That's another thing we can cut. £5,000 taxpayer subsidies for rich persons playthings.

Sorry, sort of...merging threads here.

As you were.

Apart fron the limited range and excessive purchase price, the other main weakness of electric cars is the impracticality for town dwellers (for whom they are in theory most suited) of charging them.

Most have to park on the street. Unless there's a free dedicated charging point nearby, you have to run the lead from your house (whiuch knocks out upper-floor flats), across the pavement where old people can trip over the wire and sue you, or teenagers on the way home from the pub think it a jolly jape to unplug it.

Not me!

As a company car driver with my car due for renewal, I had a Prius Plug In on a 3 day test drive. My sole motivator for trying the Prius was the low 5% company car benefits in kind tax. I drive 40k miles per year.

I could not get on with the automatic transmission, the floor mounted parking brake and the lack of grunt of a 2 litre diesel engine.

Electric cars just aren't for me.

So isn't an electric car a very inefficient use of energy? if you charge an electric car up (and not forgetting like the eco-nutters that the electricity comes from a dirty power station, not from daisies and fresh air) and then leave it for a week or so, you must lose a lot of the charge.

It's even worse than that because the EU are forcing us to shut down some power stations next year at the same time we're encouraging people to power their cars via the plug rather than the plentiful supply of fuel at the bottom of the sea.

Couldn't make it up.

The EU are not forcing the shut down of any power station the ones that are going off line are simply goosed and are being replaced by more modern efficient units.I

Far from it - it's EU legislation on power station emissions which are forcing the closure of the dirtiest ones - the problem is that replacements, using imported gas, won't be ready at the same time and leave the UK very vulnerable to political piracy.

The power generation industry is predicting the brown-outs, they know more about these things than politicians or the media.

RT is right. Totally bonkers and completely unachievable EU renewables targets are forcing the closure of some of our least efficient power plants. If we were in control of when they close then obviously we'd close them when the new ones are up and running, but the timing is dictated to us by the European Union.

You should actually visit some power stations in the UK its not as you describe

Trollos, whenever anybody proves you wrong your instant reaction is to patronise. No wonder your wife left you. Thankfully UK power stations don't just let you wander in and look around.

You talk as though the UK is not part of the EU

I talk as though the UK shouldn't be in the EU and that aged 28 I've had no democratic say over our status as a non-independent satellite state of an unelected bureaucracy.

it was UK that was the instigator of the clean air act and has pushed the rest of europe all the way

Inaccurate. While it's true we were stuck with a Government keen to go even further than the European Commission, the fact is these laws and renewables targets have been imposed on us by people we didn't elect and can't remove. We've had a change of Government since Gordon signed that pathetic act, yet our new Government couldn't change one thing about this if they wanted to.

What's the point of voting?

Independent countries get to vote in new people to change direction. EU members don't, so we must all be ripped off on our energy bills and forced to freeze to death to save 0.00001% of carbon dioxide emissions.

The Chinese and Indians must be laughing their heads off.