Someone observed to me the other day that he considered cars are now just white goods and because we are both hardened Petrol Heads we mourned the passing of motoring as a pleasure, a pastime, a way of life, a source of endless conversation, an interesting method of travel, a trove of stories but above all an endless stream of expense, frustration and joy. I now consider the golden age of motoring to be over and it has gone beyond the usual arguments of traffic, cost and the uniformity of current vehicles.
M25 traffic jam.
Ask any motorist, commuter or someone who drives for a living, what their main issue is and the answer is usually traffic. Hold-ups on the M25, accidents on the M62, road works on the ring road (of any city) and they all contribute to delay, frustration and cost. There are also the stringent rules and regulations that have one overriding objective, financially milk the motorist.
The Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) of a vehicle is an exercise best avoided if one wishes to retain one’s sanity, especially depreciation, but even the everyday running costs can make one squirm. Public transport is touted as a panacea to our travel problems, especially by left-leaning liberal Londoners, but I do not enjoy sharing my personal space with a stranger whose hygiene may be questionable and their taste in music or politics or religion at odds with ones own.
15 Years! Is that all?
And now the Government, in its misguided omniscient way has concluded that battery power is the way to go, having learnt nothing from its disastrous diesel decision. 15 years! That’s all we have apparently to massively upgrade the electric infrastructure and build immense new power stations. We are so poor at building huge civil engineering projects on time and on budget, look at how HS2 has increased in cost!
There is a wealth of information on electric cars on the internet but a very interesting take on the current viability of a Jaguar i-Pace is given by Harry Metcalf (YouTube Video). 
Harry is a keen Petrol Head and in this video he makes some astute observations about motoring in battery-powered cars, not least that the charging system is very poor (unless you have a Tesla). Electric vehicles are least economical on motorways at a constant speed, they seem to work best in stop start situations. The speed of recharging is currently woeful and I understand that these vehicles cannot be towed so running out of volts on a busy road is to be avoided. In conclusion Harry will use the Jaguar for short town journeys but if he needs to go some distance then it’s the Range Rover!
More power!
Now I am not sure what the answer is, but I do believe that we are headed in the wrong direction. The infrastructure is not there and not just the lack of power generation although several Hinkley Points are not the solution. In the village where I live the grid will need to be upgraded if just 10% of the residents decide to install a 7KW charger, the power lines will not cope. We are also told that gas and solid fuel will soon be verboten and so everyone will have to use electric heating. Madness!
The most likely answer is Hydrogen. These people seem to be leading the way, but there will be others. Quite a good Autocar article here. The future is bright if market forces, driven by demand is allowed to be given its head, just keep the politicians out of it.
February 23, 2020 at 5:16 pm
Power generation: passive safety reactors look the way forward. They cannot cause runaway reactions following a tsunami or whatever (unlike active safety reactors) so are inherently safe. Plus, fuel is thorium which is abundant and the waste product is mostly helium. Inevitable that this will play major role.
Cars and trains will inevitably run on hydrogen, according to a logistics expert I happened to chat to in Cafe Nero recently (it’s true, it turned out he was editor of an industry journal and advised the likes of Chris Grayling). He had a lot of interesting things to say, but the idea that electric will be stepping stone to hydrogen is pretty mind-blowing, although I imagine the building of the hydrogen infrastructure to be similarly challenging to building the electric infrastructure?
February 23, 2020 at 7:13 pm
I can’t argue with your comments except to say that I think one possible future for power generation is microgeneration with SMR’s, the Small Modular Reactor similar to nuclear sub reactors placed where required. My overall concern is that we plunge so far into the ‘electric battery’ future that we lose our way to the hydrogen solution. I think the hydrogen infrastructure will be based around the existing petrol stations, they already do CNG and there are a couple of Shell hydrogen stations around Europe.