PG Carz World

New boost to UK auto industry after tech firm and scooter maker invests in R&D plant to develop electric vehicles Indian tech company Ola has announced plans to invest £100m in the UK to open a research and development facility for a planned electric car, in a significant boost to the British automotive industry. Ola launched its taxi app that rivals Uber in cities including London, Birmingham and Cardiff in 2018, but it is pushing into electric vehicles with a recently launched road-going scooter and a planned electric car. Continue reading...

‘Charging anxiety’ may prevent the government from meeting its 2030 target for mass adoption of zero-emission cars The lack of a widespread electric vehicle charging network in the UK is holding back the mass adoption of zero-emission cars, according to carmakers and industry analysts. This year is considered crucial for electric vehicles (EVs) going mainstream, but the German manufacturer Volkswagen has warned that a significant increase in the number of available chargers is needed to convince consumers to make the switch from petrol and diesel cars. Continue reading...

Volkswagen-owned British brand plans for battery electric vehicle to roll off production line in 2025 The luxury carmaker Bentley has announced that its first fully electric car will be developed and built at its Crewe factory. The British brand’s first battery electric vehicle is scheduled to roll off the production line in 2025. Continue reading...

Law commissions recommend that vehicle users should not face regulatory sanctions if something goes wrong Users of self-driving cars should have immunity from a wide range of motoring offences, including dangerous driving, speeding and jumping red lights, Britain’s law commissions have jointly recommended. The Law Commission for England and Wales and the Scottish Law Commission propose creation of an Automated Vehicles Act to reflect the “profound legal consequences” of self-driving cars. The person in the driving seat would no longer responsible for how the car drives; instead, the company or body that obtained authorisation for the self-driving vehicle would face regulatory sanctions if anything went wrong. Continue reading...

The power steering motor is faulty on my four-year-old GLC car but it has only done 34,000 miles A month ago my four-year-old Mercedes-Benz GLC had a serious malfunction as I was driving through town. On a bend, the power steering failed causing the car to jerk severely to the left and leaving me with no control over the steering. The fact that I was driving slowly almost certainly saved me and our one-year-old child from an accident. The car had to be towed to the local Mercedes dealer which has identified a faulty power steering electrical motor. I have been told that this is only supplied as part of a complete steering rack, and have been quoted about £3,500 plus labour costs. Continue reading...

Two-thirds of all new cars bought by Norwegians last year were electric. Turns out you just need a government with a clue I’ve just been standing for 10 minutes at a moderately quiet junction near where I work in Cambridge. During that time I’ve seen six electric vehicles (EVs) – three VW ID.3s, a Nissan Leaf, a Nissan white van and a Renault Zoe. Three years ago, if I’d been standing at the same spot, I’d have seen precisely zero such vehicles. And what that brought to mind was Ernest Hemingway’s celebrated reply to the question: how does one go bankrupt? “Two ways,” he said. “Gradually, then suddenly.” Something similar is going on in relation to adoption of EVs in Britain. The hockey-stick graph is common in consumer technologies. We saw it in the early years of mobile phones, when text messaging was ignored by adults as an inferior form of email. But when pay-as-you-go tariffs arrived and teenagers could have phones, SMS use suddenly shot skywards. The arrival of kids represente...

The deal to build an electric car battery plant near Blyth will bring up to 3,000 jobs to the area by 2028 The UK government will invest £100m in Britishvolt as the car battery manufacturing startup seeks to build Britain’s first large-scale “gigafactory” in the north-east of England. The government’s Automotive Transformation Fund will invest alongside asset management company Abrdn and its majority-owned property investment arm, Tritax, to fund a sale and leaseback deal for the huge building that will house the electric car battery factory, near Blyth in Northumberland. Continue reading...

Mayor says air pollution and climate crisis are issues of ‘social justice’ in capital and across the globe Motorists across the whole of London could be charged for every journey from 2024 under plans being drawn up to reduce carbon emissions and improve air quality. The mayor, Sadiq Khan, said London should be a global leader in introducing smart road pricing, as a report found car journeys in the capital needed to be cut by more than a quarter to meet net zero emissions targets by 2030. Continue reading...

DMV revisiting prior decision that full self-driving is not subject to its regulations on autonomous vehicles California is evaluating whether Tesla’s self-driving tests require regulatory oversight, following “videos showing a dangerous use of that technology” and federal investigations into Tesla vehicle crashes, a state regulator said. The California department of motor vehicles previous said that Tesla’s full self-driving, or FSD, beta requires human intervention and therefore is not subject to its regulations on autonomous vehicles. Continue reading...

Luxury carmaker says pandemic has made people realise life is short and they should not postpone buying Covid-19 spurred wealthy motorists to buy more Rolls-Royces than ever before because it made them realise life is short, the luxury carmaker has said. As global cases escalated in 2021, Rolls-Royce Motor Cars, based in Goodwood, West Sussex, booked the highest annual sales in its 117-year history, selling 5,586 vehicles. Continue reading...

Record sales and now news of a battery that lasts hundreds of miles. It’s getting better, but going green was tough, admits a reluctant pioneer This time last year my partner John and I celebrated purchasing an electric car by driving through London to see the Christmas lights without having to pay congestion or Ulez – ultra-low emission zone – charges. I gleefully tweeted that Regent Street, deserted in lockdown, seemed a London from a different era: empty roads and glittering shop windows. This was my first moment of enjoyment of the electric vehicle (EV), whose purchase had been the source of considerable domestic tension. An eternal optimist, John was convinced we should dispense with a diesel car. The arrival of a grandchild, living at the opposite diagonal corner of London, tipped the balance. It would cut 30 minutes off a hellish journey. Continue reading...

The advent of electric vehicles will eventually extend to motorbikes, despite a deep cultural attachment to the internal combustion engine on two wheels The guttural roar rising from the start-up pits was flag marshal Shane Adderton’s cue. The 34-year-old technician has been involved in the motorbike world since he was a teenager, and volunteering at South Australia’s racing mecca of Mallala Motorsport Park always gave him a special thrill. “When you hear them start up and leave the pits, that sound is something you look forward to,” he says. “That note of the exhaust – the emotion it creates is part of the attractiveness.” Continue reading...

Use of data from Covid-hit 2020 has CEO pay looking lower than usual, but don’t expect it to last It’s the first week of January, so it must be time for “high pay day”, the High Pay Centre’s illuminating calculation of the moment at which the average chief executive of a FTSE 100 company will have been paid as much as the average UK worker will earn in the entire year. The imaginary gong will strike at about 9am on Friday morning. That, notably, is slightly later than normal because the thinktank has to use backward-looking data for its exercise and, relatively speaking (a crucial qualification), the FTSE 100 crew had a lean time during the first pandemic year. In 2020, their average pay fell from £3.25m to £2.7m. That was still about 86 times the median earnings of a full-time UK worker but represented a multi-year low ratio-wise. Continue reading...

Our business writers pick their contenders for the headlines in 2022, from startups to venerable high street favourites In all likelihood, BT will be under new ownership, or at the least involved in a takeover battle, in June next year. The billionaire Patrick Drahi has been assiduously building his stake in the British telecoms giant, having spent more than £3bn to acquire 18% to date , making him BT’s biggest shareholder. Continue reading...