Opinion

Early electric cars were defined by range. While range remains an important part of an EV's spec panel, a broader understanding of battery sizes and efficiency, as well as the reliability of the charging network and the speed at which an EV can be recharged have become just as prominent and important as that ultimate range figure.  

Unless a car's range is notably smaller compared to the market norm or notably greater, then it can be 234 miles, 256 miles or 291 miles and that can typically be defined as being somewhere between enough and more than enough. EV drivers have realised running out of charge is ultimately as likely as running out of fuel in a petrol car, even if it's a more complex situation to be able to avoid.

Yet overall range is fast making a comeback as the biggest number in town due to the relationship it has with the car's price. Executives from Mazda, Toyota, Polestar and Nissan have all recently dropped not-too-subtle hints in interviews with Autocar Business that the fastest way to reduce the cost of electric cars – which are proving prohibitively expensive to be able to crack past the early adopters and incentivised fleet buyers – is to reduce the size of the battery and thus the range, while speeding up charging at the same time.

Lexus's design boss Simon Humphries put it bluntly when he said: “Costs can come down if the acceptance of range comes down. Customers can decide.” When the battery is widely accepted to be anything from 40-60% of the cost of a car, you can see why.

There is a related argument that by using smaller batteries you will ultimately use fewer natural resources, too. This is why Toyota so passionately still pushes forward hybrids with small batteries for real-world efficiency, yet the same can be said for EVs.

Mazda's chief financial officer Jeff Guyton was quoted in this column earlier this year: "From a consumer standpoint, people often think that bigger is better, right? The MX-30 [Mazda's first EV], I think, offers people a usable daily driving range. Doesn’t it make sense that if you have a 30-something kWh battery instead of a 100kWh battery, then three people can have those precious resources that are in that battery?"

Polestar boss Thomas Ingenlath believes it’s faster charging that can ultimately bring down battery sizes and therefore costs. His firm has invested in a company called StoreDot, which has developed extreme fast charging using existing battery technology and architectures that can achieve 100 miles of range in five minutes

“It will allow you to reduce the resources you put into the car," he says on faster charging times. "From a material perspective and from the customer's money you put into a car, it’s much better to find the efficiency with fast charging and higher efficiency of a car. If you go towards smaller batteries, everything benefits, including the weight.”

All of which begs the question: how much range is necessary? For now, a larger range nearly always means a larger battery and thus a much larger cost.

The likes of Lucid, BMW and Mercedes have all broken through the 100kWh barrier with premium electric models that cost more than £100,000. Yet the fact that jumbo battery packs are now being offered in 4.5-metre-long crossovers with the likes of the Peugeot e-3008 soon to offer a near-100kWh battery shows that range is still considered the ultimate selling point for EVs. Given the standard e-3008 with a 73kWh battery costs almost £50,000, the price of the larger 98kWh one and its 435-mile range that will follow at the end of next year will be eye-watering.

Nissan's Cli Lyons, vice president for product and services planning across Nissan's AMIEO region, which includes Europe, says her firm thinks differently when it comes to range.

"Customers think of destinations: journey lengths and journey times," she told me. "For us, range is the reality of driving distance and the total journey time. If you have a bigger battery, you stop less and then take longer to charge. If you have a smaller battery, you stop more but charge for less time. It's then different by segment, but you need to understand customer needs and usage.

"You should never ask customers to change habits, instead offer solutions that fit into their lifestyle. We'd never say we want to have, say, a 110kWh battery, we'd say to do this journey in this time, and then be competitive with rivals."

Ultimately, there's a direct link between charging infrastructure and battery size and therefore vehicle cost that won't be uncoupled until the former is truly fit for purpose. Batteries have been made bigger to compensate for a lack of charging infrastructure and consumer confidence in charging is lagging and will take time to shift.

"At some point, customers will feel comfortable with range as the network will be able to support them," says Shunsuke Shigemoto, Nissan's vice president ePowertrain technology, research and advanced engineering, with ultimately confidence in charging allowing for an acceptance of smaller range and the healthy by-product of less cost.

"Customers will go on this journey with OEMs and society, but it's not going to take us to a 200kWh battery."

Whatever happened to ‘engineered like no other’?

My colleague Steve Cropley last week asked this about Mercedes-Benz’s erstwhile advertising strapline, which was first mentioned in promotional copy in 1956 (with ‘…in the world’ on the end) and which routinely accompanied the company’s publicity until 1995.

It was followed, if you remember, by ‘the best or nothing’, a more nothing than best phrase that still gets airtime today. It’s the title of a page on Mercedes’ US website at least, although it doesn’t highlight the end of any new adverts I’ve seen.

Today, online, where most adverts are viewed, Mercedes ads are mostly signed off only by the three-pointed star and a clickable link to a relevant web page. Sometimes there’s a different, model-appropriate slogan like the also forgettable ‘so AMG’.

There isn’t, then, an overarching single Mercedes message – one thing that you must associate with the brand every time you see it.

Maybe in a world where the model range and the selling of it have both changed so much and where old-school engineering sits behind, say, style or connectivity, Mercedes doesn’t think lasting consistency matters like it once did. It still shouts about engineering today, but mostly through its Formula 1 team. 

The world’s two other best-known automotive practitioners of the slogan art aren’t yet ready to give them up. 

BMW has toyed with a few different phrases but primarily retains the same ‘Freude am Fahren’ (‘sheer driving pleasure’) line it first used in 1965, adjusting it to ‘the ultimate driving machine’ for its two biggest English-speaking markets, the US and the UK, in 1972.

You will see a little less ‘Vorsprung durch Technik’ (‘progress through technology’) from Audi than you once did and a little more ‘future is an attitude’, alongside its electric cars.

But while its use of ‘Vorsprung’, like the brewer Carlsberg’s use of ‘probably…’ is more varied and nuanced today, this is still a company that values its association with the phrase to the extent it has Vorsprung trim levels.

‘Vorsprung’ is more than 50 years old, but Audi’s technical head, Oliver Hoffmann, claims it’s “much more than a slogan for us” and that “it encapsulates the Audi mindset”.

That was true, he says, when Audi made the 80 lightweight, when it made the A8 premium and when it won at Le Mans, and still it’s true now. I wonder if that’s accurate and whether bearing the slogan not just externally but internally drives employees just as much as it does customers.

After all, Lexus’s fuzzy ‘experience amazing’ feels less focused today than the totally apt ‘the relentless pursuit of perfection’ did at the launch of the LS 400 in 1989.

There’s sometimes a ‘new broom’ syndrome at car companies, as in so many other businesses. It’s easy to find oneself so close to a subject that one gets blinkered by it. But executives should try to remember that, bluntly, people mostly don’t give a monkey’s about their brands.

We have work and play and family and friends to care about, and if a company announces a new look or a new slogan, it might mean a lot to a very few people at the business but basically nothing to the rest of us.

Honestly, please believe that we just don’t care. That’s why it takes decades of subtle, repetitive, consistent embedding to get associations like ‘Vorsprung’, ‘probably…’, ‘just do it’ or ‘should’ve gone to…’ to stick in our minds.

Once they have, companies shouldn’t give up these treasured associations lightly. It’s a darn sight easier to lose them than to get them back.

Battery-electric vehicle registrations in the UK continue to go backwards and the timing couldn’t be worse.

The 24,359 BEVs registered in the UK in November was a 17.1% drop on those registered a year earlier and the market share fell back from 20.6% to 15.6% in the same period, according to the latest SMMT figures. 

The average market share for the year is 16.3%, and while that is up marginally on the 15.1% in 2022, the prevailing trend last year was always upwards whereas in 2023 the opposite has occurred as sales have continued to slip backwards.

Now we are less than a month away from 2024 and the introduction of the zero-emission vehicle (ZEV) mandate, which dictates that car manufacturers must have 22% of car sales as BEVs or face fines of £15,000 for every car that does not conform.

At the current rate, the market share of electric vehicles must increase by almost 50% if the 22% target is to be reached against the current run rate. While sales of BEVs continue to perform to fleets and to company car buyers, where the benefit-in-kind advantage is massive, there are no tangible signs to suggest the much-needed growth from private buyers to allow the 22% target to be reached is going to be achieved.

Even so, the SMMT is still optimistically forecasting a 22.3% market share for BEVs in 2024 in a market that it expects to grow by 4.4% from 2023. If that’s to be realised, then all sorts of chaotic tactics are going to take place.

For car manufacturers to comply with the 22% target, they can hit that figure organically, buy credits from other car manufacturers that over-achieve (unpalatable given you’ll be helping a competitor), or defer to 2025. Or, of course, they can pay the fines. We’ll see a combination of all options.

To achieve the target organically, the only way to stimulate that private growth will be through discounting. What Car? Target Price data from our sibling brand has shown that EV discounts are up from an average of £1395 per car in January to £4226 in November and that makes EV discounts comfortably higher than those for every other fuel type. 

Greater discounts will inevitably follow. They have to, because there are no whispers of the return of incentives from the government to help private buyers. The current discounts seemingly aren’t enough to finally kick-start private demand for BEVs. 

Assuming those discounts still don’t give the near-50% growth needed in BEV sales, we’ll see plenty of other tricks being undertaken. 

Some car manufacturers will pre-register lots of ICE vehicles before the end of 2023 to ensure they don’t impact the 2024 sales, where every BEV sale will be so crucial. We’ll see lead times for ICE models increase and BEV models reduce to try and tempt buyers into a manufacturer’s favoured choice sooner. And we’ll see BEVs pre-registered en masse towards the end of the year to further boost a manufacturer’s ‘registrations’ for BEVs. 

A trend has recently emerged of car makers now highlighting monthly payments of EVs being the same of those for equivalent ICE cars in their range, but buyer beware: this is often the result of ICE prices having crept up in recent months to artificially bridge the gap to BEVs and make the BEVs suddenly seem not so expensive. 

All this is not how the government would have imagined it when targets were set, but then this is the same government that trashed consumer confidence in BEVs by pushing back the ban on the sale of non-BEVs by five years to 2035. What did they expect?

It was always going to be a challenge without this intervention as BEVs moved out of the early adopter phase. It’s one thing convincing someone from a Tesla forum to buy a BEV, quite another for an average car buyer who simply can’t overlook the higher purchase price, inadequate charging network, rising insurance costs and continued uncertainty around residual values. 

Let the fun and games begin

Hyundai executives can get defensive about criticism of the number of drive modes and options on performance cars like their i30 N.

That’s one of my favourite hot hatchbacks, but there’s no denying that it has a lot of adjustable things. 

On-board systems allow you to choose between various suspension stiffnesses, to change the steering weight, to tune the engine response and much more besides. Apparently there are nearly 2000 combinations.

Some say that’s too many – probably me included. But Hyundai’s driving attributes chief, Tyrone Johnson, says that if you don’t like having so many, don’t use them. There are a number of presets, including what Hyundai thinks is an optimal N mode, so just pick that.

That also seems like an entirely reasonable position. But until now, I didn’t absolutely know where I stood on it. I’ve sat in BMW M cars and Mercedes-AMGs in the past and once spent six months in an M5 without once feeling like I had entirely got to grips with everything it could offer.

There are shades of a cook-it-yourself restaurant about having this many choices. Somewhere in the background is a great chef who knows precisely what would be the best way to cook the ingredients presented to me yet is content to stand there while I make a complete hash of it.

So come on, you’re the expert: why don’t you get it right and just let me enjoy it? I rather like it when an expert does something, whether it’s the chargrilling of vegetables or the suspension tuning of a Toyota GR86.

Anyway, this situation is only going to get worse – or better, depending on your point of view – as driver’s cars become ever more electrified.

In the i30 N, there’s a mechanical limit to the things that could be changed. Drive can only ever go to the front wheels and there’s only so much bandwidth within which the engine can realistically respond. But, as you might have seen in last week’s first drive of the Hyundai Ioniq 5 N, electric cars are something else again.

The Ioniq 5 N has no fewer than four preset and two customisable modes for regular driving. But even though you can in the adjustable modes change the damping, steering weight and motor and differential response and more, that barely touches the surface.

Other buttons activate maximum boost for 10 seconds, knock the power back a bit so that you can complete more laps of a circuit without it overheating, activate full braking effort if you lift off the throttle pedal, put the car into a specific low-speed drifty mode or, through 11 stages, allow the power to be differently apportioned between the front and rear.

It will even make three different synthesised engine noises (or none), with or without fake gear-changes. It’s like the partner who promises to be everything you want them to be if you will just give them another chance.

In one sense, this is bonkers. On what road is a 72.7% rear drive bias too little but 81.2% just enough? In another sense, it’s totally rational: among the tens of thousands of eventual Ioniq 5 N drivers, it’s inevitable that one will prefer 72.7% power over 81.2% power when exiting their favourite deserted roundabout.

And if you don’t want to get involved, just prod the N button, as Johnson says. He has done the hard work so you don’t have to, unless you particularly want to. Your roads and your right foot might be different to his, after all, and it’s pretty easy to see what’s currently selected and to flick between them.

In a car that has so many characters and so many of them lovable as the Ioniq 5 N, I think I’m convinced.

The automotive industry moves so fast that it’s easy to forget how hard and complicated some things are to change and implement. It’s not a case of getting a job done and moving onto the next problem.

One such example is the creation of Stellantis out of the merger of PSA and FCA. This was ‘completed’ back in January 2021 but the reality is that these are two wildly different entities operationally still being embedded together in less heralded corners of the companies long away from the cars in showrooms.

Maria Grazia Davino started as Stellantis UK group managing director in September and has found a company with “major operational problems” that are a result of the merger that is still ongoing. 

Bear in mind too that the integration of Vauxhall into PSA was still not fully complete before the creation of Stellantis, and you have three companies and three systems across multiple brands. Let alone trying to influence the future, the past still needs clearing up to allow the present to function. 

This manifests itself as issues with logistics, aftersales and payment systems that have caused “confusion and issues for our network”. It’s understandable, given “different legacies have come together at a speed that was very fast”, says Davino, and as such this disorder has to be “cleared as soon as possible”, all while managing the business day to day. It’s been a hugely complex and disruptive process. 

On the day-to-day front, Davino’s brief is to grow market share and increase customer satisfaction for the Stellantis stable of brands. Simple…

Short term, there is the need to get to 22% of total sales for electric vehicles in 2024 from a current run rate of about 15% or be fined £15,000 per car. Davino says Stellantis will not buy credits from other manufacturers or defer sales to 2025 so the only option is to find more buyers for EVs. Clearly, this means Stellantis will have to “stimulate demand with attractive offers”, alongside an ongoing education job about the total cost of ownership advantages EVs offer to at least the 22% of buyers it needs to reach. 

Maria Grazia Davino

All of the Stellantis brands have a long-term future and security in the UK, even DS, which has sold just over 2000 cars in 2023 to the end of October. She’ll set them up to succeed and says Stellantis’s UK success will be based on “all of my brands doing their jobs properly”. 

Stellantis will stay in the background as a name and not ever be pushed as a brand and the company “has the brands and products that allow me to do something that if well executed can work”. She dismisses the notion that it doesn’t matter which brand a customer buys into so long as it’s a Stellantis one, because each brand needs to deliver on its own business plan. 

On those brands, Davino says it is a “privilege” to have a domestic brand in Vauxhall and it is a “fundamental part of Stellantis’s UK performance”. It is Stellantis’s largest brand in the UK by some margin and sells its biggest-selling car, the Vauxhall Corsa, and has two factories. 

Peugeot is “doing very well but can do and must do better” with a whole host of new cars arriving. Citroën is finding its place as an entry-level brand and “can help Stellantis in an important way” with cars like the new ë-C3 bringing the cost of an EV close to £20,000.

Fiat has struggled with the ramp-up of the 500e and Davino says it has “not been helped by big operational issues”, including a switch in the retail network. But “the offer now works and it is the right one”.

She says DS “has a long way to go” in the UK and more must be done to build awareness of the brand. Alfa is in a similar boat. “The brand is good, products good, performance not,” says Davino. Jeep’s future success looks likely to be defined by the Avenger, which has “big UK potential”.

Stellantis also recently acquired a 20% stake in Chinese brand Leapmotor, and while it has yet to be decided if the brand will come to the UK, it would do so under Davino’s watch should it get the go-ahead. In case her job wasn’t busy enough, she is also in charge of Stellantis’s used car Spoticar business, the thriving van division and the two plants at Ellesmere Port and Luton. 

Davino, from southern Italy, is a considered speaker, taking the time to carefully think of answers. She took the UK role from her most recent position as Stellantis head of sales and marketing in the enlarged Europe area. She commutes to the UK each week from Italy, and while not taught English at school, she was a fan of translations of Shakespeare to Ken Loach films via James Joyce.

Davino believes the UK automotive industry is at a 50:50 moment, where it can either become a world leader in electrification or slip into the “queue” with the rest of the world. You sense she’ll do all she can to achieve the former and is keen to have a voice on UK industry matters and push the plants at Ellesmere Port and Luton as part of the solution for a thriving UK EV manufacturing industry.

To that end, her view is that politicians should be using corporations to help them “understand the impact on business that decisions can have” and she has found that UK leaders she has engaged with “listen and are well prepared and presented”. She’s also willing to challenge the insurance industry around the rising cost of electric car insurance.

Davino has found that the UK is a hard place in a global company because so many of its needs are specific – not just with right-hand drive (she’s working on getting RHD cars earlier after the likes of the Avenger were delayed) but also the requirements for them, such as EV chargers being able to operate with the UK’s low overnight charging tariffs. “We need to advocate specific UK solutions,” she says.

You’re left with the impression of a serious operator who has quickly got a grip of a complex but hugely important market, one packed with nuances and set ways of doing things, for better or worse. This isn’t the last you’ll be hearing from her.