According to the government petrol and diesel car sales will be banned by 2040. According to the Free Car Mag desktop calculator that is 23 years time and predicting the future is a dangerous thing to do. The best we can usually rely on is Hollywood where Back to the Future II suggested that there would be hover boards by 2015. However, Marty McFly wouldn’t give those so-called current generation wheeled ‘hoverboards’ the time of day. Meanwhile the original Blade Runner had flying cars in 2019 so there is still a couple of years for that to happen. The point is that you can make any promise or prediction into the far flung future and you won’t have to deliver on it because you will be dead, retired, or in prison and no one will care.
However, this isn’t Hollywood it’s the real world and right now coal fired power stations are shut, no nuclear one has been built in the last few decades, renewables are actually unreliables and there is no provision for gas storage, so where exactly is the ‘lecky for all these battery cars going to come from? Presumably fireflies.
Electric cars need an infrastructure, just like petrol and diesel cars need fuel stations and that programme seems to be progressing rather slowly. Obviously you can recharge at home, but what would rather have a fully charged motor, or heat, light and the telly showing Game of Thrones?
Trouble is, politicians like the idea of an electric car as it seems to answer every pollution question. That’s why they previously focused on diesel, because it was so low in C02, although they ignored the more dangerous particulates. Electric cars are one answer, but so are hydrogen powered ones. Their own emission is pure water. Honda, Hyundai and Toyota have hydrogen cars you can buy right now and they don’t need to be plugged in anywhere. Maybe that is the future?
Right now Free Car Mag off to make a film about a world powered purely from politician’s broken promises which does not sound too far fetched to us.
