16 November (Part 1) - Carrie on Clowning
It is reported that Bozo Johnson is going to make a speech on climate change
this week. I blame Ed Milliband’s 2008 Climate Change Act that put into law the
requirement to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 80% by 2050. It has already cost
every one of us thousands of pounds.
It is being said that Johnson will ban the sale of new Internal Combustion Engine
(ICE) powered vehicles by 2030. Some ICE vehicle manufacturers have already
announced that they will stop producing new ICE vehicles in only five years
time. That is not to say that they won’t make them but they will not develop any
new models. You can see the direction of travel and it is the correct one, but Bozo
Johnson is very wrong at the same time.
The 2030 rumour has already brought out the cynics, sceptics and ignoramuses on
Social Media and in newspaper comments.
Electric vehicles (EV) “need a new battery every two years
and cannot be recycled”. It takes “five hours to charge for a 20 minute journey”,
“they are ׅslow” and they “have no limp mode if the battery goes flat on a
motorway”. What is that all about? What does an ICE
car do when it runs out of petrol? The engine suddenly cuts whereas an EV will
give you a very accurate prediction of how many miles you have left and throttle
the performance to maximise economy. When it finally gives up it will still
crawl another few hundred yards, or at least that is what braver owners than me have reported.
It is on the record that some EVs have done more than a million miles on the
original battery and they are recycled sometimes into home storage batteries. I
suppose we will all be forced to buy one of those before long.
The battery on my car is warranted for twice as long as the rest of the car (ten
years) but at two years old its charging speed is already dated. If a twenty
minute journey is ten miles it would take me two minutes to put the required amount
of juice into it at its fastest charging speed. Some more recent cars are nearly three times faster. Twitter is full of clueless commentators.
I
don’t really want everyone to switch to electric cars but that is for purely selfish
reasons. The one petrolhead in the family boasts that his 0-60 time is more than
a second quicker than mine but that is only if he crashes through the gears at
just the right moment. In practice he cannot do it, all I have to do is floor
the accelerator and just sit there. No gears at all and in a 0-40 race the EV
leaves him standing. Full torque output from a standstill and no possibility of
stalling the thing, ideal for nipping into gaps at junctions.
I like knowing that I can out perform every family saloon or SUV on the road if the mood takes
me and happy to own that superiority for as long as possible.
But even without putting the selfish gene to the fore I still think BJ is nuts, or should I say nut nuts?
There will be enough electricity,
the National Grid bosses say so even if the
sceptics say all the lights will be going out. However distribution will be an
issue and not only for those who live on the fifth floor of a tower block.
My car will only take 32 amps from the mains supply which is pretty much standard
at the moment but we are already seeing some that will take 50% more and a very
few three times as much. The oven takes another 12 amps or more, the
washing machine and immersion heater similar. Then BJ says we can’t have gas
boilers any more. Where will my 18 kilowatts of gas heating come from?
The electricity supply to my house has been uprated to 100 amps but it cannot go any higher without
digging up the roads and if I use the vacuum cleaner I would be looking at 150 amps.
There would have to be some sort of smart meter regulation and then you might
wake up with a car insufficiently charged to get you to work.
And did I say that EVs cost far too much? Mine is more than 20% more
expensive now than when I bought it with nothing to show for the extra money other than
one more USB port and heated rear seats. On the plus side servicing costs are near zero and less than
three pence a mile to run it if charging at home. I have only had to charge away twice in two years,
once was just playing safe, it would have scraped home anyway, and on both
occasions there was no charge. Payment that is.
Most ICE car owners talk total nonsense about electric cars, no one who buys one
would ever want to go back to a smelly sluggish noisy ICE car but heavy trucks may be a problem.
Electric buses and vans are becoming available, but at a price. 2040 maybe, but 2030?
Boris will do as much damage to the country’s transport infrastructure as Sadiq Khan has done to London’s.