Nicky Hatherell 💙🌻

🚨 DO NOT BUY AN ELECTRIC CAR! 🚨 Winter is coming 🥶❄️ This will be my 8th winter driving an electric car, and I can honestly say they’re absolutely terrible. They make you lazy, spoil you and generally teach you that life is far too easy. For example… You don’t have to get up early, go outside in the freezing cold and start your engine to warm the car up. Teaching you that you shouldn’t have to make an effort. You don’t get the satisfaction of scraping ice off your windscreen for 10 minutes while your fingers slowly lose all feeling. Teaching you that hard work isn’t necessary. You don’t even get to sit shivering in a freezing car waiting for the heaters to warm up. Teaching you that you should be comfortable all the time. Instead, you just press a button on your phone while you’re still in bed, and by the time you get outside, the car is warm, the windows are defrosted and the seats are heated. Teaching you that everything should be handed to you on a plate. And it gets worse. You don’t even have to visit a petrol station on a freezing winter morning. You just plug it in at home, go to bed and wake up with a charged car. Teaching you that convenience is easy to find and makes you unappreciative. You can charge overnight for pennies compared with filling up a petrol or diesel car. Teaching you that you don’t have to work hard just to afford things. I am certain this eighth winter will be the one to finally finish me off. So please, whatever you do, DON’T BUY AN EV. Keep buying petrol and diesel cars. Keep telling everyone electric cars are rubbish. We don’t need you discovering how good they actually are and ruining it for the rest of us.

EV DEPRECIATION! HERE WE GO AGAIN! Another day, another misleading chart doing the rounds on social media, claiming electric vehicles are losing over 70% of their value in just three years. Except the entire data is flawed. So how accurate is the data? Let’s take the Citroën ë-C4 as an example. According to this chart: ❌ New price: £32,895 ❌ Value after 3 years: £9,125 ❌ Depreciation: 72.26% Sounds absolutely horrendous, doesn’t it? Except there’s a rather big problem. A brand new Citroën ë-C4 is just under £27,000. And when you look at the actual used car market? The cheapest three-year-old example I’ve found on Auto Trader is just under £12,000, with nearly 70,000 miles. Examples with around 36,000 miles, as used in this chart, are advertised for £13,000+. This is 52% depreciation, NOT 72%! Today’s new price isn’t necessarily what somebody paid three years ago, and advertised used prices aren’t the same as trade-in values. And that’s exactly the problem with these charts. They’re using manufacturer list prices and predicted trade values, rather than showing what people actually paid and what comparable cars are selling for today. Manufacturer discounts, finance offers and specification differences can completely change the picture. And let’s not pretend petrol and diesel cars don’t depreciate heavily either. Losing around half their value over three years is hardly unheard of and has been accepted as the norm for years. But when an EV depreciates by 50%, it makes headlines and people create charts. I’m not suggesting EVs don’t depreciate. Some depreciate significantly, just like some fossil cars. But if you’re going to publish a chart claiming electric cars are losing over 70% of their value, don’t lie and give people like me free content.

You can’t recycle wind turbines. If you’ve ever said this, or believed someone that’s said it, look away now. Do not continue reading if you know it’s going to trigger you. It is one of the favourite arguments against renewable energy, and it has just taken a hit. Scotland’s first commercial wind farm has been decommissioned after operating since 1995. So what happened to all that supposedly “unrecyclable” green technology? 79.5% of it was recycled. 20.4% was reused and repurposed for future spare parts. Less than 0.1% went to landfill. That’s 99.9% recycled or reused. “But the blades! What about the blades?!” Those were processed into a new polymer material that can be used as an alternative to timber, concrete and virgin plastics in construction. It gets worse for the weird anti-renewables crowd… The original wind farm needed 26 turbines. The replacement? Just 14 modern turbines, producing around FIVE TIMES the generating capacity of the original site. Enough electricity equivalent to the annual needs of around 57,000 homes. Of course, this doesn’t mean wind turbines have zero environmental impact. Nothing does. But the next time somebody tells you we’ll have millions of wind turbine blades dumped in landfill while insisting we should continue extracting, transporting and burning fossil fuels forever… Send them this post.