Is the future electric?
As an old geezer, I like to swing back and forth between being ‘up with the latest technological advances’ and the direct opposite. It so happens that I was looking through a recent copy of Stuff magazine the other day – it’s the monthly one whose obvious competitor is called T3 – just to pass the time upon a railway journey, see what’s what and whether there’s anything in the worlds of modern computers, cameras, smartphone, hi-fi and video gaming that might be of interest to someone who’ll never see 59, or indeed the soles of his feet, ever again.
Currently I’m hosting Barry, my thirtysomething son, at my home after he flew to London a couple of weeks ago for a major operation upon a broken wrist.
As a father, when he was young I naturally used to discount everything he ever said for being naïve and/or fatuous – which inevitably a lot of it was – and even now, when he’s long been off ‘doing his own thing’ in foreign lands, I have to suppress my instinctive inclination to scepticism whenever he gives his opinion on anything. This despite the fact that these days I’m happy to admit that in many areas of life he knows a great deal more than I do.
I’m one of the older generation who about a dozen years ago listened when the UK Government told motorists that diesel cars were the way forward – i.e. cheaper and no longer inefficient or unacceptably noisy – and began buying them as we were encouraged.
Within eight years I was smarting and indignant. The same government had simply gone and upped the taxes on diesel fuel so that it was now more expensive that unleaded (the reverse of what had persuaded most of us to switch to diesel) … and then, within the last 18 months, we’ve been told that not only is diesel once again ‘dirty’, but a wide range of motor manufacturers have been ‘cheating’ the emission tests designed to ensure that diesel remained at least as clean as any other form of fuel.
Which in reality it will probably never be.
Hence my current stance as a cynic on everything to do with cars that I’m ever told by anyone.
Having registered that, let me return to my son Barry’s views on such matters and expand a little.
About twenty years ago, as a teenage schoolboy Barry told me solemnly that the day would soon come when everybody would own a personal ‘hover car’ as their primary mode of transport. I naturally thought he’d imbibed a suspicious substance or lost his marbles and – to be fair – at the time, on all know science and indeed fantasy speculation that I had come across, he was clearly talking through his hat. And I told him so.
And yet. These days, scarcely an edition of the Daily Mail is published without containing a story (and sometimes a video) featuring inventors around the world who have produced working models of ‘personal hover cars’ that can by choice either travel our motorways and/or take off and land in gardens and at airports … and in between fly around the country at relatively minimal cost. As son as the laws and the practicalities have been worked out, that is …
So (one might reasonably ask) who was right – and who was wrong?
I believe I have mentioned previously a while back now, when Barry visited the UK, he casually mentioned towards the conclusion of his stay that, by prior arrangement on a day excursion into central London, he had test-driven an early prototype of a Tesla electric car that had been developed by multi-billionaire and serial entrepreneur and inventor Elon Musk.
Barry had described the experience as totally mind-changing and revolutionary. The efficiency of the battery-powered car was extraordinary and – in his view – this was the direction in which car-technology was going.
Yesterday, two years later, with the Tesla Model 3 (its reasonably-priced semi-hatchback electric vehicle version) launched last month in the United States, Barry and I spotted a massive Tesla dealership garage – where once there had been a Porsche equivalent – not long before the Hammersmith fly-over whilst on our way into London for his post-operative check-up. Clearly Mr Musk and his electric cars are readying themselves for their assault on the British and European markets.
Completely by chance I have another connection with the world of electric cars. My daughter’s partner, who used to work for one of the Formula One teams, has more recently also done some consultancy work for one of the teams now operating in Formula E – the electric battery-powered version of Formula One which is gaining popularity around the world with its ‘several races in one day’ and street-circuit venues.
Its purpose, of course, is to provide a development environment for those at the cutting edge of electric-powered vehicle technology and to promote the cause of electric power with the general public.
Judging by the way things are going, Formula E seems to be doing pretty well – not that I’ve personally ever watched more than twenty-minutes’ worth of any of its races because, not being a motor sports fanatic, it has been only of passing interest.
See here for a link to an article on Formula E’s latest news by Giles Richards that appears today upon the website of – THE GUARDIAN
