Linas.P

Black edition was only available in 2018 and it had all the options including ML. One thing I would note is that buying 2018 car you will have to pay new road tax (I believe £140/year) compared to £20 on 2017 car. This is kind of annoying, because I think 2018MY are the best RCs in my opinion - not FL (I don't like how they look), but already includes LSS+ and Widescreen Sat-Nav. To be fair I would not pay extra £3000-4000 they are are asking for this particular "black edition" - there are other cars with lower miles and lower price, or same price and FL models. Besides back on black is kind of too dark in my opinion, but that is personal preference I guess.

Key advantage of Hydrogen station is that it enables everyone in it's vicinity to own Hydrogen vehicle. What is considered reasonable distance to travel obviously is personal thing, but I would say ~20 miles is feasible.

LC is indeed tempting car... probably even good investment. Regarding hydrogen... I really doubt we see any IS/GS car returning and using hydrogen. I think the most likely hydrogen Lexus would be LS (because it is based on the same platform as Mirai mk2). LC is based on same platform as well, but I doubt Lexus going to release GT coupe with 7.5s 0-60... for LS it is less of an issue. Perhaps we will see some crossover monster thing with hydrogen cell, but I would not be interested in that either.

I have answered your question. It is not future, it is present ... even past for some. You can already own hydrogen car and reach any part of UK in it.

There are other way to answer this... In Europe saloons have always been very competitive niche, it is even referred as "European/sports saloon" in say US. This is distinct car which isn't really popular in US or generally worldwide... they have their full-size saloon (sedan) cars in US well represented by such cars as Ford Crown Victoria or Lexus ES. These are large cars made for cruising at highway, but not very sporty. Lexus decision to make IS and GS was a shot at specifically BMW 3 and 5 series European Sport saloons... Perhaps the reason Lexus decided to stop making IS and GS is simply because: The market is far too competitive/unprofitable they simply lost the game for BMW/MB They tried hard, but sadly they were never been able to make competitive European/sports saloon which would be recognised as market leader. Same could be said about Ford - Mondeo was popular in early 90's, Sierra in 80's before Germans found the way to dominate the market. Nowadays no exec drives Mondeo, despite it being normal in 90s. BMW/MB simply managed to establish themselves as a market leaders and other manufacturers simply could not bother to invest money needed to offer competitive product there.

@Malc - No, there won't be another IS. I would go with the first guess - no more IS ever worldwide. If there is going to be global saloon version it will be ES based car. Not exactly sure how UX300e represents 3L petrol engine? I think this nomenclature is long out of the windows and the last car to somewhat represent it was GS450h... 300h never represented equivalent to 3L petrol... so these number have long become arbitrary model names showing where the car sits in the range and nothing else.

It is not ridiculously false... It is a fact that to fully charge BEV with standards socket will take 2-3 days. That you have decided to include rather arbitrary circumstances and conditions to suit your story that is your problem not mine. I never said people drive 180miles everyday, but it would not be unusual to do it once a week or once a month... and if that makes your car unusable next day, then it is quite a big issue. Again you pedal same ridiculous idea that - either can simply charge from the socket already... which is not at all universally true, or that people most can install the charge (no they can't) or they already have one (no they don't). Let's just agree on on thing - owning BEV will inevitably require significant change in how we use the cars, the charging times significantly reduces flexibility of how, when and for how long the car could be used, where it could be charged etc. I agree that there will be few people for whom it may not be an issue, but most likely (as it is today) most of BEV owners simply going to have 2 cars... once BEV for just run around the town for short trips and another one ICE when they want to go further. This isn't exactly good solution and certainly it isn't very environmentally friendly. 2 cars even if one of the are BEV will pollute more over their lifetime than 1.

I have said many times that I hate several cars because they are too slow, but frankly even I think that 2.5s in family SUV is stupid and unnecessary. I understand there are cars where 0-60 is the key selling point (supercars, hypercars etc.), with exception of those the only think which matters to me is acceleration enough to be able to safely accelerate and join the traffic. I don't think there is definitive answer to that, but 5-6s 0-60 should be enough to safely join any road and for overtaking. In short - I think what Tesla is doing with Plaid versions is just stupid and wasteful. Not to mention this extra acceleration is pollution as well. Let's just face it - Tesla is not a green car. Yes they took BEV technology and are very successful with marketing themselves as "green" , but performance BEVs are very far from actually being green. As @Las Palmas mentioned many times here - CO2 emissions is not the only way to look at how green the car is. In fact I much less worried about global warming and CO2... which may or may not impact humanity in 10000 years, but I am very worried about much more acute problem like plastic and heavy metal pollution which is poisoning our food sources right now!

You are banking on that something needed the electricity exactly when there is sudden excess. We are not talking about general peaks and quite times here, there are demand fluctuations and that is what causes most issues. Secondly, to charge these cars there are still transmission losses and the charging itself is not 100% efficient either. This doesn't disprove my statement in any way, nor it makes Hydrogen production for excess power not viable - you simply just assume BEVs could take a use of excess capacity in the network... which is true in theory, I just don't think networks and charging points could manage the transmissions so precisely to eliminate waste completely. It is definitely much more easy to do it at power station level - because power station can sense excess almost instantly. The second statement just oversimplifies the issue. No you absolutely can't charge modern electric car using domestic socket, because it may take 2-3 days to do it. You assume that every one simply going to charge the car back to the range they have used during the day everyday... again I can see many issues with that. Simple example - I decided to drive to the seaside on Sunday, which is around 140miles each way... give or take. So 280miles range is gone and because you generally get less range once A/C, cooling, heating and music is on this would mean I could barely manage this even in long rage Tesla. On Monday I have to drive to client meeting 40 miles from home... so again I need at lest 120 miles of range.... There is no way I will be able to recharge it at home, because it would take 17 hours. Sure I may be able to recharge enough to reach fast charging point, but then I need to factor extra 30-60minutes into my morning... For me that would be disaster, because I already hate morning as it is, if I need to wake-up hour earlier, then I may as well just run ICE car. Or maybe I decided to go to the beach both days, Saturday and Sunday - there is no way I can do that with home charging BEV. In short - you can't take average annual mileage, divide it by day and assume that every person will drive exact same route every day and thus can simply recharge at home. This is not how it works in reality... journeys will warry significantly and there will be days when car will not be used, and there will be days where car needs to do 600 miles in a span of 2 days.

Interesting information above. From the script it seems like LAS director had really hard time and was pressured into taking his words back in the name of "political correctness" ("how dare you undermining our cunning plan of traffic calming features!"). I have seen quite a lot more research from US, but I generally tying not to use research outside of UK as other countries may have different circumstances. I think it would be fair to say that traffic calming features causes both additional pollution and delay to emergency services. That is fact. However, it seems there are no recent research in UK which would quantify definitive impact. In such case I would have a go at speed bump with a hammer at night... definitely not selling the Ferrari 😄 But the owner may have recognised the bigger issue - even if he can leave the shared drive.... he still lives in the country littered with these nasty things... and having a go on each of them with a hammer at night is probably not worthy. I personally hate speed humps and narrow gates - I think they are absolutely retarded idea, with exception of access roads and parking. I don't mind chicanes actually, but they still increase pollution.

No I just said, that it would be much more difficult to visit it with EV without Supercharger being there. For many older/lower range EVs it would be actually impossible. And I still believe that you decided to visit Fort William (instead of literally any other beautiful place in UK), because BEV charger network allows it. It is not my issue that you have totally failed to understand what I said. Simply said - you currently can reach any part of UK with HCV, but you would have to start your journey, or drive via one of 4 locations - Aberdeen, London, Sheffield or Swindon. That said with 400 miles range, this isn't as much of an issue at it may seem. Likewise you probably would need to live no more than 20 miles from those locations to make it viable, so it limits the access somewhat. I never said I am planning to buy hydrogen car - good old petrol completely satisfies my needs. However, contrary to what you said "most of drivers could charge at home" - I said "it would be easier for me to own HCV, than BEV". And that is true, because I live 5 miles from Hydrogen station, meaning I can own HCV and reach any part of UK in it, yet I can't charge car at home, so I can't own BEV. Going back to the topic - if there would be new IS BEV and assuming I would like to buy it, I just can't buy it because I can't charge it. But if new IS would be HCV, and again assuming I would like to buy it... I can buy it and use it without any issues. So for me HCV is better than BEV...

Actually, I finally find the type of research I was looking for... sadly it is 2010, but we can only assume situation got worse in last 11 years, certainly didn't improve. The key take away for me - arguing "off-street" vs "on-street", or counting parking per household is pointless, actually what we should be counting is actual number of registered cars vs. number of available spaces with charging facility. Key table is here: By looking at the table - it would be easy to assume that 41% of garages and 26% of off-street parking means there is 67% of spaces where charges can be installed, however this could not be further for the truth. The definition "off-street" does not mean car is parked in the place outside of home with charger for BEV or even possibility to have one. What it means is simply that car is not parked on the public road... that is all! For example my parking space in garage is considered "off-street" parking, likewise neighbours parking spaces outside of the building on the road are considered "off-street", because they are on private land. Clearly neither could be used to charge BEV despite being off-street. Another interesting fact - in UK there are over 10 million garages, but as we know almost no council garages have provision for electricity and frankly they are not suitable to park the car at all. I was once offered council garage and my car literally could not fit thought the gate (like majority of modern cars). This means that number of garages skews the number of available "off-street" parking, because let's face it - most of the people who have council garage uses them as a storage, but actually parks their cars on the street. Sadly, this research was done before BEVs were relevant, but based on few sources we can try to get some picture. We know how many parking spaces there are (or were in 2010), but we don't know how many of them are suitable for charging. Based on following source, currently there are ~300k private chargers and ~42k public chargers in UK. Another source estimate suggested that 350k more will be installed in next 4 years (with caveat that they quote only 120k chargers currently exists). What does that mean? Even with optimistic predictions there will be ~800k chargers in UK by 2025. It means that industry is estimating far less charging points than I did! I said that I would assume ~15% of household would have access to charger (now) ... industry itself is estimating only about 800k in 2025, out of 26 million parking spaces (going by 2010 stats) - that is less than 3%! And here we have people saying "simple - just charge at home"... "majority of people can charge at home"... yes if "majority" is 3% maybe... but last time I checked my English the "majority" had different meaning. In summary If we distil the question to "how many households have access to off-street parking", this answer is 67% (in 2010) and I guess that means Colin is technically right. But if we ask what actually matters - "how many of 32 million cars in UK could be parked in the space at home which is suitable for charging"... Then the answer is completely different - firstly there are no research to answer this questions and secondly - it is quite clear there are not many.

Colin is knowledgeable man and well respected, but I if he is talking non-sense then it is non-sense! That does not mean I don't agree with him on 100 other topics 🙂

In theory yes - because currently you only share the station with 100 odd people in the entire country. But the main advantage is that filling hydrogen takes ~2 minutes per tank, so single pump has like 30 times the capacity of BEV charging point. Actually, I tried to plot the range of where you can get in HCV today... and you can get to absolutely any part of UK with some range to spare (400+ miles range, meaning you can go 200 miles from the station and back). However, assuming you need to live within 20 miles from hydrogen station to make it viable to own HCV... this means very few people can do it - basically only cities of Aberdeen, London, Sheffield and Swindon are covered... however this already means there are more people with access to Hydrogen fuel (~11 million) then there are people with access of car charging at home (~9.9 million), because obviously unlike with BEV you don't need to charge HCV at home!

This is actually very flawed assumption - look again at the graph I have already copied in this thread. 48% of electricity produced is wasted due to transmission loses and fluctuation in demand e.g. electricity demand suddenly drops at night, but you can't just reduce the output of nuclear reactor, or there is high wind during all the night, but nobody needs the electricity from wind turbine - so this electricity will be wasted. The alternative is to have hydrolysis plant near the station and as soon as there is excessive demand you can start converting water into hydrogen. Not only this saves wasted energy, but as well it produces basically free hydrogen and still allows to have enough capacity for periods of high demand. Not to mention such hydrogen would be easier to store and transport than current solution (used Tesla batteries). Likewise it does not require installing recharging infrastructure in residential buildings. Overall - the energy required to produce hydrogen is similar to that need to charge BEV if we start producing hydrogen on large scale from excess energy we produce. The reason why hydrogen production is so inefficient currently is because we take electricity as end product and use it to make hydrogen after transmission, instead of making in the power plant itself as soon as there is excess. Finally, you repeating same debunked claim - NO majority of car owners CAN'T charge BEVs at home. Your second paragraph just doesn't make sense overall. What is more tiring?.. to drive 600 miles with 3 coffee stops in 8 hours, or to drive same 600 miles with 3 coffee and charge stops in 11 hours? Both would be tiring, but I am sure adding 3 extra hours required to charge car will make last 200 mile stint impossible after 8 hours already on the road.

Again you playing same hypocritical line. I have already answered your question - it is impossible, because there are no hydrogen stations near Leicester. ... and no I am not joking at all... and you know that without Supercharger being at Fort William it would be nearly impossible to visit it with average BEV. Only very few long range BEVs can actually make that journey and comeback to either Glasgow or Inverness. Looking at the map is kind of obvious realistically you need 240 miles of actual range (so ~280 miles claimed) to go from Glasgow and back, otherwise you have to go around via Perth>Aviemore/Inverness where you will still need BEV with 140 miles or more of actual range which most of BEVs can do nowadays: If you say having Supercharger in your destination does not affect your planning, then I just don't believe you. That is the same as it is impossible for me to drive BEV anywhere at all, because I can't charge it at home. Yet I can easily own HCV and go to both Fort William and good 200 miles in any direction from London. Not to mention Hydrogen network is in complete infancy at the moment and playing the same line as you I can say that "in future you can simply fill hydrogen in any petrol station".

They have tiny battery, comparable to that one on ICE vehicle and you know it. HCVs are not better than BEVs, this is silly statement because we know that battery technology is much more mature (in fact if over 100 years old). However, HCVs are de-facto cleaner, whereas BEVs are de-facto faster. But if we making such comparisons then nobody would be surprised if 1.2L Toyota Yaris would be cleaner but slower than Porsche 911. You can't do such trip with HCV car simply because you don't have Hydrogen stations near Leicester, but this is good example of your hypocrisy - you see I don't have way of charging BEV at home either. Now assuming you can refuel hydrogen new Leicester (which you currently can't), then the journey to Fort William would be possible and would take about the same time (via Sheffield and Aberdeen for refuel). On top of that let's be honest here - big part of why you chosen Fort William as your destination is because Tesla Supercharger is there (so it is very convenient), but let's not pretend that you don't have to look at the charging points location before you decide if you could go there. Something one never needs to do in ICE car...

Yes but that is because you represent minority who have ability to own EV and charge it at home. Just to be clear I am not completely against EVs and I see benefits of owning one is city, however where we need to agree is that this is not solution for majority of population. It just isn't... I personally seriously considered BMW i8, that is not BEV, but the battery only range on it was enough for me to get to work in central London, meaning I rarely have to refuel it and I woudl benefit saving £12.5 a day on congestion charge. So I made a lot of enquiries about installing the charging point. Building management company was actually supportive, but freeholder refused to grant permission. As far as I know they have to do risk assessment for entire building again, because car charging was not in original plan and I was told that is very expensive (in a millions?). So I just could not have it... end of story... what is the point of having PHEV or even worse BEV if you can charge it. This is reality for most of people in the cities and because majority live in the cities, that means for majority in the country... period. You can keep ignoring this fact, but that doesn't change it. Another statistic which support above is the fact that majority of BEV buyers are no the people who upgrade their existing BEV, to new one... why do you think it is that? Because people who can have BEVs mostly already have them, the rest of the country either can't afford them or can't own them because of practical issues like parking/charging. That is the present. You could argue that in future things will change and they may change, but then don't say it is past, or that it is present. It may be past for you, but for most of the country it is future. So just admit you do not represent average brit, certainly not majority and that you are in the minority. That is just a fact.

All those surveys conducted by professionals... sadly you have not linked any here. I admit that my figures are "educated guesses" at best, at least I have looked-up some actual statistics and explained how I came to estimates/ conclusion. As I said before the mere fact that one estimate is 50% and another is 75% already shows that both estimates are incorrect. We not talking about accidental chance of getting hit by lightning here, we are talking about quantifiable thing - parking space. So there should be no significant disparity... If you look at any estimates provided by goverment, they are always estimating that: energy consumption will continue to fall and even that fall will accelerate... which is massive assumption is that number of cars overall going to be much lower in future... again I am not convinced they are only estimating that ~10-25% of cars will be EVs (by 2030)... which begs a question, what will be remaining 75-90% if they planning to ban ICE sales the same year!? In short I agree with you - it is far easier said than done and this "lamp-post" charging sounds to me like typical politician lie when they are confronted with the facts of suitable parking and charging points... "no worries - in future somehow we will have charging point on every lamp post, so you don't need to worry about charging at home"... BS!

your conclusions are no less deluded and could easily be debunked... If research would be at all accurate, then it would say how many homes exactly have parking, especially off-street. Saying that is something between 50-75% just shows that the research is pile of 💩. Not only that, but if you have ever spent time look at homes to buy or rent (sadly I have recently spent weeks doing it), what you will find is that off-street parking is especially rare. The councils said they will provide lamp-post charging - that is true. But please enlighten me how many of those have actually been installed so far? I think you will have to agree whatever was done so far is negligible amount... what they have promised to do in the future that is another questions, but we talking here about the present. You are saying urban areas are "not-valid" representation of country as a whole? I would argue that considering 82% of people live in urban areas and BEV are most beneficial especially in urban areas, this makes your statement which invalid itself. Again what number of people will own cars in future is just speculation, so there is no point discussing it... but I agree that rates of car ownership in the urban areas are lower... perhaps because people can't find where to park them, never mind to charge them.

Read my post first... I said detached homes will always have off-street parking, this isn't strictly true, but there will be very few exceptions. However, I have tried to estimate how many terraced, semi-detached and flats could have parking as well. If you just bother to read then you would know. Secondly, having off-street parking does not mean you could charge your car there. Finally, the reality with flats is that not only you may not have charging, you may not have parking space at all! Not sure in what sort of flats you have lived, but in all flats I have ever lived in London parking space number was never higher than 50 spaces per 100 flats, in my current apartment it is 30 per 100 and despite it being technically "off-street" and despite me having my own dedicated parking space I can't charge my car there as freeholder won't give permission for it. Unless you have some data to prove otherwise... I stick with my conclusion that vast majority of people can't charge EVs at home.

I doubt they would simply sell you FL upgrades. Same thing as you can't buy FL lights, bumpers etc, or F-Sport bumpers for non-f-sport car. @Winghui Pang Your best bet is to get your callipers refurbished and painted in any colour you like... in the end of the day it is mostly only the paint which is difference between Orange Pack and normal callipers.

No you can't!.. you just assuming everyone have of street parking with electrical installation capable of charging EV. This is very ignorant considering that majority of the people in UK don't have this. So for example for me it would be easier to fuel hydrogen car than BEV, because I have hydrogen station 5 miles from where I live. I mean sure 13 stations in UK is far cry from the density in say Germany, or something we could consider sufficient, but don't forget you only need to refuel hydrogen car once in 1000 miles or so. I would be ignorant to say "maybe you are living on different planet" when myself I live 5 miles from hydrogen station, but that is exactly what you do with your "you can charge it at home statement"! The dwelling type statistics in UK is as follows: Terraced 27.4%, Semi-detached 25.0%, Detached 17.9%, Bungalow 8.8% and Flats 20.9% I don't have exact stats for off-street parking, but with 82% of population being urban it not going to be great. The only dwelling type which is likely always have off-street parking is Detached, so only 17.9%. This does not mean they have right electrical installation - so maybe only half of detached houses can charge BEV at home. And I will make same assumption for the rest of dwelling types (only half of those who have offstreet parking can charge at home). Following on - almost all terraced houses won't have off-street, so say only 10% can, maybe 25% of semi-detached and bungalows and finally none of the flats... again maybe 10%. If my math and assumption are correct this leaves only 15.6% of household who may be able to charge their cars at home and 84.4% who can't. I would not call it "you can simply charge it at home"...

Yes... but what worries/annoys me the most... that we now know it is the case, this is not secret! Yet government and councils continues to add new traffic calming features every day. In short making mistakes is "fine", but not learning from them is the main issue. Now I say "fine", because I believe for the goverment it isn't actually "fine", I consider that they should always do more due diligence, but I accept some mistakes will be made - they are just people after all. This reminds me the "diesel gate" - it as known for quite some time diesel cars are much dirtier than CO2 figures suggests, yet goverment continued to push (incentivise via tax) diesels all the way to ~2016 and only really started penalising them recently... ~2018 maybe... yet still to this day you can get new diesel and actually take advantage of lower tax in some case. Again - obvious issue for everyone, diesel gate actually started in US in 2008, clear conclusions were made in 2012 and WV was already penalised in court in 2015... why did it take UK so long to do anything about it? To be fair it doesn't seems like even today they have done enough... So it is this failure to recognise and correct past issues which is most annoying. But obviously it being goverment I would expect better decisions from them overall. More facts based and less political (I know this is not realistic with the bunch we have...)

It was a study done by emergency services where they calculated how many people dies on average per minute of delay, then they calculated how much ambulances and other emergency services are delayed, to come-up with conclusion that more people dies from traffic calming features that are saved by reduction in speed. I would agree it is theoretical increase, but likewise traffic calming features are justified by theoretical decrease - so I think it is just fair comparison. In nutshell - traffic calming features actually does not work as a way to reduce deaths. I will try to find the article. LTNs are not traffic "calming" feature, they are literally blocking off the road in the middle and making 2 dead ends from both sides for access only. What I consider traffic calming feature are speed humps, narrow gates and chicanes... roundabouts depending on how obstructive they are could as well be considered as such. Regarding "reductio ad absurdum" - not sure what is your point... I think we all agree that it is both true and absurd at the same time. Like - let's make all knives dull and we won't have accidental cuts... yes except then we will lose utility of having a knife! Edit: 1. Apparently The National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) has estimated that Pollution caused by speed calming measures kills additional 25,000 people a year. I would take this with a grain of salt (maybe quite a lot salt actually)... because it means 1/6th of all deaths are caused indirectly only by traffic calming features (ridiculous). 2. More realistic estimate comes from London Ambulance Service - they claim that more than 500 deaths from cardiac arrest a year could be caused by traffic calming features delay in London alone. Extrapolated for UK that would be ~3000 deaths. If we take road deaths number in UK last year ~1700, this makes my statement correct - traffic calming features causes more deaths by causing delay to emergency services... actually quite significantly more than they could ever save! Because assumption is that traffic calming features reduce some of deaths, but if LAS estimate is correct then they cause almost twice the total number! Add fee deaths from what NICE estimates and they look even less appealing!