So Nikki and her evil little helper book Electric Dreams have poked my brain in a fundamentally very annoying way.
When I was a kid I pointed out to my dad the clearly verifiable ridiculousness of cars. Cars are frankly, dumb. I love them, at least classics; I love their looks, I love their convenience (at least in theory), I love the beauty of some of the engineering, but they are at a most basic level dumb.
If cars didn’t exist and someone said:
“Hey, let’s all move ourselves around in individual 28 foot square tin boxes”
You’d look at them, and to misquote Feynmann, you’d say:
“I think that’s a bit nutty.”
…ideally complete with the New York accent.
But we’re sold on them, and despite much ponderence on the problem as a child (seriously, this is the kind of thing I thought about for fun) I couldn’t really see a solution which kept the concept on which we’ve been sold while making it even 10 times more sensible.
Making cars much smaller is a good plan, and I’m a devout believer in the small vehicle, the 340 being an exception because I’m more intrigued by the engineering than the car. And the only way to get that piece of engineering at a price we can afford is the Volvo. Anyhow.
So, the car is kind of a given. Our society is built around it and we all seem to believe that we’re entitled to move around rapidly and whenever we damn want, so pretty much all solutions are going to feature the car in some way, shape or form. But petrol engines, with the exception of Wankel engines, really are just taking-the-biscuit kind of ridiculous. And this from someone who really rather likes them. I mean, I love the A-Series engine, it’s a masterpiece of engine design, and it sounds lovely, at least in it’s smaller incarnations. The larger ones (like the 1.3 gracing Rebecca’s engine bay) have a kind of rough industrial thrashy musicallity at speed which I rather enjoy. But it’s dumb.
You want to see how dumb it is?
Go and run a hundred meters. Okay? Tiring, eh – at least if you sprinted it.
Now, let’s do a petrol equivalent.
Go and run back and forth 2 meters 50 times (or 25 times depending on how you’re counting it).
Now how’re you feeling, eh?
You’ve run the same distance but you’ve wasted *loads* of energy by stopping and turning around every 2 meters, and that’s what your petrol engine’d car does. Every flipping cycle. It’s patently dumb.
I grant it’s an exceptionally clever idea. It converts a linear, ‘splodey motion into a circular one. Which can make the big tin box go forward. But it’s dumb all the same.
Which is why I want my EV. I can’t have my EV because I don’t have the money, but when Rebecca’s 1300cc fast-road-cam equipped Ital derived engine finally passes from this Earth I plan to make her into a shiny, shiny EV.
And this is Nikki’s fault*.
On the plus side, despite what the government say, none of my cars contribute substantially toward global warming. Yes, they burn petrol and, because of my commute, a fair amount, but they’re all moderately efficient and have far less impact than the one transatlantic holiday we’d like to take this year. And since we try and buy a minimal amount of crap from *insert name of country currently producing useless cheap tat for consumers* then we’re only putting out food-shipping-miles and much less tat-shipping miles, so that’s all good.
While my green credentials remain tarnished (by having a car at all) they’re about as green as they could be with the current job and our finances. I feel less bad.
But cars, they’re dumb.
* It’s not only Nikki’s fault, mind. My dad pointed out to me the idiocy of this system of propelling a vehicle long ago, but I lost that in being fascinated by the engineering. I should have realised, the solution isn’t beautiful and therefore it’s not the right one.
