How will people afford cars in the future?

[stbrandonsboat]

This 'no new petrol cars to be sold from 2030' is rather worrying. From what I've seen, electric cars are super expensive and prices of used petrol cars are going to become unaffordable as well as the deadline looms. How are ordinary people going to be able to afford cars?

How much does it cost to lease an electric car? Why aren't electric cars smaller? All the ones I see are massive. I have vehicle anxiety 🫣

How are ordinary people going to be able to afford cars?

Within my life time, I remember when many 'ordinary' people couldn't afford a car. As they became more affordable, public transport was slashed and the expectation that people would commute 10s of miles to and from work arose. High streets were abandoned for out-of-town shopping, children were driven away from playing on the streets and the disabled left to fend for themselves.

I'm not sure if the growth in car ownership has been the benefit that many seem to believe.

Presumably the theory is that more people buying electric will bring the cost down.

Where they are going to charge them is another huge issue - there just isn't enough charging for those living rurally and travelling for work.

Also, as cities improve less people should need a car.

That's the idea of 15 min cities though all the hysteria about it may stall stuff happening before the next election. Sad really.

Which doesn’t help those of us who don’t live in cities.

I’m on the outskirts of a medium-sized town, so not rural at all. Don’t have anywhere to store a bike (can’t get it up the stairs and there’s no external storage) and anything useful is too far to walk. There is one bus an hour but doesn’t run early enough or late enough for me to get to work.

Unless public transport is seriously improved, if I can’t afford to buy and run a car it’s going to be a real issue.

The infrastructure is no where near ready for everyone to own electric cars. It would be a nightmare.

I live semi rurally and my life would be very limited without a car. Will they still allow hybrids? I’m not really comfortable with the idea of a fully electric car until the infrastructure for them is sufficient and the range they can travel on one charge improves.

They won't. They won't be able to afford houses either.

They'll have to rent both. They'll pay more and have to do a lot more legwork to avoid getting ripped off entirely. If they demur they'll be told to stop being selfish and catch an infrequent bus with an opaque ticket pricing system. They'll end up owning nothing and never being quite sure of future costs.

@LorraineInSpain

Towns should have decent public transport. It's really pathetic

@Ifailed I 100% agree with you. We lived without a car till we were in our 30’s but then it seriously started to impact on my husbands career and we bought one. I make a massive effort not to drive everywhere, to get buses and walk any distance less than a mile or two. It would still be hard to go back to not having one because as you say- so many things are built out of town now. Bus routes are rubbish and inconvenient times. Taxis are super pricy. And we live in a central ish area- all the new build estates near us are built on the sides of A roads with no public transport links.

Lots of lower paid workers - eg community care workers, community nurses absolutely need access to cars to work. Those jobs could certainly not be done without cars, particularly in rural areas.

Many ordinary people have to have a car.

Should, but don’t. Nowhere close. One bus an hour for us, on the very edge of a small/medium sized town. One bus an hour and £5 return for the 2 mile trip to the town centre.

we need to own cars. We don’t have anything fancy. Mine is 10 years old and a 1.2L, but all 3 adults in the house own and use a car. We have to or getting to work would be an expensive nightmare.

It won't happen. Infrastructure isn't there, it'll lose elections, electric isn't even the most suitable alternative. I'm not giving it a second thought, and I'm not looking at electric cars.

We are13 miles from nearest town. Bus on Tuesday only at 10am, returning at 1.30pm. What use is that?

@Puffed was coming on to say just this. I live rurally and work in community nursing can do anywhere between 50-60 miles some days and at least 20 odd on a normal day. We have one pool car between 8 members of staff and the one working furthest away uses it, has to be left at a base cannot be used for anything else. My children’s school is also at the next village 4 miles away along a winding single track country road and I drop off before going to work. The nhs is not going to provide every community nurse with a car and they’d still need a car to get home. They keep slashing the buses etc times getting further apart or no service at all 🤷‍♀️. This isn’t going to change either with the constant push for more hospital at home services especially where I am where the elderly outstrip the younger generation

I don’t think it’ll happen but if it does I’m planning to keep my diesel car until 2029 and will then buy a new one.

Fuel powered cars are not going to disappear overnight! The UK buys on average 1.5m new cars every year.

Say, by 2030 half of that number is 50% (currently less than 10%) and the last petrol powered car (diesel is already in decline in favour of petrol hybrid) car rolls off the production line on 31/12/2029.

That's 750,000 brand new- petrol powered- cars, which have a life span of a good 15yrs trickling into the used car market. Plus all the 14,13,12,11,10,9 yr old cars still out there....that takes us to 2045/2050.

In the meantime, the government will do one of three things.

1. Invest (like they said they would) and expand the infrastructure.
2. Heavily subsidise EV purchase (remember the ££££ scrappage scheme?)
3. Extend their ludicrous 'deadline' because they have to admit that talking big in the bar of an Environmental Summit after a few drinks and trying to be Billy Big Bollocks about going green has landed them in a load of shit.

Stop panicking about EV's.

The 2030 target is merely an "aspiration" and 100% WILL be pushed back.

It's basically a "nudge" to get "those who can" to move over to electric, i.e. those who it works for, those who have drives to charge on, those who can afford to pay more, those for whom journeys can be planned around charging.

It'll be a success if it can get half of the cars running on electric.

Cars last an average of 13 years at the moment and it's not particularly rare to see cars much older, typically 20 years, so even if sales of new cars were banned in 2030, there'd still be petrol cars on the roads until well into the 2040s so we'd still have petrol filling stations etc.

But anyway, not all countries are banning petrol cars, so there'll still be new petrol cars being manufactured - maybe not the main brands who seem to be phasing them out, but they'll still be out there. That means people can buy abroad and import, and of course, immigrants can bring them in with them as they do now, so they'll still be available for people to buy on the second hand market.

Of course, "hybrids" are being allowed until 2035 I think, so that'll be another deadline to be pushed back. In fact hybrids may be the politically acceptable answer, i.e. cars mainly running on petrol, partly assisted by a small battery, to "tick boxes" of reducing emissions, but in reality, not by much.

At the end of the day, getting as many people as possible to switch to electric will help the environment and tick boxes for the politicians. It doesn't need to be everybody, and in reality, will never be everybody. I'd say if they reach 50% of cars on the road being electric or hybrid, it will all have been a success. Trying to hit 100% is never going to happen as the infrastructure will never be there, especially in more rural areas, and the costs will be way out of proportion to justify it. It's ALL about picking the easy fruit - those who can need to be "nudged" to do it, those who can't will just continue with petrol cars for another 2 or 3 decades at least - that gives them time to adjust their lifestyles, careers, etc.,

My work involves visiting people's houses and the buses in my area are unreliable and expensive. I like my car, it helps me work and gives me freedom. I'm not well off and electric cars are around £30k new. I have a small car which is economical, but it's also nine years old.

Yeah, this. A shit future filled with insecurity and endless stress.

I always go for a small engine, current car is 1.2 couldn’t afford to run anything else with the miles I do 🤣

I'd be wary of that plan. You may find that there's a massive shortage of diesel cars by then as manufacturers will be scaling down production long beforehand and demand will rise (by lots of people doing what you plan to do). I wouldn't risk leaving it that late. Car factories aren't going to stop producing them on 31/12/29, they may well have stopped several months or a year or two beforehand and they won't want to be stuck with compounds full of new cars they aren't allowed to sell!

I've asked our council how they'll convert all the ex council estates with communal parking to electric parking. They never replied.
People without driveways will be screwed.

Higher interest rates will also start to feed through into higher monthly leasing costs, as the finance firms behind lease schemes will have to pay more for the money they need to borrow to buy the cars from the manufacturers. Car leasing has only seemed "cheap" recently because of the historically low unsustainable interest rates.

This is one of the many reasons why the 2030 deadline won't happen.

We've already seen the electoral rejection of the London Mayor's ULEZ expansion - that's just the start. Voters will start to vote against politicians/political parties who take the green agenda too far, so the politicians will have to start being more realistic otherwise they'll lose their seats and political power.

Same with me! I remember my grandparents getting their first car and their first phone when they were in their 50s / 60s! They chose a mini as it was easy to drive and park and they 'motored out' to places at the weekends.

Prior to this my grandfather had walked to work. People I remember in my childhood who walked to work included my headteacher and most teachers, most of the hospital nurses (from the nurses' home over the road), and my friend's dad who was a police sargeant.

God I feel old. (I'm not even a pensioner!)

@AutumnCrow

And that's what we need to go back to. A proper sense of community.

Yet people are terrified of it