China is crushing Europe's electric car dreams
There is another short term problem that has to be resolved before we get to EV cars in Europe. The E.U. car market is in a bit of a holding pattern due to Brexit. This is cramping the style of the European manufacturers even if they have no components coming from little Britain, no manufacturing plant there and no customers there. You would think companies like FCA (Fiat) or Mercedes would be exempt but they are not.<p>I am an evangelist when it comes to EV cars however I don&#x27;t think that everyone is so keen, particularly in the cynical UK. Relatively speaking Americans are falling over themselves to buy Tesla cars, Tesla being a great American success story, even with Elon Musk upsetting people in his own special way and the prices being so high.<p>With the European brands there are tells, if VW come out with a new car there is nobody asking where the EV version is. Same with other makes, that is just not on most people&#x27;s radar, exhaust note matters more. I think it is a sad state of affairs. There are promises that they will be fully electric&#x2F;hybrid by such and such a date and then they launch a &#x27;G-Wagen&#x27; type behemoth with a monster ICE engine in it. It is like they are hooked on heroin and promise they will give up next week.<p>China is showing leadership and it is about their domestic market and having cleaner cities. You can&#x27;t get permits to drive an ICE car into some cities now, unless you live there and already have an ICE car then your only option is EV. That is fantastic. The Chinese know that they really will be conquering the world with their EV cars. We may mock their cars as not being crash worthy and rip-offs of European designs but we said that about the Japanese and their sub-compact cars. And the Koreans. It is not rocket science, just poach the design team from another company and get styling from an Italian specialist - Italdesign, Pininfarina, there are plenty of good ones.<p>The Chinese cars I am looking forward to seeing are the basic electric cars. When you have a quiet car with no gearbox or vibrations there is no need to make up for having an ICE with cupholders galore, speakers galore, carpets galore and other cruft. People in China have cottoned on to this already through buying second cars - EV cars - to enter the city with. They find that they don&#x27;t really need that &#x27;luxury&#x27; car after all.<p>Once these things enter the EU market the European marques will be doomed, maybe with a few exceptions. The Nissan Leaf&#x2F;Renault Zoe is a product that is going somewhere but consumers are not that interested apart from evangelists. I also doubt that the insistence on 500 km range will be lasting forever - range anxiety. In China you can have 50 mile range and with a supercapacitor that can be achieved with far less batteries. Anything further just hop on a plane. Can&#x27;t do this in Europe where it takes four hours to get in and out the airport.<p>The European makes and the European customers had their chance and they blew it. Tough. I look forward to the 5 year plan of China and a flood of Chinese EV Volvos coming over to Europe to be totally taken up by millenials with kids, leaving fuddy duddy ICE addicts to grow old and die off.