I'm not "against" EVs but I do think they are far too expensive for what you are buying at this time. Hopefully they will greatly reduce in price when they are the only thing you can buy and/or someone invents some completely new way to make/store electricity. In the meantime, as you say, I think I'm probably as well to try to make the Ibiza last as long as possible.
I think we are seeing an adjustment in the industry at the moment. Cars have been for a very long time now “cheap” if you look at what you can buy these days. To use your own example £11k for a new car is an exceptional deal, if you consider what else you can get for £11k
A new conservatory or kitchen is likely to cost considerably more. Which amounts to some glass panes or some cupboards. A couple of holidays can easily add up to that sort of money. Even technology I posted about buying a treadmill a few weeks back and while no comparable to a car, I paid not far off £1000 there is a huge amount more that goes into a single car than the materials, time and effort into making a dozen treadmill.
The electric car is allowing car companies to rewrite the books, they need the money coming in to survive, they also need the money to keep developing new technologies.
I can see £30,000 - £40,000 becoming the new normal for new car prices at the bottom end. Regardless of how much battery prices fall.
Electric cars don’t need the same sort of servicing they don’t need as much maintenance and they don’t tend to break due to very few moving parts, there is no carbon deposits or piston rings no bearing surfaces to wear. There is no loss of power over time because of these things. There is no exhaust pipes to rust, no gear cables to snap, no gear box fluid to replace and no changing gears to wear out synchros. There is very little in common between an electric car and a combustion engined car. And as a result new electric cars will last longer, they will be more economical to repair and they will hold there value better.
Also years ago a car consisted of 4 wheels an engine and some seats, it was a very simple thing that didn’t really cost all that much to make, when these days even the cheapest cars are very advanced with computers and technology that is not cheap to develop, so profit margins are probably tiny now. They need to sell new cars and they need to do that at a healthy profit, the way many are doing this with electric car is the lease model so that the customer pays for the depreciation and profit but the manufacturers never lose ownership of the car, they can then sell it second hand or lease it again for more money 3-4 years down the line.
The guy who organised my test drive in an ID,3 let slip that by leasing the car it allows vw to control used car prices later down the road ensuring that your new car isn’t suddenly worthless, I think however he wasn’t bright enough to realise if I was leasing the car i couldn’t car less how worthless the car was 3 years from now because it’s still not my car.
