On last nights Top Gear the theme was electric cars and caravans. Now to be fair it's probably the best show with the new cast, it made me laugh (a first) but mostly because they were suffering eating chillies. The electric cars however were a bit more serious. Out of three high quality electric cars, two ran out of electric before the finish.
Now while this isn't a big deal or the end of the world for the Top Gear crew, for you or me it's a bloody nightmare. Before if you ran out of go juice you rang a mate, he'd nip out and buy you a gallon and get you to a garage, where £50 and 2 minutes would see you sorted for a few days motoring. Now with electric it's different.
Run out now and your mate cant help, The AA will come out, but they cant help either, they will tow you to the nearest charging point, and thats where it gets worse. On a recent trip to Milton Keynes (from south Wales) just a 180 miles, my brother tried 6 charging points at different places, only one worked and it cost him a whopping £160 to top up the car he was using, ok he got a fair bit of back after he could prove the charging points didn't work but they all charged him at the time.
The real problem however is driving, worried sick your going to run out of electric on the motorway and trying to find a charging point, these are thin on the ground, most services only have 2 or 3 points, and these are often obstructed by non electric cars, those that are not in use or broken that is. How bad will it be if we all go electric? Then theres the wait for the car to charge while you sit there and silently smoulder at your life ebbing by.
The other 2 big elephants in the plug socket of electric cars is much more serious. Over 70% of UK houses dont have drives, this means on street parking or car paking by flats. So how do these people run a cable to charge their cars? The pavements are already crowded by cars parked on them , hords of recycling bins and now they'll be festooed with trip hazard wires like an ambulance chasing lawyers wet dream. Will your house insurance cover you if I fall over the wire and sue? I bloody doubt it.
So what do they do? All queue up for the few charging point at the nearest motorway services, thet'll make the morning commute fun wont it. Think of the thousands of new friends you'll make waiting for a charge. Or will they risk it and run a cable out to the car? Yes I would too! That raises the second part of this issue, that only works if you can park by your house. I often can't, and I know I'm not alone in this, in inner cities people often have to park streets away from their home. Yes that morning commute looks better all the time doesn't it.
All this pales though compared to the biggest problem., We don't have enough electric! All well and good to set a target, everybody goes electric by so and so date. The truth is we're very nearly at full capacticy for generating electric now, just 3% spare last year, and it's not like we can just make more, a power station takes time to build, a nuclear power plant takes about 20 years (roughly) from concept to producing power,
OK we could get it quicker if we skip the bullshit planning nonsence and shoot the frizzy haired protesters who want electric cars and vegan coats but not power stations. But even then it's going to be 10 years plus, and we have electric cars NOW. This should have been done before coming up with the " lets go all electric" plan, not wait until the lights go out and the trams stop running on Blackpool seafront. It's a bit late then.
So come on Borris, forget the all electric plan, pour a few bucket fulls of hydrocarbons in the tank and keep Britain running.... You know it makes sense!
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