supermini coming to market with a meaningfully longer range than that, the Kia EV2, which has a range of 278 miles. And it’s still not quite across the 300 mile mark.

Finally, I expect a couple of really significant increments in core tech in the coming years — the arrival of sodium enabling cold starts and lower pricing, and the arrival of semi-solid and solid-state enabling longer ranges. The MG4 will have a semi-solid state option this year in Europe, and is already available in China.

We are definitely seeing some responses from the OEMs too. Sometimes both wacky and intriguing, like this:
https://www.dacia.co.uk/concep...

We are nowhere near eliminating NOx, SOx and particulates from the actual ICE fleet, including new ICE vehicles, given how vehicles are actually used. Everything form cold starts to aggressive acceleration to variability from lab conditions. Much better than a decade ago is still really, really bad. Fundamentally, an air-breathing flame engine has an inherent mechanism that forms NOx that can be somewhat mitigated but not eliminated.

You're also being blithe about the efficiency point. The costs of producing, say, enough fuel for a 787 to go from JFK to LHR with these machines would be absolutely astronomical.

I understand that CO2 is the strategic threat. But tailpipe pollution is a massive tactical threat, and synthetic fuels do not tackle this at all. NOx, SOx, and particulate matter are really awful.

You mean some kind of "baseload"-battery-to-"peaker"-battery charging overnight? I don't really follow. Recharging simply requires an excess of power available, ie whenever supply outstrips demand. In the UK, for sure that's overnight because that's when wind is strongest and demand lowest, but in duck-curve countries, which is most of the world, it's during the day when insolation levels are so high that batteries can be recharged alongside supplying daytime activity.

You've misunderstood how the typical African setup works. There's typically no attempt to back-feed into house wiring, much less a domestic grid. Instead, the solar panels feed a battery, the battery plugs into a microinverter to convert DC to AC, and the appliances plug into a socket directly on the inverter.

I am very aware that microgrids are not domestic consumers taking panels home and plugging them in. You can tell I'm very aware from my previous post, which used the phrase "BUT there are ALSO community microgrids". The words I have now capitalised for you were the big clue that I was already aware. The entire point I was making to the person to whom I was replying was that the scale of solar deployments was not merely domestic and also not nationally significant solar farms, but a local intermediate scale.

Finally, everything really depends on what you are terming a "full" BESS. A community microgrid has storage, so it's technically a VESS. But it doesn't trade on wholesale markets, and doesn't provide frequency response / capacity / arbitrage, because it's not designed as a grid asset. It's optimised for local consumption and prioritises resilience. It doesn't plugs into low-voltage local distribution networks, not a high-voltage national system.

You're thinking of plugging into the grid in the context of the developed world. But in the developing world, especially in Africa where so many communities are rural, plugging into the grid means high fees and capex on local connection reinforcement -- poles, transformers, transmission lines, etc, often 10 or 20k USD per km -- and even after that, you're still left paying for cover for frequent blackouts, voltage instability, and load shedding. The comparison is never the economics of microgrid vs national grid alone, it's microgrid vs national grid + diesel + candles, which is a very different economic benchmark.

Why would you need batteries to replace *baseload*, though? You need batteries to replace peakers, not baseload. You’re looking to get through lulls, you’re looking for dispatchability, these are not what baseload is.

Batteries already beat peakers at substantially higher prices than the $20 figure you mention. I did some maths on this the other day. In the UK:
A 100MW gas peaker would have capex of about £40m, while a BESS is closer to £60m. But that £20m is dwarfed by opex, because fuel costs for the peaker are about £5.5m a year for 500 hours at today’s prices, ie £110m over 20 years.

Obvously this is all very very rough calcs, a proper model would be much more sophisticated and take account of inflation, amortisation, sensitivity analyses for gas prices, etc.

But the basic truths are that there is a thermodynamic floor to the opex costs for a gas peaker that doesn’t exist for a BESS, and that gas peaker capex is going up over time because it’s construction driven while BESS capex continues to fall because it’s technology-driven. The economics goes only one way, both today and into the future.

Thanks for that. An interesting read, especially given who he was and his role