What do members think of the future of our cars past 2030 
will increases in car tax and fuel costs make them too expensive to run?
Maybe not as soon as 2030, but I keep mentioning people driving ICE cars will look much like those folk who drive steam engines at the weekend, and do think it will be like that
As I say its not a 2030 thing, but the appeal will dwindle (as ādriversā cars already have over fast techfests), and keep dwindling.
We will get a good 20-30 years out of our cars, but over time they will become pretty socially unacceptable, weāll likely be priced off the road and certain roads we will be unable to travel on at all
Larger more practical ICE cars will start to have a much shorter life. Whilst my daughter loves the Exige and the M5, she has several times asked would I not like an electric version, and son used to get excited seeing a lambo, now Tesla seem to be the thing him and his friends lust after.
Yes thatās very interesting, ok post 2030 there will be some overlap but for how long, will the residual value of our once sort after cars dwindle to nothing. Will Lotus offer generous trade ins to loyal customers as we approach 2030? A lot will have to change in the next 9 years. So weād better enjoy the cars whilst we can!
Iād like to think the true death of the ICE car wonāt come in my lifetime, but I am worried about them becoming socially unacceptableā¦ that may even come before 2030 at this rate!!
Iād like to think that fuel, servicing and other key infrastructure will be around long enough to run an ICE as an enthusiast/weekend car for the foreseeable future, but I imagine running one as a daily/commuter will become cost prohibitive quite quickly.
MrP80 if you say we should get 20-30 years out of our current ICE cars that should be ok being 60 years old myself hoping in the next 20-30 years I can still manage to climb aboard!! 
So we are all able to afford an EV Lotus!! Can you imagine the queues for the charging points. I donāt think the infrastructure even in 2030 will cope with full electrification of vehicles. This is my worry 
Petrol and diesel will be around for much longer than the government would like you to think but it will be for difficult applications, heavy haulage, forestry and things like that that does mean that fuel will be available for āclassicsā. I personally have said I will never buy another petrol engined car and I do agree, people chugging around in an Exige or 911 will look like cap wearing MGB owners do today, all noise and no go!
Exiges may have value in the future but I can see run of the mill m5s and 911s being used for banger racing!
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So we are all able to afford an EV Lotus!! Can you imagine the queues for the charging points. I donāt think the infrastructure even in 2030 will cope with full electrification of vehicles. This is my worry
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Iām not pro-EV by a long shot, but I think this concern is overstated. With a plug in EV your fuelling habits will not be the same as they are in an ICE car, ie - youāll rarely/never charge up whilst on the go.
If you take an average commuter petrol car today, lets say you could magically have a full tank each time you left the house - how many times would you need to visit a petrol station? For most of the population itāll be once or twice per year, even on a car with a relatively small tank.
If EVās are already getting 250-300 miles per charge, thatās only going to improve and very few passenger cars do 250-300 mile journeys on a regular basis.
Freight and stuff like that is another matter, Iād expect weāll still see diesel trucks around for a bit longer than weāll see ICE passenger cars for that reason.
Infrastructure will cope and adapt, it always does. Thereās a pretty good interview with Chris Harris and a guy from the National Grid floating around somewhere which puts a lot of the concerns to bed, and the NG guy has an S1 Elise too! <LINK_TEXT text=ā- YouTube ā¦ el=TopGearā>IS THERE ENOUGH JUICE? Chris Harris talks EVs with Graeme Cooper from the National Grid | Top Gear - YouTube</LINK_TEXT>
I donāt believe infrastructure is going to meet demand by 2030. Personally do believe change is coming but a 10 year hard stop isnāt a reality.
I think commentators all universally agree that EV has a lot of maturing to do yet.
Personally I just brought an Aston V12 Vantage to share space with the Exige, neither is a daily, I believe for remainder of my lifetime theyāll have a place and a value.
Could be wrong and loose my money but intend to enjoy the present for as long as I can.
I think thats right, and Iām hoping by then there will be an alternative that I will want to go to anyway so Iām not hugely concerned.
It could be quite an exciting time, alternative fuels as I will call them (as I donāt think EV will be the final or only answer) have a huge evolution to go through.
Solutions come rapidly when there is a problem to fix, so the evolution will be rapid now the problems are being accepted.
Hopefully we can start to focus on the exciting future rather than what we are potentially saying goodbye to.
I doubt I will buy another big engined v8 as a daily ever again though those days are certainly numbered no matter how much I love it
Iāve got an EV car, as do many others at my place work, across several different manufacturers, Iāve been getting around 50% of the quoted range in winter and most people seem to report something similar. I donāt think internal combustion engines are going anywhere for now. 
Exactly, batteries in cold conditions and when extra is required of them through use of air conditioning, heating, lights and other ancillary equipment become inefficient. Regeneration through braking etc does not replenish the batteries enough. Batteries will have to become more efficient and hold more charge if the era of EV motoring is going to be successful. My main source of transport is a self charging hybrid possibly the best of both worlds.
My Exige i already carbon neutralā¦ not driven it for the last year 
Wife has an electric car. Itās nice, relaxing but not particularly a fun, drivers car that you get out of and go āthat was funā. Track days are going to be shite!
If you buy a petrol/diesel on the last moment you would be able to in 2030, you have 10-15yrs left to drive that. What about the second hand market, there will be millions of combustion engine vehicles still on the road neading fuel.
Given the poor charging infrastructure in large cities especially when people have no driveways, the use of ICE is not going away in 10 years, I do expect the ones of us who keep ICE will be expected to fund the battery or hydrogen cars where they are unable to tax the fuels in the same way, I have a small collection of cars and expect to be taxed to the hilt in the future, wonāt sell them, just have to work out the cheapest way of driving them
As more people move over to electric cars from ICE cars, the government will lose millions in fuel duty.
I expect pay per mile will come into effect and electric cars RFL will change from being free.
If we get pay per mile, that would suit me and many other Lotus owners who donāt use their car that much.
Yeah thereās no way EVs will remain the tax haven that they currently are. Back when we used to do mileage for work (remember those days?!) getting an EV, even an expensive one through the company was the only thing that made any sense due to tax. Iād wager thatās why weāre seeing so many EVs on the road already despite the aforementioned charging/battery concerns that exist today.
In the quite near future I expect some degree of standardisation on charging (hopefully Tesla donāt ādo an Appleā and go their own way inventing new USB sockets every 2 yearsā¦) and with that will come some taxing mechanism, either on juice or more likely through road tax on a pay per mile basis.
Pay per mile would make a lot of sense in many ways, and may actually work in the favour of ICE enthusiasts who just go out for a blast 8-10 weekends per year or whatever but Iām sure theyāll find another way to stiff us 
Hybrids still excite me a bit, it feels a shame that we condemned that idea so soon by planning to go full EV. Given a few generations of development I think we could have unlocked some eye watering performance or economy depending on use case. The F1 engines currently in use are nothing short of miraculous - we just need a few years for some of that to filter down into road cars.
As I have previously owned a plug in hybrid, I found if you canāt charge at home it is so expensive it doesnāt really make financial sense, prices ranged from 50p to 75p per kwh and with many suppliers there was a monthly charge to be a member and you needed to buy a dongle download an app etc
You are right about the tax incentives, apparently 90% of Tycans are company owned!
As you say our cars (Lotus) are not usually used as main transport vehicles but we still have to pay exuberant amounts in car tax for the number of miles we cover in a year due to the higher emissions. Mine is certainly zero emission having been on SORN since Sept 20 and only covering less than 500 miles since last March (COVID times and all that). Therefore going forward a pay per mile may well work to our advantage. Overall our cars are reasonably āgreenā compared to cars that are used everyday covering huge mileages.
Pay per mile is a great idea in theory, but the idea of putting a tracker on my car for big brother to watch my speed as well as miles completed is not so appealing, especially if I have to buy one for each car!
Only time will tell what they do to fix the loss of tax revenue from petrol and diesel that comes with BEV and plug in hybrid, but BEV needs to be cheaper and charging infrastructure in side streets needs to improve and the countries ability to generate electric needs to grow, all at a time where the government is going to struggle to find the cash because of covid
Lots on the web about ICE weekend cars /toys with owners beginning to think about this, and rightly so. Our cars will still be around for many years, you only have to look at the amount of ICE cars that are around in terms of historics, classics and special toys. We will see the run of the mill ICE cars deplete pretty rapidly as soon as electrification hits the ground running and makes ownership of buying and running easily plausible for the average driver.
What will happen is that the next generation may not be interested in purchasing your car unless it was my āgrandadsā. If you think about the owners of your car/ older cars then look at the age of the owners, you will see what I mean. We tend to buy what we saw as our cars of our years growing up or owned when we were younger. Why would a 10 year old in 20 years time (so heā s in his 30s lets day) be interested in driving a āslowā lotus that you have to go out of your way to find fuel to drive? The other thing to support this is that our cars are manual, they wonāt necessarily have a licence to drive them as all their tuition will be single pedal once full electrification hits from 2035 which will be interesting if the law changes. I think the best examples will remain and owned by collectors etc and the others will be ātradedā in with something along the lines of the scrappage scheme that did wonders for the price of remaining examples of āspecial drivers carsā from the 90s and early 2000s.
Now is the time to enjoy them ladies and gentlemen (once lockdown is eased 
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