Ban hybrid cars or make Britain a laughing stock, Starmer urged
WTF do we care what Johnny Foreigner thinks?
And let’s be honest about it. A number of us here live in foreign. So, the local conversations revolve around EV, hybrid and ICE policies in Britain, do they?
What sort of argument does this idiot think that is ?
“Shoot yourself in the head, because people will laugh at you if you try and chop it off.”
It is akin to the fools and knaves who used to complain about Britain losing influence in Europe if we voted against Directive 1998/01/2563 Standardisation of Paper Fastenings ( Paperclips ).
Berk.
To the political class, it really matters to them what foreigners think. They do not want to turn up at an international conference and have to deal with shitty comments about how we are a nation that still has one too many ICE cars.
Take HS2: The basic idea was not too bad. Create a dedicated express line from London to other cities. It did not need to cost the earth. Say a standard line with trains doing 140 to 160 mph. Nothing fancy. Serviceable, would work for the UK given the compact nature of the country and 90% of the people would be fine with it. Most people want a reliable train service, clean and comfortable and some edible food for the intercity services.
However, Johnny Foreigner would laugh at us as it would not be a true high speed train, capable of travelling at 300 MPH or more! In addition they would laugh at us for using a British Loading Gauge and not the superior European loading gauge! So HS2 had to use European loading gauge, allowing the potential of Eurostar services to run on it.
It’s a British middle class thing, first noticed it with remoaners. A delusional belief that all your actions have an audience of jeering foreigners.
In reality, they’re too busy wrecking their own countries to worry about us.
With the exception of changing to driving on the other side of the road step changes are hard to implement compared with incentivizing a gradual change. If the Governments intention is to phase out ICE cars, rather than banning hybrids they should be setting milestones for all ICE based cars to be first mild hybrid, then full hybrid and eventually plug in hybrid with a minimum electric range. An even smarter move might be to introduce mandatory “efficiency” standards that pushed the car manufactures down that route. Then with the correct car prices, electricity prices and fuel prices, with a little nudge from tax rules more and more people would transition to full electric as the technology and infrastructure continues to improve. It does however take a long time for a motor manufacturer to bring new models to market. The manufactures need longer than five year targets.
It’s quite revealing of the fact that the opinions of foreigners are more important to the Establishment than the wellbeing of the British people…
The hybrid is the only one of the climate religion fleet that can compete with and beat ICE cars. Mandating hybrids turns out not to be a punishment at all, like wife telling hubby that for his sins he’s banished to the garage/workshop. Punishment being the core purpose of the entire climate racket, hybrids must therefore be banned.
Speaking as a forriner these days. (Altho as a Londoner, I was always pretty forrin) I’d have to agree that Britain’s a laughing stock. Was when I left & had been for years. But it’s energy & EV policies are nothing to laugh about. Not unless one finds slow suicide played as pantomime amusing. To much chance of somebody in forrin wanting to copy you.
I tend towards a combo of Salamander and Southerner. Net Zero is really just a competition between Western virtue signalers. Climate is just a label for them. Who can kick sand in the citizens’ face the most and still cling on to power? I saw dumbo Bill Gates extolling the virtues of a cow feed that stops cows farting as being vital to save the planet which merely means Bill makes a lot of money if he can get the world’s farmers to buy it. I suppose to most people Bill Gates is some towering intellect so he must know what he’s talking about but to those of us who’ve been around computers since the Days of MS-DOS we think of him as the boss of Microsoft who, when asked why the company had not created an internet browser to compete with Netscape Navigator replied “We don’t think there’s much future in the internet. Who’s interested in seeing what’s on the Harvard lunch menu this Thursday?”
Which tells you all you need to know about Gates. A short ugly twit who has made an enormous amount of money by conning DOS out of an unsophisticated programmer and then nicking the idea of Windows from Xerox.
Oh, and a lot of people are making gazillions from seeing how stupid people are to think that ridding the world of CO2 is a GOOD THING…
Andyf
The manufactures need longer than five year targets.
Never mind the manufacturers. They need raw materials, such as copper. And since a lot of countries are trying the same, then the amount of copper we need will increase. Yet a copper mine takes about 20 years to get going.
So vehicle prices are going to shoot up as supply massively outstrips demand.
Southerner
The hybrid is the only one of the climate religion fleet that can compete with and beat ICE cars.
Compete with, yes. Beat? Not so sure.
Hybrid cars have more failure modes and the cost of replacing even the hybrid battery is quite high. So maintenance costs are higher.
At least with a hybrid, if the battery dies, the engine can keep you going.
@ Ottokring
Not a fool – he is a spokesman fot a group including Octopus Energy and Tesla.
Try another word
I have just Googled the percentage of the World population which is th UK………0.84%. Probably the rest of the World has little interest in the UK at all, let alone laughing at stupid ideas about the number of hybrids being sold.
I can only agree Jim.
After all, how much interest do you (or I) have in foreigners??
So the rest of the world is supposed to look up to us instead then, eh? As it did when the map was pink? A bit colonialist, what?
How the rest of the world thinks about the UK, is about how much the UK thinks about the Isle of Man.
Starting from here, and observing this applies to most of the “free west”, I would content no action whatsoever is required to turn Britain into a laughing stock.
Not a lot, Boganboy , Apart from how much antics of politicians the USA cause us problems. That’s about it.
Salamander,
“Take HS2: The basic idea was not too bad. Create a dedicated express line from London to other cities. It did not need to cost the earth. Say a standard line with trains doing 140 to 160 mph. Nothing fancy. Serviceable, would work for the UK given the compact nature of the country and 90% of the people would be fine with it. Most people want a reliable train service, clean and comfortable and some edible food for the intercity services.”
The thing is, where is even the demand for that? It’s 83 minutes from Birmingham to London. Which means it isn’t a daily commuter route. It’s used for going to see a client for a monthly meeting or for grannies going to see Les Miserables. And neither of those people cares that much about going slightly quicker. You can still comfortably get there, do the thing, and be back home and in bed that day. Ask people to cough up to save 15 minutes and they won’t spend much for it.
Rail is mostly a pack of lies by rail nerds who want a bigger trainset to play with and engineering companies that want more dosh.
Oh the Englishman has lots of little foibles,
and some of them are really past belief…
For he’s still of the opinion
that the folk in each dominion
all regard him as the Big.White.Chief,
(C) The late Paddy Roberts, sometime in the early 1960s…
Plus ça change.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m4zyfwtDIHE
We’ve got plenty of foreigners in this country to ignore too!
John77
An anagram of an 11th Century Danish King of England ?
unless traditional hybrid cars are banned
Eee, I remember me grandad coming home from t’pit down cobbled streets and ginnels in his battered Toyota Yaris.
This argument is very familiar in Oz, “it will hurt our world standing”. News flash – the world could care less unless we shut down our coal, gas, and iron ore exports.
If any other country is taking an interest in what we’re doing they’ll be dying of laughter. At 17:10 GMT GridWatch reports: renewables 24%, Carbon Neutral 30%, of which:
Nuclear 12%, Evil gas 46%, Wind 16%, Biomass 5%, Pumped Hydro, Hydro, other each 3%, Imported 3% of which 2% re-exported. On an island floating on coal- 0%.
A look at Windy shows that of the wind generated electricity the land based turbines are as close to producing 0% as fuck it is to swearing.
And we have some of the world’s most expensive electricity.
HS2 had to use European loading gauge, allowing the potential of Eurostar services to run on it.
Except HS2 doesn’t connect to HS1 (that’s genius at work, right there); and Eurostar trains are built to British loading gauge (so that they can run through to their maintenance depot outside Paddington). HS2 trains will be British loading gauge, too, as they need to run through to points north of Brum – albeit they’ll do that bit slower than the existing Pendolinos, since they can’t tilt, cancelling any time saved on the actual high-speed section.
A triumph of British ingenuity, I tells ya!
It’s not “the opinion of foreigners” that they care about.
It’s “the opinion of COOL foreigners.”
No one wants to go to Davos and have to slink around the end of the bar in shame. One wants to be one of the cool people from the cool countries that have banned all ICE engines. Those are the people who attract the truly beautiful in the crowd.
To have to admit that your country still allows them – well, you’re not going to sit at the cool kids’ table that way. Might have to sit near Trudeau. Might as well stay home.
Do COOL foreigners also allow widespread rape of their indigenous young females by useless goat herder immigrants with a backwards religious belief system?
The Swedes are doing the same – are they cool kids?