ARE ELECTRIC CARS THE NEXT BETAMAX? [EV News – Week 3, 2024]
In this week’s EV news seat might not be dead after all as it sort of commits to keep making cars electric cars could go the way of betamax according to Mike Rutherford from Auto Express electric van maker arrival is in a bit of a bad
Way as they teet are on the edge of insolvency and EV sales are on the rise in Australia and well it’s exactly the brands that you’d expect to be doing well that Are welcome back to another EV news now last week I talked a little bit about the fact that 85% of you that watch this channel regularly are not currently subscribed and how you could help me do something about that and you have that number has now fallen to
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You haven’t submitted yet do get your ideas in there right then on with the news and there might be hope after all for seat’s future last year there was a little bit of an uproar in the automotive press when seat boss Thomas sh AER said that
The future of seat was cpra and the cpra brand that has now been sort of spun out of seat to sit on its own strongly suggesting that the seat brand would no longer be used for cars once the current model range that they’re currently still selling runs out so runs its natural
Course the owner Volkswagen group was said to be looking to find a different role for SE in their portfolio and that it wouldn’t necessarily continue to make and sell cars SE and CA UK boss mark cion has now told autocar that the brand is still growing alongside cpra and that
Seat will have a car in 5 years time he says they’re said to be working hard to find the right entry level for the Volkswagen group so that se is properly positioned to be a brand that adds value and there’s a strong inclination that this could actually take the form of a
Small cheap EV that could be twined with the rumored upcoming Volkswagen id1 the entry level small sub20 Grand EV that were promised is going to be coming from the Volkswagen stable well we could see a SE badged version of it if this did happen and obviously it’s a very very big if at
The moment despite auto car doing what they usually do and producing these renders of what they think it might look like and all that I can show you those um you’d be looking at a cheaper entry into the Volkswagen stable slightly priced below the id1 right and making SE
The sort of entry level brand and really it being a a successor to the cat me the little electric super mini that they have discontinued now but as far as I know was pretty successful and a lot of people actually really liked now I’m no huge fan of seat to be honest I’ve
Always considered scod to be the entry level to the Volkswagen group and they offer proper value and they actually offer models that I maybe actually want to buy I’ve never particularly liked say Interiors for example and I’ve always found myself a little bit confused about what the purpose of the brand was I
Can’t be the only person in that boat although I know some people get oddly sentimental about them having said that if they do pull this off a cheap entry level EV for less than 20 grand it’s exactly what the Market’s looking for isn’t it and therefore it could be very
Very successful indeed I think it’s crazy that they discontinued the electric SE at me along with the equivalent Volkswagen e up and the scor a city goal because that is for me exactly the kind of car that the market really really needs and doesn’t currently really have from very many
Brands let me know what you think though should SE hang on in there and become the entry brand for the VW group or like me are you not particularly first and would rather just see scod fill that role well let me know what you think in the comments next up electric cars could
End up like betax according to Mike Rutherford from Auto Express now people drawn on about this all the time it has to be one of the most common tropes I hear about EVs and people say it over and over again in the comments and people say it down the pub
And oh they’re just the betamax of the automotive industry they’ll never amount to anything you know they’ll soon be gone very few people are actually making a valid comparison when they say that I think uh and really mak’s no exception here the reason he thinks EVS are like betamax are customer perception real
World range and retail prices so let’s consider those in turn shall we on customer perception he says the answer is that manufacturers need to stop talking about bevs battery electric vehicles and instead use the term pure electric or fully electric it’s more appealing easier to understand I’m not really sure what
Difference that will make to be honest customer perception is largely driven by all the crap you see in the media and very little L worries really about what you call them so you know he he even says that electric cars would also be a fine term to use well that’s what most
People call them anyway and I don’t think what the manufacturer puts in their press release really has any difference to people’s buying habits and and doesn’t really affect customer perception Real World Range that’s something I can get behind the wltp test obviously it’s standardized it’s the
Same for every car and it’s meant to help you compare but the test conditions mean that it’s really really difficult for that to be reflective of a real world range and people see the X miles that a manufacturer says a car can do and they
Say Well it must do that why doesn’t it do that it must be broken or they’re no good those electric cars because it doesn’t do the X number of miles that they said it would do but it’s because it’s a standardized test in a lab and you know it doesn’t reflect the real
World and I’ve said this before I’ve said before that a standard for a real world range that everybody needs to follow would go a long long way to improve consumer confidence and improve the experience for everyone if you fully understand what the winter range would look like
For example based on a realistic test that everybody needs to follow then it would save a lot of that surprise and negativity that you get in the winter when you know there it won’t go quite as far as it usually does uh that seems to
Do that does seem to catch a lot of people out and and a little bit more transparency from all manufacturers in the same way would help a lot with that so I do kind of agree with that In fairness retail prices though well it’s the usual Trope isn’t it about how
Private buyers can’t afford them and they only get bought by company car buyers because they cost too much and it’s a little bit like the smmt with their calls for vat reduction that we talked about in the previous video and well to this I say what I always do when we discuss price
And if the cost of a new EV puts you off and for a lot of people it does buy a secondhand one and if you can’t stand the thought of someone having farted in the seat before you then buy a pre-registered one you’re at least cutting down on the number of people
People that have farted in that seat before you and you’ll still save an absolute Fortune people and by people I mean private buyers weren’t buying new diesel Munds and vas and stuff like that in fact Publications like all Express and what car and stuff like that we’re
Actively encouraging you not to as sort of consumer advice say well depreciation is really high so buy a cheap bargain used one when The Fleets have done with it and it was a good thing a lightly used diesel car a bargain secondhand price was a bargain but an EV is a depreciation Nightmare
And you shouldn’t go anywhere near it and I don’t follow the Logic Let The Fleets deal with the depreciation because obviously they’re getting the big uh tax reductions and all that stuff and buy second hand buy lightly used and get on with it right the article itself
Talks about how an electric cors has 32 Grand and a petrol one is just under 20 but since when have list prices of vool vehicles being particularly important you can go to a vool main dealer right now and you can buy an electric Corsa for less than 20
Grand pretty much exactly the same price as the petrol one in fact hasn’t turned a wheel probably delivery mileage pre-registered and i’ I’ve even seen occasionally them pric slightly lower than what the petrol one cost list prices are not relevant the fact that the list price is 32 Grand has no
Bearing if as a private buyer you can into dealer and buy one for less than 20 so the price difference it makes no real difference to whether someone would buy one or not because surely you’re not just looking at the brochure and going oh it’s 32 Grand I can’t afford that
When you see that you can get one for less than 20 that will definitely change your perception very very quickly so the they’re too expensive thing is very very quickly fading away and as I say less prices of volume cars like vxs Etc were never important to private buyers and they still
Aren’t so nonsense for clicks basically is how I’m summing up this article although I’m sure a lot of you say that about some of these videos but it’s barely even a valid comparison to beat Max is it let’s be honest the failure of beamax was primarily due to the way it
Was marketed at the end of the day Sony Executives were convinced that recording time of an hour was more than sufficient and therefore you know tapes that could record for an hour was was what everybody wanted cuz they were going to record some TV shows and therefore that
Would be absolutely fine sort of completely ignoring the fact that films exist and people are going to want to not only record them but you know Supply tapes with films on and VHS tapes could run double that right out at the gate and look I don’t need you to comment
About range and compare range to recording time because that’s not what we’re going for here but I think people who go on about this are are basically saying that petrol cars are VHS and EV are betamax but if we’re going to compare Technologies here they should probably both be zero emission right
Because everybody always forgets about the whole emissions thing and and talks about these comparisons but let’s compare two zero emissions Technologies shall and compare battery electric with hydrogen fuel cell for example um I certainly know which one of those is beta Max I don’t know about you
But let me know what you think in the comments used bargain of the week time though where I select a used bargain from auto trader and tell you what I think about it basically now given the first story in this week’s video it has to be SE doesn’t it and unlike last time
Actually a car it’s a seat me of course the electric version of the ever popular super mini £1,495 buys you this lightly used example uh sensible small City car with a 36 KW battery and according to EV database a real world rate range of 130 mil seems like an absolute bargain to me
If you can live with a size it’s a little bit smaller than a Zoe which you can pick up for sort of similar money uh but for some people it’s all the car you need and all the car you want people don’t like big cars they want something
Small and I mean okay it’s not going to be much use for pounding up and down the motorway but it’s probably better than the petrol version for Motorway Journeys let’s be honest if you don’t need to go like huge distances but you need to travel at higher speed so the EV drivetrain will
Inevitably be better than the little uh three-cylinder petrol engine to listen to um but ultimately as a city car doing City Car things it’s absolutely ideal for it values of these actually almost seem to be firing back up a little bit I swear you could buy these for like n
Grand under 10 grand not that long ago so it’s quite interesting if if they’re creeping back up again but yeah for me say at me just over time Grand looks like an absolute bargain next up it’s not looking good for arrival the British electric van start up that well they promised to
Reinvent the van firm is in talks with accounting firm ey about acting as administrator should it have failed to obtain rescue funding they went public during the pandemic capitalizing on the spack boom that we’ve talked about before as investors rushed to try and find the next Tesla and were just
Throwing money at anything BAS basically but it seems that that boom is now over the stock price has fallen 95% in the past year and they’re looking increasingly unlikely to secure rescue funding or a takeover bid it’s unfortunate news although there’s quite a few of these firms around isn’t there
Startups that have sort of promised the world yet have barely built anything and they seem to have very little to show for the sort of quite outlandish claims they’re making so I can’t say I’m hugely surprised that they’re strug strugling now it seems that the S the cheap money
Is drying up and therefore unfortunately time is running out for them I’ll keep an eye out to see what happens with them I’ll bring you an update once we know either way where it’s going but it’s not looking good for arrival and finally it looks like EV sales are on the up in
Australia and the brands that well realistically you’d expect to be doing quite well are doing quite well the top three selling EVS in Australia in 2023 were from Tesla and byd between them accounting for 2/3 of the 87,7 electric cars sold according to the figures released by the federal chamber of Automotive
Industries here’s the top 10 on the screen here well Tesla mg byd and Volvo are absolutely cleaning up the market 7.2% of the 1.2 million Vehicles sold throughout Australia in 2023 were powered solely by electricity that doesn’t sound like a huge amount but when you consider that there are certain
Categories that are really really popular over there that there aren’t any Vehicles available that are fully electric in that actually sounds quite good the Tesla Model 3 is the top selling sedan in the country easily out selling the once dominant Toyota Camry despite it being tens of thousands of
Dollars cheaper there’s also EV action hotting up in the hatchback Market courtesy of the late year arrival of three Circa $40,000 contenders and that is obviously the mg4 the byd dolphin and the AA funky cat or whatever they call it now between those three they accounted
For more than a thousand sales a month in the final quarter of 2023 so it’ be interesting to see next year what the full year sales of those look like cuz it seems like they’re very popular indeed and it means that these three EVS obviously all Chinese stole
14% of the small hatchback Market that includes big players like the Toyota Corolla the the Hyundai i30 the Mazda 3 and the Kia cat I find this particularly interesting just like here in the UK the big manufacturers seem to be stalling with EV rollouts and the Chinese manufacturers are just coming along and
Running away with it and compl completely blowing them away and I don’t really understand why everybody’s being so lethargic about that lower end of the market and they’re just allowing that these big sedes of the market it to be just completely blown away by mg byd Etc
I it’s it’s crazy but it does seem to be happening every but that’s it for this week’s EV news as always let me know in the comments what you think about any or all of these stories as I said earlier make sure you like this video and if you
Aren’t subscribed I would appreciate it if you’d subscribe with notifications turned on so that you don’t miss out on the next one thank you so much for watching I’ll see you next time
In this week’s EV news, SEAT might not stop making cars after all, Mike Rutherford from Auto Express reckons EVs could be the next Betamax, things aren’t looking good for EV van startup Arrival, and are EV sales finally taking off in Australia?
https://www.autocar.co.uk/car-news/new-cars/seat-plots-urban-ev-it-commits-keep-making-cars
https://www.autoexpress.co.uk/opinion/362056/electric-cars-could-end-betamax
https://news.sky.com/story/electric-van-maker-arrival-lurches-closer-to-insolvency-13054073
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/jan/12/electric-vehicles-evs-australia-sales-figures-boom-tesla-byd-toyota-hyundai-mg-kia-volvo-mercedes
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00:00 Intro
01:54 SEAT not dead yet?
04:51 Betamax
11:36 Used Bargain of the Week
13:04 Sad news for Arrival
14:12 Australian EV sales
