The Kia EV4 is a small electric car that’s like a little SUV, meaning it’s good for city and family use but runs on batteries. Its release in the US has been pushed back, so people are waiting to see it.
MG is a car company originally from Britain but now owned by a Chinese company. They make electric cars that are affordable and are selling more in Europe.
The MG4 is a small electric car that’s easy to drive in cities and doesn’t cost too much. It’s made to be simple and good for everyday trips around town.
The 5 E-Tech Electric is a small car that runs only on electricity, so it doesn’t use gas. It’s a cheaper way for people to try electric cars without spending too much.
The Volkswagen ID. Buzz is a new electric van that looks like the old VW camper vans but runs on batteries instead of gas. People like it because it’s good for the environment and has a cool, familiar look.
A semi-solid state battery is a type of car battery that uses a jelly-like material inside. This helps the battery work better when it's cold and is safer than regular batteries.
The Honda Stream is a family car that’s bigger inside than normal cars, so it can carry more people or things. It’s popular for families who need space and comfort.
The BMW M5 is a fast and fancy car that looks like a regular family car but can drive really quickly. People talk about it because it’s fun to drive on highways and feels special compared to normal cars.
The Volkswagen Bus is a big van that can carry many people or goods. Volkswagen is now making electric versions that don’t use gas, which are being tested to make sure they work well in winter.
The Dodge Journey is a family car that’s bigger than a normal car and good for carrying lots of people or stuff. It’s not electric but is often talked about when comparing older cars to new electric ones.
Thermal management means keeping the batteries and parts of an electric vehicle at the right temperature so they work well and last a long time, even when it's very cold or hot outside.
The Citroën C3 is a small and comfy car that’s easy to drive in cities. It looks a bit different from other cars and is good for people who want something simple and fun.
Plug-in hybrids are cars that use both gas and electricity. You can charge their batteries by plugging them in, and sometimes they can drive just on electricity.
A heat pump is a machine that helps warm or cool your home by moving heat from one place to another, using less energy than a normal heater. It can take heat from outside air and bring it inside to keep you warm.
A self charging hybrid is a type of car that uses both a gas engine and a battery. It doesn't need to be plugged in to charge because it charges the battery while you drive, but it can't make energy all by itself without using gas or braking.
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Welcome back to EV News Daily, today Hyundai Kia pullback, MGTZ's new compact EV and AMG
shows off electric GT, plus stay tuned, later in the show I'll tell you which emissions
record Britain just broke for the first time in 400 years, no EV news China today, our
spin-off podcast, that's back tomorrow morning, first thing on Monday, Hyundai Kia have started
trimming back their EV ambitions in the United States, blaming, affordability pressure,
and tariff uncertainty, Hyundai will cut the South Korean Bill
Onyx 5 line, sorry Onyx 6 line to a single version, that's the Onyx 6N, the proper fast
one, the high performance model with 641 horsepower will arrive later this year, it's coming as
a 2026 model year, come, Hyundai hasn't confirmed pricing, but Onyx 6N should cost more than
the outgoing Onyx 6 limited sticker price of 52.5, the move ends the standard Onyx 6
in the US for now, Hyundai priced it for under $40,000, but February sales were low, dealers
have some stock that they can sell you, Kia, sister companies also pausing their United
States sales indefinitely delaying the GT versions of EV6 GT and EV9 GT, US built EV6
GT line and EV9 GT9, that's a trim level, not an indication of performance, that continues. So
those are made in West Point, Georgia, unaffected, Kia had already pushed back the US launch of the
EV4 from this year to sometime in the future, again shifting market conditions and uncertainty
over tariffs, they sit in the background because South Korean built cars are now facing 15% at
least as of when we woke up this morning and which way the wind was blowing, and that could be a 25%
tariff with new threats from the White House to escalate levees, and for now US built cars carry
on the imports wait for an EV market and a tariff rate that makes sense for them, so there's many
times before I'm no economist, but even my tiny simpleton brain can understand that if you want
to do any sort of favor for the car industry, you just need certainty, and decisions are made for
10, 20, sometimes 30 years, at least product cycles are very extensive, and you can't be
waking up in the morning and seeing which country has annoyed the president, and so
it's no way to run, hey, no idea what a country is, but there you go, it's not my business,
and no way to run a car company, and so ultimately consumers suffer, and so ultimately buyers of
those brilliant EVs are not going to be found in the US for a while, that's a real shame,
but it's inevitability with the consistency required by the automotive industry on things
like policy, and anyway we'll move on. MG will unveil a car at the Goodwood Festival of Speed
in July this year, a small EV, we think it'll be called the MG2, MG head of Europe William Wang
putting the production car in 2027, MG2 would be four meters long, and a great urban car,
although not the MG4 Urban, which is literally urban, not only in size, because it's smaller than
the MG4, I hope you're keeping up, but the MG4 Urban is literally called urban, however,
this car will be even smaller. Now MG4 Urban starts at £23,500, it's a really attractive
price, yeah sure, that's based spec, and the MG4 Urban is not the MG4, entirely different platform
and driving experience, but incredibly good value, and so Renault 5, BYD, Dolphin, Serf,
upcoming Volvo, Volkswagen ID Polo, and Cooper Revell, etc, that kind of market, that 20 grand,
or a little bit either way, market is so hot over in Europe at the moment. Under the skin,
MG2 would be front wheel drive platform underneath the MG4, MG4 Urban has in its smallest guys a
42.8 kilowatt hour battery pack, they could also, if they wanted to, at a price, offer the MG4's
semi-solid state battery. Now there is one trim in China which has a semi-solid state battery
on the road right now, a gel like electrolyte, very good for cold conditions, although unless
you are perhaps in Scotland over here, you're only going to get cold temperatures for limited
times of the year, and so MG, obviously owned by the Chinese SAIC, expanding their European lineup,
18 models in the next two years will launch, the MG4 Urban is really really good value by the way,
as for how it drives, if you're asking about whether it's front wheel drive or rear wheel drive,
whether the chassis dynamics are not as good as the other original MG4, then by the way,
this car's not for you. If you're asking that question, this car's not for you. If you're
asking what the monthly payments are, and if you like the fact that it's got loads more rear leg
room than the other MG4, then this is the car for you. Let's move on. Mercedes AMG has revealed
the production interior of its four-door electric GT. The Mercedes AMG GT has a full unveil coming
soon, previously called the XX when it was a prototype, and so we've seen it lapping for eight
days, a track called Nardo at 186 miles an hour. AMG Mercedes pitched the runners' proof of their
new platform, AMG.EA, and it's 1,360 horsepower, power transfer, 1,000 kilowatts anyway.
Inside, it's a big screen, to be honest with you, and not just one big screen,
like a Mercedes-Benz hyperscreen, a single piece of glass across the entire front with
various screens behind it. Oh no, this is just lots of screens all at different angles. Now,
you've heard me say before, I'm not convinced this current era that we're in is going to age very
well. I don't think big screens are very classy, very timeless, very high-end, to be honest with
you, feels like too much of a gadget, but they say this car will be aimed at a Chinese market,
which doesn't feel the same way that I do, and so there's a 10.2-inch driver display,
14-inch central multimedia touchscreen, a 14-inch passenger screen in front of the passenger seat
as well. Yeah, it's just all screens inside this thing, but also I think some, you know,
machined metal knobs and buttons and rotary dials, because this is going to be a high-performance
vehicle. Should get a confirmed on sale day, or at least more details,
coming soon. Talking of high-end vehicles, Ferrari has teased its upcoming Luce on video for the
same time, not just stills anymore, a brief nighttime glimpse of the front end and the
lighting signature. The clip shows little beyond a shadowy silhouette, but the front lighting
gives the first real-world hint of the Ferrari design. Ferrari plans to debut the Luce next
month until then. The teaser confirms the car exists and withholds pretty much everything
else. It will take the shape of a crossover, slightly smaller than a Pura Sangue in size,
with 116.5-inch wheelbase, four occupants in style and comfort. The cabin will feature a fully
redesigned interior from former Apple chief designer, Johnny Ive, described as a redesign
that marks a significant departure from Ferrari's traditional interior language. Underneath,
the Luce is on a bespoke platform, developed fully in-house, incorporating a structural
back-tree pack, they say under the floor and a range of 310 miles anticipated power for electric
motors, 2-power axle, over 1,000 horsepower, and 0-62 in 2.5 seconds. All right, one more story
then, we should take a break. Ireland is expanding its zero-emission truck and bus
grants, the zero-emission heavy-duty vehicle grant scheme, adding a second funding stream.
Under the expanded program, companies can draw up to €500,000, $543,000 per year,
towards zero-emission truck and bus purchases. The subsidy targets the price gap with diesel
alternatives, aiming to make buying decisions less about the upfront cost. A parallel stream,
the infrastructure scheme offering €300,000, $326,000 in funding for depot charging, logistics,
and urban distribution charging. The widen scheme backs the vehicles and the plugs. The next test
sits outside the grant terms, it's whether the take-up rate keeps pace with the scale of the job,
which is to electrify our road transport. In the UK, that's going very well actually,
the United Kingdom electric HDV market hit a big marker last year. The 1,000th electric heavy goods
vehicle is now on our roads. Okay, it's a thousand, we've got to start somewhere though. The data
from the car lobby shows EHDV registrations rising 171% last year on 2024. The gap remains large,
zero-emission trucks 1.4% of the market. GridServe's electric freightway program
supplied 161 of the almost 600,000 electric HDVs that gave the scheme more than a quarter
of all new electric truck registrations in the UK. Electric freightway is partly funded by the
Department for Transport, delivered in partnership with Innovate UK and GridServe, targeting
to eliminate two of the barriers really for fleet operators, vehicle access and reliable
half-hour high-power charging infrastructure. There are 21 zero-emission truck models to pick
from over here, DAF trucks, Volvo, Renault, Daimler, and more. GridServe has expanded its
dedicated charging network for heavy goods vehicles across depo hubs and the road network
on the A1M at Bouldock and Moto Services on the M5 down in the southwest. Not too far from me,
the M5, the southwest area, gets some great charging, by the way. It's fantastic when you
drive down in the southwest. There's some really good motorway infrastructure now. Anyway,
we'll take a break, we'll come back and we'll talk about our final trucking story today
and a bit of solantis threats. Find out why. Stick around.
All right, welcome back to the podcast. MAN truck and bus has finished the first winter test of
their fully electric coach. Never done a coach journey on fully electric and I can't wait for
the day that I do. They've been doing minus 30 degrees Celsius testing in the Arctic Circle
and on snow and icy terrain. The team focused on the systems that typically harm EVs, the high
voltage battery getting very cold, thermal management, powertrain, energy, and interior
heating. For a battery electric coach, cold weather isn't just about comfort, it's about
whether it can do energy management. These MAN PureBev trucks will do up to 650 kilometers
from 320 kilowatt hour pack, up to 480 kilowatt hour pack, carrying 63 passengers in comfort and
down to very cold temperatures as well. They say luggage capacity, all that kind of stuff,
exactly the same as the diesel equivalents, so no compromise there in going electric
if you are taking a coach journey. Now, Stalantis are back with a familiar refrain,
threatening the United Kingdom, because Stalantis have a lot of infrastructure here.
They do some car building, some van building, and politicians hate the idea of job losses,
and so once again, Stalantis, who are not shy of doing this as a tactic, by the way,
threatening to shrink its UK operations unless the government backs down and reforms the zero
emission mandate. The Stalantis Europe boss, Emanuele Capilano, said the rules forces car makers
to bleed money, and hands the edge to the Chinese importers. Stalantis sold over 200,000 cars here
in the UK last year. It's the second largest car maker by volume behind VW Group, and a fifth
of Stalantis were electric here. So they're doing all right. The mandate pushes the market faster
than it typically wants to go, that's why politicians get involved. It sets a 32% EV share
target this year, and EVs made up 22% of the sales in the first couple of months in 2026.
So a job to do, a long way to go, and government flexibilities, like credits for CO2 savings
are all part of the scheme. It's going to be very difficult for some of the car makers
to hit it, but Stalantis, of all of them, actually have strong brands over here and
some really good cars. So it's always a little bit sad to see them being a bit anti-EV and saying,
well, we can't do it. But missing the target brings fines of £12,000, $15,000 per car sold,
if they miss the targets, or obviously doing deals with other car makers to pool with them,
that's cheaper. The lobby organization over here of car companies reported average discounts of
£11,000 last year, which is a lot, isn't it, to discount an EV, to get it off the lot,
but by the way, massive discounting also on petrol and diesel cars, just a bit more for EVs.
So it sounds a huge amount, and then you go, well, okay, but there's still like
£9,000, £8,000 of discounting on average for combustion cars. So clearly, you know,
I have some sympathy. It's probably not as bad as those that want to make the headlines sound,
but it probably is a massive headache for, I don't know, the CFOs and those whose job it is,
to lobby politicians with things like this. They've got the Citroën EC3, Vauxhall Frontera,
Fiat Grande Panda, you know, they start from £18,000, £19,000, LFP pack, smart car platform,
they've got some great stock. I just wish there'd be a bit more pro EV rather than,
you know, butting up against the government, which they've done plenty of times before,
and even when they've reduced investment over here, which Stalantas has done in the last couple of
years, erroneously reported by the media as because of electric vehicles, and well, no,
they were always closing things like their van facilities and moving investment, you know,
around nothing to do EVs. But I think Stalantas were quite happy with that narrative to play out
in the media. Again, a lot of the newspapers who see massively falling circulations requiring on,
you know, clicks online and wild headlines are more than happy to print anti-EV stuff because it
does any kind of bad news that gets you your blood boiling is, you know, more clickable
than the truth. And so, yeah, I'm not surprised, but frustrating, if nothing else, Volkswagen is
starting pre-series building of the ID buzz autonomous vehicle, fully autonomous, making it
in Hanover. It's the buzz AD, AD stands for autonomous driving. And so these are genuine
Robo taxis and Robo shuttles. They'll be 500 made this year. They've got all that massive
sensor suite on the roof, like the Waymo vehicles with the radar, the LiDAR, the cameras and stuff
like that. But they'll be ID buzzes, which is really cool because the vehicles look cool anyway,
and a bit space agey. And now they'll be fully autonomous. I'm not sure where they'll be rolled
out, but these are level four vehicles like the Waymo ones, fully autonomous. That's cool. Now,
finally, UK greenhouse gas emissions fell two and a half percent last year, the lowest level since
1872. But the records actually get bigger than that. Cold demand sank to levels last seen in the year
1600. And because not only are we a very old country, but a country that likes things like
rules and, you know, queuing, keeping records, I fully believe that stat. I'm sure there's been
somebody since the year 1600 keeping track of how much coal we burned because that seems like a good
British pastime. I mean, you can't do something because the weather's terrible. So you might as
well keep track of how much coal we're burning. Gas demand slid to a 34 year low as well. A warmer
winter and higher gas prices doing some of the work. The rest came from a power sector that kept
pulling coal off of the system. UK coal demand fell 56% last year. That left coal use 97% below
what we burned in just 2015. And I know that the move to EV is incredibly quick for car makers who
work on long time scales. And sure, it can feel overwhelming not to you and I, because we talk
about this every single day. But to people, the idea of not having their petrol or diesel car seems
absolutely unthinkable. The never bevers are out there. But we've cut our coal use 97%
in this country in the last 10 years. And it's 99.6% below the peak in 1956. The closure of the UK's
last coal fired plant did much of the work. Oil moved a little bit less. UK oil demand fell a
last year. Electrified vehicles chipped away at that. There are now 3 million EVs on our roads,
plug-in hybrids and electric vans make up 5% of the overall car park. The UK added 700,000 plug-in
vehicles last year, saving 2 million tons of CO2. The fleet now cuts more than 7 million tons of
CO2 every single year. And EV drivers save 700 pounds, that's $800 per year, per car in lower
fueling costs. And it's a lot more per van as well, by the way. Heat pump sales, if you're
interested, I know it's not an EV technology, but it's kind of EV-adjacent. And you know,
when I talk about solar and heat pumps and stuff, people are still pretty interested.
Heat pump sales were up 25% last year. 125,000 heat pumps installed. But the heat pump stock
total around 450,000 as a total. Government wants 2.3 million. I feel like, you know,
it's a sample size of one, but we're right in the middle of that dilemma. So we have a gas boiler
that is old, really old. But it was a warm winter this year. And I look back and we put it on sometime
in November. I mean, we've got a new-ish house that's really well-insulated, by the way. 70s house,
but tons of extra insulation. New double glazing, not triple glazing, but loads of loft insulation
here. Way more than we have to. And cavity walls been added. Also got solar and solar thermal for
our hot water. I should get our EPC redone because the last 10 years, we've really got a home battery
here as well. So our EPC is really at a date. But we didn't turn it on till November. And it's
turned off now. And maybe some days in the evening or the morning can be a little bit chilly. And
we sort of just whack it on for half an hour. But if we didn't have the kids, we'd wear a jumper.
And so we haven't used much gas at all. So buying a heat pump, it's a struggle. Because we've got
other things we can spend our money on. If the gas boiler dies, it becomes a more compelling
argument. But to take out a working technology, we'd simply be doing it for the ideological
reasons because we want to cut gas. And we got rid of the gas hob. It's an induction hob here. Now
we did that when we did the kitchen last year. So we've done stuff, but we still do burn a bit of
gas. But that's a tough sell to my wife. Let's get rid of a gas boiler that works perfectly well.
The next phase of transport here in the UK, accounting for 30% of total UK emissions,
transport is less than half of all of our emissions, but it's roughly around a third.
And it remains the UK's largest single emitting sector. Transport is the primary source of emissions
cuts through to 2040 as the EV transition accelerates. And that's hopefully where I will be
for as long as you let me be. And you do that by supporting me on Patreon and listening to the
podcast and the odd ad and stuff. If you listen to the free feed, and we get to commentate on that
move every day for the last eight years, and maybe even until 2040 and longer. Who knows?
If there's a listener, I'll carry on doing it. And that's your podcast for today. Thanks to our
premium partners, National Car Charging on the US mainland and the low hard charge in Hawaii,
and Test TV. Have a loose trusted partner for independent EV battery health testing in Australia
and New Zealand. Have a good one. See you tomorrow. And remember, there's no such thing as a self
charging hybrid.
About this episode
Hyundai and Kia are scaling back their US EV plans due to tariff uncertainties and affordability concerns, delaying or cutting some models. MG teases a new compact EV, the MG2, targeting the European urban market with a 2027 launch. Mercedes AMG reveals the interior of its high-performance electric GT with multiple screens, aimed at China. Ferrari previews its upcoming Luce crossover with a redesigned interior and strong electric performance. Ireland expands grants for zero-emission trucks and buses, while MAN tests electric coaches in extreme cold. Stalantis warns of UK production cuts over strict EV mandates, highlighting industry tensions.
