Imagine we lived in a world where all cars were EVs, and then along comes a new invention, the "Internal Combustion Engine"! Think how well they would sell: A vehicle half the weight, half the price that will almost quarter the damage done to the road. A vehicle that can be refuelled in 1/10th of the time and has a range of up to 4 times the distance in all weather conditions. It does not rely on the environmentally damaging use of non-renewable rare earth elements to power it, and use far less steel and
other materials. Just think how excited people would be for such technology, it would sell like hot cakes.

Cheap to insure. Relatively speaking Plus the infrastructure is there for refuelling at about 100th of the time to put any meaningful levels of charge into a battery

. Aot of EV drivers are getting a right shock, (pun intended,) at how much they are to insure.

Simple, they want us off the roads.
To meet all the targets for a renewable future they’ll limit your choice by out pricing you.
Apparently there just ain’t the minerals to make the batteries they need so you’ll be squeezing onto an all standing bus and you definitely won’t be able to afford to go on a train still….we are going backwards when it comes to the freedom to travel.
All to pander to net zero.

I heard that Toyota (?) hd developed a solid state battery that does 100% more miles per charge and with 10 minute charging which may be a game changer.

Add to that 15 minutes zones around the country birth control and major food problems it won't be worth living for 99% of the people. Worse still we are to blame for letting them get away with this shambles by sleeping walking and trusting the greedy bastards who run this money driven hell
hole.

Irrelevant if mineral resources can’t satisfy demand, the price will exclude most people anyway.
Air travel will be the focus over the next ten years, but not a proble if you have the money.

We are exhausting all of Earths easily accessible resources at a pretty good clip and that includes oil as well. So prices are going to go up either way

My Horse doesn't cost that much and leaves some nice "muck" to put on the garden. The problem is it is only 1 Horse Power!

C’mon…they wouldn’t dare put petrol prices up too much so a smooth shift to electric will be the barrier that gets you back on the buses….unless of course you can afford an electric car.

Don't worry as cars become unaffordable the price of bicycles will go through the roof, as will bus, train and taxi prices, we'll end up being pulled around in human driven carriages like they have in the Far East.

When buses were de-regulated in the 80’s, Nicholas Ridley who ‘masterminded’ it visualised bus drivers owning their own buses, you couldn’t make it up.

No different when the utility companies were privatised, every one would own a little bit of them then the share price increased people sold them and the shares were swept up by the big conglomerates.
The original owners of Stagecoach the Souter family allegedly made millions selling of the bus stations most in town centres of the companies they had acquired.

There’s a difference between investing in a company and the ideology of actually owning, maintaining and driving the bus yourself …which was Ridley’s brainwave, for glorified bus co-operatives.

Might work in a city but the majority of the buses run with a few passengers during the day in Hartlepool, a cooperative wouldn’t last 5 minutes. Ridley like most politicians don’t look past Watford.

know of a good few who ran a wheel of someone elses bus. one mysteriously found money to buya blackpool hotel when he only previously lived in an old terraced house.

cars are getting pricier by the year and thats just the old banger market. you,d be lucky now to get something decent for under a grand. add on ever increasing tax an insurance costs with more and more speed cameras, 20 mph zones for no apparent reason, people will just give up on them in the end. never thought i,d ever say this but i,m getting close myself to packing driving in. its just my monthly visit to the vic that keeps me going and then i,m waiting till middle of the week just in case i,ve missed a camera because its deemed a dangerous area because there is a school there. funny how you never actually see these vans when schools are open.

He wouldn’t need to, he allowed London to be exempt from de-regulation of the buses.
Few passengers in Hartlepool? ……really.
If that was the case Stagecoach would be off.

Bought a new diesel car last year and will buy a replacement at 23.55 on the day before the UK Govt finally bans the sale of diesel and petrol vehicles. My job entails travelling to the South East/West regularly (although thankfully not Genghis Khan’s London) and the ugly milk floats are nowhere near capable of an up to 800 mile return journey without several recharges.

Snowy Stagecoach get a lump sum of money from the Council to run the buses in Hartlepool, they can’t lose, they don’t rely on the number of passengers to fund them.

To the best of my knowledge the Council slashed all bus subsidies in 2011 after the Government cut their grant.

That’s why Hartlepool has such a poor bus service, try getting a bus after 6.30 at night although I think the number 6 runs later. Most people prefer a taxi now, door to door instead of standing at a bus stop not knowing if a bus will turn up.

Which is what I said all along…daytime buses are financially worthwhile or Stagecoach would have rode out of town years ago…..evening services are crap, but in council days everything was cross subsidised for the benefit of everyone
When they arrived early thirty years ago they jacked prices up with constant rises, messed about with routes and generally ran the buses for their benefit. not this customers if my experience anyway….they were the spur for me to return to car ownership and never return.
Stagecoach took over lots of council owned bus companies as they were ultra competitive back in the day and the Darlington example explains why.

do not blame stagecoach. first bus or any of these big new companies. all they have done is use the system presented to them by a government who had no interest in public transport. they never expected these big new companies forming but wanted loads of small firms completing against the big boys like united and the corporation. only a fool would know where the competition would happen. on routes with loads of passengers therefore making everyone weaker in the end. many didn,t last long and were bought out by new big boys to the scene who bought up the rest. even before maggie put her ore in cross subsidisation became a dirty word across the industry and the national bus company were quite happy to drop unremunative services when stagecoach only operated an express service from scotland to london.

Snowy the Council as I said before pay Stagecoach a lump sum of money to provide a bus service, it’s upto stagecoach where and when the buses run.

not much of a difference to what the council did when the passenger transport committee ran bus services. They were run on a budget given and any losses made were made up from council funds. trouble was in large towns and cities the passenger transport authorities were formed with a spend, spend, spend attitude where losses abounded. a good example being the west yorkshire one i worked for. huddersfield and halifax made small losses, bradford made a profit but leeds made an almighty loss. they based the operation on the leeds model and actually built a HQ in wakefield where they didn,t run a bus but kept every main office of the 4 open. thinking now that the present situation towns are in started here and caused privatisation we now have.

So give me the date when the cancelled bus subsidies were reinstated….if you have one.

Of course I’ll blame them and Arriva and First for eliminating competition, pushing prices up and from my experience, getting a worse service just like all privatised companies do, you end up with a monopoly, …the only place you can go out of town to now is Sunderland or Durham on a bus or to the Boro on the ridicculously long Stagecoach 36, the only bus service with in flight meals and you need a shave when you get off.
The best boost to car sales over the past 30 years.

I never said the subsidies were cancelled, the council contract stagecoach to provide a bus service. When I am in town I use bus numbers 1.3, 3A and 6, the only time they have a few passengers is after 9.30 when people with bus passes don’t have to pay the 30p and in school hours. By your own admittance Snowy you don’t use the buses so you have no real idea how many people use them.

I drive around town most of the day, I have eyes to see 12 months a year and I take an interest because I’m a member of a transport group.
Now can you tell me when the cancelled 2011 subsidy cuts were re-instated…?

fine, but really the situation was handed to them on a plate. the other alternative is a public owned monopoly as all transport from the 20,s onwards has proved. small independant companies bought out by a firm like United to make them as large as they once where. later after de regulation we had similar using 3rd hand vehicles bought for chicken feed to rake a bit of profit in on competing on busy routes knowing quite well they,d make even more when the big boys bought em out. how many lasted a pace to buy replacement crap i wonder.

When Stagecoach shafted Darlington by running duplicate services for free, might I suggest the traffic commissioners should have told them in the event of Darlington collapsing they should have been obliged to carry on offering free services for a year.
We’ve ended up with massive monopolies.

come on you of all people know this has been the case since the 1930 road traffic act. until de reg. you could not just start a bus service without the permission from the traffic commisioners who would side with the local corporation or the BET, BTC or later the national bus company if it infringed on a route they operated. Its just a private monopoly taking over from a public one, but i,d much prefer having the latter back again. just pick a single year at random, say 1960 and compare what we had then to now.

You can’t compare to back then as very few had cars and their only form of transport was a bus, I am not sure what if aby taxis operated in Hartlepool then.

yes, i picked a single year too far back. You needed to compare to a time when private hire taxis started and not just a handful of hackney carriage ones which were very few outside of london anywhere. the only time us ol gits ever got in a taxi would be for a wedding or a funeral back then.

Taxi’s were avoided in the 70’s as too dear and it probably never occurred to people to use them when there was a decent bus service.

I believe Cameron’s were the first major taxi company in the town, they had a fleet of brand new cortinas then Hudsons come along with their ash trays on wheels usually orions.
The last time I got taxi, yellow one from the train station to Sainsbury’s it cost me just under £10 !

do not fully know but i,d guess the yellow ones are carrying a hackney licence and have charges previous agreed with the licence provider and needs to be displayed. others are private hire vehicles that need pre booking and seem able to charge much less even though they seem to vary from driver to driver and company to company. I paid less than a tenner for 5 miles travel from our local hospital to home in heavy traffic.

The Yellow Cabs have a set fee before you even set off then it’s by the meter, private hire is by the mile. 23 do special deals during off peak times but I some times thought they took a detour to rack a bit extra mileage up.

Cars always give me a wide berth when i'm riding at Appleby Fair..