David Craig, on October 2nd, 2023Monday/Tuesday blog
An article worth reading in the Guardian?
Something strange happened last week. The Guardian newspaper published an article which was worth reading. It concerned the massive insurance costs owners of electric vehicles (EVs) are facing.
Here’s how the article started: ‘Driving an electric car should be a win-win, saving money and the planet. So David was shocked when the insurance on his Tesla Model Y came up for renewal, and Aviva refused to cover him again, while several other brands turned him away. When David did secure a new deal, the annual cost rocketed from £1,200 to more than £5,000’.
The article then went on to say: ‘A recent cost of living bulletin from the Office for National Statistics revealed that the price of car insurance – which for many Britons is one of their biggest household bills – is up by 52.9% in the last 12 months.
However, this average masks bigger increases for electric car owners, according to Confused.com. Its figures, derived from quotes, show that insurance premiums for electric vehicles are 72% – or £402 – higher than this time last year, at a typical £959. Meanwhile, for petrol and diesel car drivers, the increase is 29%, or £192, taking the figure to £848′.
Moreover, several insurance companies are refusing to even insure EVs.
The problem seems to be the fragility of EV batteries and the enormous cost of replacing them if you have even just a small bump. As one reader explained: ‘If I curb bump my £4,000 diesel Renault Megane at 4mph it’s a £50 wheel re-alignment at the next service. If a £50,000 EV does the same, it’s potentially a slightly damaged battery and 100% write off. They’re rubbish’.
But I don’t drive an EV, so why should I care?
Reading this you might think, why should I care, I don’t drive an EV? Well, our useless, Greta-worshipping rulers are obsessed with forcing us to either buy an EV or abandon our cars altogether. So, when the politicians see that high insurance costs are putting people off buying EVs, they’ll yet again attack petrol and diesel car owners. If I remember correctly, a few years ago the EU insisted that young male drivers could not be charged higher car insurance premiums than young female drivers, notwithstanding the major difference in risk.
Here’s what Professor Google says: ‘A decade ago, the European Court of Justice ruled that taking gender into account when calculating car insurance premiums violated EU gender equality legislation. Regulations banning the practice came into effect in December 2012 and remain in force in the UK although we’ve since left the EU’.
Gazing into my crystal balls, I predict that charging EV drivers more than ICE (Internal Combustion Engine) drivers, will also be outlawed. So, there will be a massive rise in motor insurance costs for drivers of ICE cars. Maybe our rulers will even decide that as EV drivers are dutifully saving the planet while ICE drivers are supposedly destroying it, perhaps EV drivers may be relieved of paying more than a nominal charge for insurance and therefore must be subsidised almost entirely by ICE drivers?
When this happens, remember you read it here first.
Richard Tice exposes the eco-nonsense
Here is the latest Richard Tice ‘Sunday Sermon’. This now comes from GB News as Tice seems to have jumped ship from Talk TV to GB News:
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I saw an article some time ago about insurance companies which was saying the we should depend on them more to assess the risks, which is their expertise. So if insurance for something was too expensive then what was being insured was not worth doing. Here is a good example.
I’m not sure about Richard Tice. He talks about the industrial revolution as being a good thing but then complains about profits being made from green energy. He does not seem to realise that it is all about money. The industrial revolution happened here because everything came together – iron, coal and the development of steam power. But what made it happen was money and the desire for more money. The money we had came from the slave trade and without it the industrial revolution would not have happened in the UK at that time. People did come to cities from the country for jobs but he ignores the dreadful working conditions and long working hours and poor pay. The industrial revolution was about creating wealth for the rich. The empire was just the same. It only came about because more money could be made from the empire than it took to run and control it. This ended with WWII which bankrupted the UK and it could not afford to run the empire. This was the intention of the USA because it wanted to dominate the world and that is what we have seen. The green revolution is just the same. It is about the rich making money and the consequences do not matter to them because they think they are protected. Tice is right about that, but like all of them they cannot see that the driver of all this is the fake science and that it where we have to focus our efforts to bring this nonsense to an end.
On an entirely different subject but illustrating the nonsense of today. Sunak is telling us that he does not want tax increases because that allows us to keep more of our money. Then he makes the ridiculous statement that reducing inflation puts more money in our pocket. Of course it doesn’t because reduced inflation is still increasing the price of goods and the fact that it is lower does not return prices to their original level. Not one interviewer corrects him.
“Of course it doesn’t because reduced inflation is still increasing the price of goods and the fact that it is lower does not return prices to their original level. Not one interviewer corrects him”
I think you need to be as old as us and have lived with inflation most of our lives to know that prices NEVER go back down again, the best you can hope for is they stop going up so quickly. Most of the interviewers are too young to know this.
Carolyn, this is a fundamental economic issue that interviewers should know about it. The Romans knew about it because it was more obvious when it happened through coin clipping. With paper money we don’t know which notes are worthless.