With summer well and truly upon us, an international football tournament finally underway and the prospect of a return to normal life on the cards, June is shaping up rather nicely. It’s looking good for electric cars, too, with a whole range of new models announced for the coming year or so.
But with all this talk of football tournaments and models, it only seems right that we look at some of the older electric cars you can buy. Bear with us on this. That’s because Lunaz, the classic vehicle restoration company swapping old classics’ clapped-out petrol engines with shiny new electric motors, has received investment from Golden Balls himself.
Yep, according to Autocar, David Beckham now owns a 10% stake in the company, which has already developed electrified versions of the original Bentley Continental and the classic Range Rover.
“Lunaz represents the very best of British ingenuity in both technology and design," Beckham said. "I was drawn to the company through their work restoring some of the most beautiful classic cars through upcycling and electrification.”
Source: Lunaz
The car magazine also claimed Lunaz plans to enter the commercial vehicle market, building HGVs on an industrial scale. The process, Autocar says, is due to begin with “industrial” vehicles including bin lorries.
At the slightly more modern end of the scale, BMW has been busy building two new electric cars of its own. The i4 fastback and iX SUV will arrive in November, boasting futuristic designs and long-range batteries. The i4, which is a zero-emission rival to the Audi A4 and Mercedes-Benz C-Class, will do 367 miles between trips to the plug, while the iX SUV will do up to 380 miles on a charge.
Both cars look set to expand the appeal of electric cars even further, but it seems their popularity is already soaring. Figures from the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders (SMMT) show more than 13,000 new electric vehicles were registered in May, bringing the total for the first five months of 2021 to over 54,000.
Electric cars have accounted for 7.5% of the new car market so far this year, up from 1.6% in 2019.
All these new electric vehicles will need somewhere to charge – particularly when they’re on a summer holiday in the UK – so EV website Zap Map has run the numbers on charging points at hotels.
According to the website, around 10% of the 23,000 charging devices listed on its map are based at hotels, with the highest concentrations of hotel-based chargers found in Wales and the south-west of England. The site also says Holiday Inns and Best Westerns have the most charging points, way ahead of Premier Inns, Hiltons and Ibises.
If you’re planning a summer getaway in your EV, you know where to go.
If, on the other hand, you’re still planning to take your petrol or diesel car on holiday, it might be worth knowing oil company Royal Dutch Shell (more commonly known as ‘Shell’) has been involved in a “landmark” ruling about carbon emissions.
According to Sky News, the company has been told it must slash its net carbon emissions by 45% by 2030, compared with 2019 levels. The company says it expects to appeal the “disappointing” decision, but Sky says the Dutch court has demanded that Shell takes immediate action to reduce its environmental footprint.
However, the company has been granted “complete freedom” to cut emissions in whatever way it chooses.
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