Is it time to go electric?

So, what does the future hold for the motorist then, what with emissions regulations, pollution, dwindling reserves of fossil fuels – could the electric car be the way forward?

Let’s think about that for a moment.

Have you driven an electric car recently - they’re crap aren’t they?

No, I don’t just mean that they’re rubbish to drive, they are rubbish in almost every other way too. They’re far too expensive (even with the £5000 taxpayer subsidy)

The build quality is compromised for lightness. They need a recharge to cover 100 miles. They don’t generate their own power so they need a heavy battery pack (complex to make, complex to recycle, limited life span etc., definitely not green anyway).

So what are the advantages then?

I can’t see any to be honest. You pay a lot of money and create a lot of emissions to produce something that doesn’t work very well.

Apparently statistics show that most journeys are local, so the inadequate range is not an issue. What? Of course most journeys are local, you’re not going to buy a house in Norwich, get a job in Newcastle and do your shopping in Nottingham are you? You don’t need a statistician to tell you that. But what if you want to drive 45 miles and then drive back home in less than 24 hours? You are going to need two cars (a ‘city car’ and a proper car) instead of one – once again, not very green.

And if we all bought one tomorrow where’s the power going to come from? The plug? We would need hundreds of new power stations (and we don’t like those do we.) Nuclear power would help I suppose, but our short-sighted politicians procrastinated for too long so we’ll probably run out of power in the next 15 years anyway. Wind power – come off it – wind farms cost an absolute fortune to build and you need an ordinary power station to switch on when the wind stops. I’m not convinced by talk of ‘integrated’ energy production either, who’s going to integrate it?

No, I just can’t see it, unless we come up with a revolutionary new way of storing electricity and a revolutionary method of generating it.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for improving efficiency, utilising the latest technology and so on and we know that a significant amount of the worlds reserves of fuel are in countries occupied by bad guys. But I just don’t think we’re going in the right direction here.

Another alternative are the hybrids, (cars utilising internal combustion engines and electric power) but they promise more than they deliver. An American woman is even suing Honda because her hybrid can’t achieve the advertised mpg. The technology is very clever of course, but like much of this cutting edge stuff it is a bit too clever and it will be very expensive to fix when it goes wrong (trust me, I know!).

So what’s the answer then? Well personally, I think the internal combustion engine will be around for a while yet, but in the future?

Hydrogen cells. Cars powered by hydrogen cells have been tested for several years now and guess what, they work. How? Briefly, a hydrogen cell is used to generate electricity which powers an electric motor.

The fuel required is hydrogen, the most abundant element in the known universe, and the only thing which comes out of the exhaust is water. So you fill up with hydrogen, the car generates its own power, no emissions apart from water and performs like a normal car.

Downsides? Just two really and not insurmountable to my mind. 

1. Hydrogen tends to be attached to other elements (e.g. water is one part oxygen, 2 parts hydrogen) so a chemical process is required to split them. Not entirely straightforward but definitely do-able.

2. We don’t have a network of hydrogen filling stations. But then we didn’t have a network of petrol stations when Carl Benz designed the first car, so that shouldn’t stop us.

To my mind the pluses far out way the minuses.

So why are our esteemed leaders so lukewarm on the idea?

Because, I think it’s just too radical.

It would require a major investment in infrastructure and manufacturing facilities,

and our politicians don’t view spending money on infrastructure as a good way of buying votes.

So, no hydrogen powered cars for us then.