Wednesday, December 15, 2010

BBC gets the Electric Car News Late and gets it Wrong

Here at Cycalogical, we've been banging out about electric cars for a while, and now the BBC is coming to the party.

The BBC interviewed "motoring journalist Kevin Haggarthy", who claimed that the Nissan Leaf would cost "£23,000 that means you're actually paying £18,000". WRONG. the £23,000 already includes the Government subsidy of £5000.

He also claimed that if the 220M cars in the US were all electric, it would take 34 times the current generating capacity of the US to power them. Eh? That doesn't sound right to me, in fact it sounds wrong by a couple of orders of magnitude. Just based on current carbon emissions, the whole transport sector isn't 34 times bigger than the power generation sector. But of course I'm just an amateur blogger, not a professional journalist, so what do I know? (I think he probably meant 34 times the current renewable generating capacity, but that's not what he said)

Come, on, BBC, you've got to do better than this!

4 comments:

  1. I couldn't agree more. I'm a specialist in green transport and write for allcarselectric.com. I, and may other EV specialists would have been more than happy to go on the BBC to help them get the story right. But for some reason they never want the input of professional EV Journalists. Hmmm.

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  2. Maybe 'getting the story right' might also include making clear that electric vehicles aren't green, and importantly do absolutely nothing to reduce congestion. Hmmm.

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  3. That is quite not the standard thing for BBQ ...wrong reporting that is.But there is a buzz about electric cars all over.can you post the accurate details?
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  4. Mikesac - the Nissan Leaf with government discount will be circa £23000.
    As for the grid load posed by electric cars, I've not seen any authoritative numbers, but I estimate it will be around 10%-20% of current generation capacity. But there's a lot of variables.

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