Electric Cars and things….

This development was partially embraced by the public but the phenomenon was only short-lived as by the time the 1960s dawned the market had grown tired of being constrained by the limitations of vehicle size, and very soon performance, speed and power were the order of the day. Only a few of the small cars developed in the 1950s and 1960s survived and lived on but that was more a factor of the growth of an economy in which both parents in a family now worked, than anything else. This increased the demand for two cars in the family, which typically included a big a and a small one, a kind of ‘his and hers’ of cars.

So with the politicians and the tree-huggers out-voted, market demands prevailed and cars once again grew in size until the next clever idea came along, the MPV. The sheer practicality of the likes of the Chrysler Voyager and the Renault Espace ensured that these vehicles were adopted as the replacement for the traditional 4-door family saloon, again a development driven by market demand and not politicians and do-gooders.

Today there is a plethora of Japanese (and more recently European) electric city cars, hybrids, plug-ins and scooter things buzzing about but not a lot of planning has gone into how these cars are going to be recharged. Just imagine if we all had electric cars and when we came home from work each evening we all plugged our cars in at about the same time to be recharged for the journey to work the next morning, the national grid would collapse. So we have to have a new, much more robust and easily accessible source of power generation than what we have at present, and coal or nuclear ain’t it.

To be honest, the next clever source of vehicle propulsion has not yet been invented, and to be totally frank, I don’t think it has even been thought of yet. Our current crop of inventors and innovative engineers don’t have the answer either, and that is no disrespect to their ingenuity because the simple fact of the matter is that we have had our minds on a single track up until now – the mighty internal combustion engine. In case you think that it is our kids, the next younger generation, who will have the answers, well it isn’t them either. The reason being because they too have been brought up thinking that the current form of motor transportation, that is the motor car as we and they know it, is the way of the future – with perhaps a few clever tweaks here and there.

Real progress in the field of alternative forms of propulsion will come from an uncluttered mind sufficiently far removed from the concept that fossil fuel is the chief source of power generation available for use in vehicles. The current explosion of hybrid and electric vehicles is mere window-dressing and motor manufacturers have merely used film stars and so-called celebrities to give their actions some mileage, while countless hybrid and electric cars sit languishing in Hollywood garages, only to see the light of day when the lucky celeb who was given the car as a freebie in the first place, can get some newspaper column inches out of the deal.

This may seem a rather cynical view to some readers, but don’t think for one minute that the internal combustion engine is going to disappear anytime soon. The livelihood of too many engineers, designers, auto industry people and manufacturers (primary suppliers, Tier-1, Tier-2 and so on), around the world depend on it continuing for many years to come. Stories of oil companies buying out inventions and inventors of alternative propulsion machinery have been circulating for decades, so the oil companies are not going to simply fold their arms and say, ‘Okay our day is over’. They are going to want to replace the revenue they currently earn from supplying fuel on the forecourt, to our homes and in industrial applications, with a similar level of revenue from a fuel replacement product, so don’t expect oil companies to roll over and give up.

Neither will running an electric motor car cost you any less than a conventional current motor car at the end of the day, because the government will not like to lose the 62% of the current fuel price it currently extorts from you in the form of taxes. Low emission and zero emission vehicles currently enjoy a much lower, and in some cases zero road tax, but don’t assume that will continue either. Oil companies and car insurance companies will need to earn similar levels of revenue from some other motoring related source and the thousands of repair garages around the country will all have to convert to space engineering if the motor car, as we know it, were to disappear.

 

Economic developments of this size and nature will only occur when the market can demonstrate that there is sufficient demand to dispense with the old, and bring in the new. We are not there yet because that replacement form of propulsion has not yet been invented and the current range of hybrid and electric vehicles cannot offer a practical replacement for the motor car as a means of transport, leisure, or work. There is nothing new about electric cars, they have been knocking about for decades and battery power still remains as much of a problem today (about 100 miles is your average battery life) as it did back in those experimental electrical vehicles of the 1980s.

The next generation of babies, not yet born, will no doubt each receive at birth a free iPad (or equivalent) from Apple and it is that group who will begin to think outside the box. These babies will grow up learning about the NASA space shuttle in their history lessons, iPhones and BlackBerries will be ‘so last century’, and the iCloud dream will be embarrassingly old technology. This generation will probably live in the iCloud, and it will be through a thought process called iClear (I thought of that name first!) that the next form of efficient, affordable clean propulsion will be born.

So don’t take your rusty old socket set down to the local boot sale, and don’t trade in the old spanners and screwdrivers for a space helmet just yet, you’re still going to need them for a while.