So, last night I was, as I mentioned, podcast guest extraordinaire. It’s funny, knowing people who do stuff, because you get to do things you’d ordinarily not do. Nikki’s always been more of a media whore person than me ( ;-) ), and I remember making our videos, and how we made a promo for Granada TV…
…anyway, so yesterday she got me to talk a bit about my desire for conversions of existing cars to electric. I know that there’s a huge number of people for whom this is unbearable sacrilege. A minor without an A-series? It’s like a Tatra without a V8…
The thing is, at the end of the day a car is a car. Yes, cars are a terribly inefficient way of moving people about. Most of the time we move one person in a 6ft by 10ft metal box on wheels, wasting space and energy. Moving people en-mass in a bus or similar is vastly more efficient. But at the moment our society isn’t set up that way. We fell, or were coaxed into love with the car. The US and Canada are incredibly car-dependent cultures; the UK has gone that way too (despite not being built that way so much); and while many could commute on public transport they choose not to because it’s often slower and vastly more inconvenient*. A legacy of decades of underinvestment in public transport – and the closure of a lot of lines.
Anyhow, so cars – or their brethren – will be with us for a while, I suspect. In which case we need to go about making them more efficient, and produce less in the way of greenhouse gases.
Most people don’t actually care very much about the way their car is powered. So long as it goes and stops – ideally quietly – they’re happy. Some classic car owners are somewhat different; I know I loved the quiet clatter of my old A-series. The 1098 at idle was almost musical – and I know people adore their 948 and the 918cc engines. Changing to the 1300, I do miss the clatter of the engine – the 1300 is a much less refined engine (despite being newer), but I cope just fine. When, eventually, I get the money and Rebecca sports an electric motor instead of an engine, I’ll care not, because I’ll still enjoy driving her just the same.
So, *most* people who are driving cars around 10 years old, the people targeted by yesterday’s environmentally disastrous budget announcement; they’ll get basically 2 grand to scrap their old car and buy a new one. They, for the most part, wouldn’t care if their new car was run by a very efficient collection of hamsters in wheels (just feed them lettuce), a whacking great electric motor, or a petrol (or diesel) engine. So long as it went adequately quickly.
In fact, they’d probably, at the end of the day, prefer an electric motor – not having to fill up with fuel? Awesome. I know I’ve been enjoying driving the DAF with it’s much more efficient (and dinky) engine, because I’ve not filled up for a week (it’s a teeny petrol tank). That ‘oh, bother, I need to get petrol’ feeling is quite annoying sometimes.
So, they wouldn’t care. What we’re doing is taking cars, which take an awful lot of energy to produce; and cause an awful lot of destruction along the way: Petrochemicals extracted and refined to make plastics; iron ore mined, refined and pressed into body parts; rare metals also mined and refined, then made into catalytic converters; thousands upon thousands of people driving to work to make the cars, sell the cars, and then transport them thousands of miles around the Earth to get them to the eventual buyer; all that energy squandered so that someone can have a shiny new car to replace a perfectly good older car.
Does anyone really believe that’s more efficient and less environmentally damaging than just keeping the old car on the road? Really (and I don’t mean industry lobbyists who’d believe the world was flat if they were paid enough).
No. Thought not.
So we’re trashing the environment some more in search of a temporary prop for companies that had no foresight, because if they had, they’d’ve been producing EVs since the 70s. Hell, the 70’s Enfield is, frankly, roughly comparible to a lot of what’s on the market today. Quirky styling, limited range, low top speed (and surprisingly nice to drive). Imagine if that development had continued, rather than stalling and having to restart now?
Instead of propping up companies that should be propping themselves up we should be transforming the way that the economy works. We should be supporting local business, improving the local economy, so my proposal is this:
You still do a grant for buying an EV. If you wish to sell or scrap your petrol car, and buy a pure EV (not a hybrid) then you can have a grant. If your car has a valid MOT and is in reasonable condition it cannot be scrapped.
You do a grant for converting Modern FWD cars could be provided for by the motor manufacturers designing and making drop-in conversions for the cars hybrid or pure EV conversions. It supports the motor industry, and keeps modern FWD cars on the road – rather than scrapping them.
And you do a grant for converting older cars (FWD and RWD). These cars can be converted locally, by local engineering firms. While particularly the RWD ones will loose out in efficiency stakes because you are, indeed, driving the wheels in a somewhat inefficient way (if you end up keeping the drive-train; I would assume that good enough designers could probably avoid doing that but it might mean major modifications to the car, which would probably make the classic owners make whimpering noises), it’s still cleaner than running it on petrol.
You tax petrol more, and continue, at least for the time being to keep EV’s and hybrids tax free or very low tax band.
So that’s my idea.
And now I’m going to go paint skirting and set the timing on a petrol-engine’d 844cc car :)
* I can’t, as it happens, unless I leave probably an hour earlier than I already do. And yes, I should work nearer to home, but a job is a job. And a job you like is better still.