Companies That You Expect to Disappear Soon

[jfollows]

Jaguar were burned in the past by going for diesel engines in a big way, and I can see that it's difficult to predict the shape of the consumer market many years in advance. I myself remember going to a Jaguar garage in about 2011 and asking what second-hand petrol-engined cars they had, to which the answer was "none". I was about to scrap an old Jaguar and I thought I'd buy a newer one to replace it. But not diesel - that's just me. The garage is no longer a Jaguar garage, I didn't buy anything from them, but I did end up with a 5L petrol-engined Jaguar in the end.
Now they're on an electric/hybrid kick, so it seems to me that they want to have good supply when that market reaches some kind of tipping point, it's bound to happen but I couldn't predict when. I'm pretty sure I'll never buy one, unless petrol becomes too hard to source, but I like petrol engines, and always have done.
Land Rover seem nice, but are far too expensive for my needs, two of us have one car which we probably drive less than once a week, and we're not going to replace it until it starts getting unreliable - it's a Golf R with a few years but only a few miles on the clock.

 

[Peter Sarf]

Perhaps Jaguar will be sold on ,their CEO is rebuilding Jaguar as 100% ZEV, Jaguar have just dropped almost all of their petrol/diesel-engine cars from their vehicle sales range. An alternative is Jaguar as a 100% ZEV car maker as a tool to counter-balance sales of non-ZEV Land Rover cars to achieve compliance with the ZEV Mandate (2024 Act of Parliament).
The ZEV mandate is a penalty system of £15,000 per car-quota shortfall if a car maker does not meet or exceed mandated quotas for sales units of ZEV cars, for 2024 the quota is 22% of sales units, rising incrementally year-by-year. 2029 quota is 66% and 2030 80% by units.
Many car makers are targeting fleet sales over private sales in order to achieve their penalty-free ZEV quotas, the private buyer both here in the UK and the USA are showing resistance to the purchase of ZEV cars

So when I come to buy a ten+ year old car there will none available as the petrol ones will be in short supply and the ZEVs will have knackered expensive batteries.

Jaguar were burned in the past by going for diesel engines in a big way, and I can see that it's difficult to predict the shape of the consumer market many years in advance. I myself remember going to a Jaguar garage in about 2011 and asking what second-hand petrol-engined cars they had, to which the answer was "none". I was about to scrap an old Jaguar and I thought I'd buy a newer one to replace it. But not diesel - that's just me. The garage is no longer a Jaguar garage, I didn't buy anything from them, but I did end up with a 5L petrol engined-Jaguar in the end.
Now they're on an electric/hybrid kick, so it seems to me that they want to have good supply when that market reaches some kind of tipping point, it's bound to happen but I couldn't predict when. I'm pretty sure I'll never buy one, unless petrol becomes too hard to source, but I like petrol engines, and always have done.
Land Rover seem nice, but are far too expensive for my needs, two of us have one car which we probably drive less than once a week, and we're not going to replace it until it starts getting unreliable - it's a Golf R with a few years but only a few miles on the clock.

I recall the encouragement to turn diesel and then diesel fuel prices went up and then diesel was frowned upon. But now it seems modern diesels have very low road tax - is that so ?. LPG was also a little side show I recall.

How does all this chopping and changing affect car manufacturers ?. The manufacturers that predict the government whim incorrectly will go under regardless of the quality of their vehicles. The priority will be to predict and fit in with state tinkering in the market - quality will not ensure survival.

I can see there being big money in resurrecting this untried technology down the years. Cheap dodgy batteries to keep a ten year old electric vehicle going, just don't park it near your house or anyone elses when charging or charged !.

 

[gg1]

So when I come to buy a ten+ year old car there will none available as the petrol ones will be in short supply and the ZEVs will have knackered expensive batteries.

I recall the encouragement to turn diesel and then diesel fuel prices went up and then diesel was frowned upon. But now it seems modern diesels have very low road tax - is that so ?. LPG was also a little side show I recall.

Diesel cars registered between March 2001 and March 2017 generally have lower tax rates than equivalent petrol models, the tax bands at the time were based wholly on CO2 emissions which diesels tend to perform well at. My old 2014 Citroen C4 Picasso had a 2 litre diesel engine and cost £30 per year to tax. For more modern cars NOx emissions are also taken into account, this is an area where diesels perform worse than petrol.

 

[Peter Sarf]

Diesel cars registered between March 2001 and March 2017 generally have lower tax rates than equivalent petrol models, the tax bands at the time were based wholly on CO2 emissions which diesels tend to perform well at. My old 2014 Citroen C4 Picasso had a 2 litre diesel engine and cost £30 per year to tax. For more modern cars NOx emissions are also taken into account, this is an area where diesels perform worse than petrol.

Ah that makes sense - thank you for the information.

Now the fear is that the tax bands for those older diesels (2001-2017) will get radically altered !.

 

[trebor79]

So when I come to buy a ten+ year old car there will none available as the petrol ones will be in short supply and the ZEVs will have knackered expensive batteries.
Cheap dodgy batteries to keep a ten year old electric vehicle going, just don't park it near your house or anyone elses when charging or charged !.

Oh, you could have added cobalt mining and burning coal to make electricity to get a full house on EV BS bingo!
Batteries will be perfectly adequate for a cheap car at 10 years old.
No they won't last forever, but then the engine in my cheap 208 didn't last forever either and literally wore out to the point I was chucking a litre of oil in every 500 miles and there was no chance it was going to pass an emissions test.

 

[Peter Sarf]

Oh, you could have added cobalt mining and burning coal to make electricity to get a full house on EV BS bingo!
Batteries will be perfectly adequate for a cheap car at 10 years old.
No they won't last forever, but then the engine in my cheap 208 didn't last forever either and literally wore out to the point I was chucking a litre of oil in every 500 miles and there was no chance it was going to pass an emissions test.

My car engines last longer than ten years - more like 30 years. I try to choose makes carefully however and then look after them. Obviously it is too soon to see how EV batteries will last as the technology is too new.

A friend of mine knows someone in car leasing and he says they are scrapping three year old EVs with knackered batteries. But to be fair that does not mean all batteries (or makes) are as bad. However the batteries are currently very expensive and unproven - I do not intend to be at the forefront of technology on that one.

I have seen too many reports of the environmental impact of extracting the raw materials for batteries to ignore it.

 

[E27007]

My car engines last longer than ten years - more like 30 years. I try to choose makes carefully however and then look after them. Obviously it is too soon to see how EV batteries will last as the technology is too new.

A friend of mine knows someone in car leasing and he says they are scrapping three year old EVs with knackered batteries. But to be fair that does not mean all batteries (or makes) are as bad. However the batteries are currently very expensive and unproven - I do not intend to be at the forefront of technology on that one.

I have seen too many reports of the environmental impact of extracting the raw materials for batteries to ignore it.

I am not a ZEV evangelist, I too have doubts as to the longevity of those batteries not matching the longevity of a decent IC engine.
The ZEV Mandate (2024 Act of Parliament). To comply with the definition of ZEV within the Act, the car maker must provide an 8-year warranty on the battery, the warranty allows for capacity degradation and minimum range, the degradation is I believe 30% of capacity.
We have had "Dieselgate" , I anticipate we will have a "ZEVgate" where car makers exploit loopholes in the ZEV Mandate to circumvent the warranty.

 

[Cowley]

Stop Stop with the electric car stuff please!
We’ve already covered virtually all this stuff in the thread below:

UK switching to electric vehicles discussion

Given the significant obstacles involved with using electric cars and the massive change in infrastructure that would be required do you think it’s practical. I’m especially thinking of those that live in blocks of flats that have no choice but to park on the street or those who do long...

www.railforums.co.uk

 

[Peter Sarf]

Stop Stop with the electric car stuff please!
We’ve already covered virtually all this stuff in the thread below:

UK switching to electric vehicles discussion

Given the significant obstacles involved with using electric cars and the massive change in infrastructure that would be required do you think it’s practical. I’m especially thinking of those that live in blocks of flats that have no choice but to park on the street or those who do long...

www.railforums.co.uk

Fair enough. Thanks for reminding us that we have a thread for ZEV stuff already. The nuisance is the opinion/fear that the subject crops up as a risk for manufacturers !. But over to the thread you linked to for more detail.

 

[Blindtraveler]

I don't have an official source for this, but a friend's teenager who works for one of the Gordon Ramsay restaurant concessions says that there is a full review of the Ramsey empire and restaurant estate ongoing at the moment and we could see a couple of his brands or concessions disappear, although I'm not for one moment suggesting that Gordon Ramsay himself is disappearing anytime soon

 

[trebor79]

I don't have an official source for this, but a friend's teenager who works for one of the Gordon Ramsay restaurant concessions says that there is a full review of the Ramsey empire and restaurant estate ongoing at the moment and we could see a couple of his brands or concessions disappear, although I'm not for one moment suggesting that Gordon Ramsay himself is disappearing anytime soon

I wasn't that impressed with his Pizza place at Battersea. The pizzas were nice and the all you can eat thing is OK, but some of them were hilariously devoid of toppings. There was a ham and pineapple came round, some slices had nothing at all other than the sauce and cheese on them, most had a solitary chunk of pineapple and a meagre piece of ham.

 

[richw]

I don't have an official source for this, but a friend's teenager who works for one of the Gordon Ramsay restaurant concessions says that there is a full review of the Ramsey empire and restaurant estate ongoing at the moment and we could see a couple of his brands or concessions disappear, although I'm not for one moment suggesting that Gordon Ramsay himself is disappearing anytime soon

I seen this somewhere a little while ago no source as I can’t remember where.

 

[jon0844]

My car engines last longer than ten years - more like 30 years. I try to choose makes carefully however and then look after them. Obviously it is too soon to see how EV batteries will last as the technology is too new.

A friend of mine knows someone in car leasing and he says they are scrapping three year old EVs with knackered batteries. But to be fair that does not mean all batteries (or makes) are as bad. However the batteries are currently very expensive and unproven - I do not intend to be at the forefront of technology on that one.

I have seen too many reports of the environmental impact of extracting the raw materials for batteries to ignore it.

Batteries may degrade a little with age, but primarily they're affected by the number of charge cycles. Many batteries are still at 80-90% health after nearly half a million miles. Yes, some batteries haven't done so well but I think we can agree that when it comes to ICE vehicles, there's plenty of good and bad cars with many having reputations for common faults through bad design.

Engines also don't just stop working after a certain length of time, but rather how much workload they've had to endure over a period of time - and how well they've been serviced and maintained. Do few miles a year and the engine might last for decades, but low mileage users might also be people who don't do regular checks and the engine fails prematurely. Fleet drivers might service at shorter intervals and the engine goes on for a million miles.

It would appear that the vehicle with the fewest moving parts, hoses, fluids and so on are performing better. And when things do go wrong, which is cheaper to fix? A brand new battery might cost £5-6k (prices really have dropped significantly in the last year or two) but who fits a new engine to a 10 year old car? You get one from a scrapyard most likely (but labour will still hit you hard). There will be people reconditioning batteries, or you'll take one from a crash damaged vehicle that's in good condition and cheap.

Finally, batteries are not unproven. The technology has been around for decades. I had a Lithium Ion battery in my phone back in 2001 or 2002. The latest LFP batteries (also not that new) have no cobalt and don't have issues with thermal runaway to blow up (not that any car batteries do this frequently, despite what you might read on the Internet where people have to literally lie that the bus/car/truck on fire in a video as electric when it's obvious it was petrol or diesel. Take Luton Airport as a classic example. Even with videos, people insisted the car was electric and the fire service, local council and all staff had been forced to lie to protect 'Big EV'.).

Edit: Sorry, I shouldn't have posted that here.. please continue on this thread.

 

[Peter Sarf]

Yes it s not just reputation of the manufacturer. Some ICE engine problems are down to reliability, servicing BUT also usage. Cannot blame a manufacturer for an engine that has dome lots of start stop working. An engine that has done significantly more miles but at steady speeds (motorway) will outlast its low mileage cousin. So a manufacturer that does not sell cars attractive to high mileage motorway users will not benefit from a reputation for reliable engines so well even if their engines are fine.

 

[dorsetdesiro]

Homebase looks like it's going to become history that the Range is reported to be interested in snapping up their stores, probably waiting for the right moment then swoop in. Sainsburys are actually converting a number of Homebase stores into supermarkets.

Homebase cannot compete with the likes of B&Q & Wickes plus Screwfix & Toolstation also B&M and The Range.

My local one got converted into Home Bargains & Food Warehouse and the last remaining Homebase in the area probably will become a B&M or The Range store as Home Bargains is few doors down and a John Lewis homestore is across the road potentially attracting affluent shoppers with their JL/Waitrose bags!

 

[Russel]

Homebase looks like it's going to become history that the Range is reported to be interested in snapping up their stores, probably waiting for the right moment then swoop in. Sainsburys are actually converting a number of Homebase stores into supermarkets.

Homebase cannot compete with the likes of B&Q & Wickes plus Screwfix & Toolstation also B&M and The Range.

My local one got converted into Home Bargains & Food Warehouse and the last remaining Homebase in the area probably will become a B&M or The Range store as Home Bargains is few doors down and a John Lewis homestore is across the road potentially attracting affluent shoppers with their JL/Waitrose bags!

My nearest Homebase was converted into a Next about 8 years ago, they didn't move with the times and everything they did, B&Q, Wickes, B&M etc all do better or cheaper.

 

[dk1]

Homebase was at one time my first choice but over the years has massively lost its way. I find it quite soul destroying to venture into their stores now if I’m honest.

 

[E27007]

With rates of marriage declining long-term , I notice bridal wear shops on the decline, the wedding dress shop in my town closed a few months ago, how many other towns have lost such shops?

 

[Cross City]

Homebase looks like it's going to become history that the Range is reported to be interested in snapping up their stores, probably waiting for the right moment then swoop in. Sainsburys are actually converting a number of Homebase stores into supermarkets.

Homebase is in a weird place where whatever niche they had doesn't exist anymore. B&M now have large stores with furniture and garden centres and those together with The Range have the budget end of the market sewn up, B&Q has the higher end of the consumer market and Wickes is where professionals and serious DIYers go.

I get the feeling that they didn't even know themselves what they wanted to be, their shop by me (which I heard is being turned into a Sainsbury's) was a very weird mix of flower nursery, bed/bathroom showroom and somewhere to buy overpriced lawnmowers and barbecues.

 

[jon81uk]

Homebase cannot compete with the likes of B&Q & Wickes plus Screwfix & Toolstation also B&M and The Range.

My nearest Homebase was converted into a Next about 8 years ago, they didn't move with the times and everything they did, B&Q, Wickes, B&M etc all do better or cheaper.

The main reason Homebase is failing was the sale to Wesfarmers who run Bunnings Warehouse (Austrailian hardware store similar to B&Q) and hadn't realised what Homebase was doing differently but instead stripped out all the soft furnishings and kitchen planning in favour of more tools and similar. In some stores that worked for them but overall they started competing with B&Q and Screwfix so much rather than continuing to focus on what made Homebase unique.

Homebase sold for £1 as DIY disaster ends for Wesfarmers

The sale ends a costly foray into the UK home improvement market for Australia's Wesfarmers.

www.bbc.co.uk

 

[AlistairCowell]

The main reason Homebase is failing was the sale to Wesfarmers who run Bunnings Warehouse (Austrailian hardware store similar to B&Q) and hadn't realised what Homebase was doing differently but instead stripped out all the soft furnishings and kitchen planning in favour of more tools and similar. In some stores that worked for them but overall they started competing with B&Q and Screwfix so much rather than continuing to focus on what made Homebase unique.

Homebase sold for £1 as DIY disaster ends for Wesfarmers

The sale ends a costly foray into the UK home improvement market for Australia's Wesfarmers.

www.bbc.co.uk

That BBC News was 6 years ago, Bunnings was a disaster! There was a Homebase in my town until around 2015 and that store is now a B&Ms. That store closed before the Wesfarmers mistake.

I don't foresee any future of Homebase stores, I think all stores will be closed in the near future.

Does anyone remember Texas Homecare?

 

[jon81uk]

Does anyone remember Texas Homecare?

That was taken over by Homebase wasn't it? There was also Focus DIY at one point.

 

[pdq]

That was taken over by Homebase wasn't it? There was also Focus DIY at one point.

And Great Mills DIY.
But we're veering well away from companies likely to disappear!

 

[Mcr Warrior]

Does anyone remember Texas Homecare?

That was taken over by Homebase wasn't it?

Yep. Acquired by the Sainsbury's group in the mid 1990s. Some Texas stores were quickly closed, the rest fairly soon got converted/madeover into Homebase outlets.

 

[Lewisham2221]

Hasn't Homebase been on its last legs for a couple of decades? I'm sure it wasn't doing too well when I was at college, goodness knows how's it's kept hanging on for so long

 

[gswindale]

It has - I'm not entirely too sure who owns Homebase now? I recall Sainsbury's owning it, selling it off, Argos acquiring it and putting their stores inside, but then being split with Argos being acquired by Sainsburys's.

Looking at Companies House, it appears that the current trading company was Homebase Ltd until Dec 2016, prior to that it was Texas Homecare until Mar 96, Home Charm Retail until Dec 82 and originally setup as B Fogel & Co Limited in 1954.

 

[jon81uk]

Hasn't Homebase been on its last legs for a couple of decades? I'm sure it wasn't doing too well when I was at college, goodness knows how's it's kept hanging on for so long

I think it was doing OK before the sale to Wesfarmers (Bunnings), not amazingly but had worked out it could aim more at furnishings with Habitat branding, than hardware and go after a different sector than B&Q (probably more in competion with Ikea). But when Homebase was sold, the Habitat brand went to Sainsbury's with Argos and then Bunnings went in the hardware direction further removing the point of difference.
In 2015 before the sale, overall group profits were down (mainly due to Argos), but Homebase sales were up. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-34590409

 

[Mcr Warrior]

It has - I'm not entirely too sure who owns Homebase now?

Isn't it the investment and restructuring company 'Hilco Capital Ltd'?

 

[jon81uk]

It has - I'm not entirely too sure who owns Homebase now? I recall Sainsbury's owning it, selling it off, Argos acquiring it and putting their stores inside, but then being split with Argos being acquired by Sainsburys's.

Currently owned by Hilco who bought it from Bunnings https://news.sky.com/story/homebase-owner-to-launch-sale-amid-interest-from-the-range-13181767

 

[dorsetdesiro]

Does anyone remember Texas Homecare?

I do remember Do It All and Atlantic Homecare which also were shortlived!