Fill yer tanks!

I’ve been out of the UK for the past 6 days so I’m a little out of the loop, but let me just see if I’ve got this right. The current Prime Minister was slipping into the mire with ugly revelations about dodgy donors dinners in Downing Street. I wasn’t surprised, we’ve all known grubby back handers from big corporations have a massive influence on policy. It’s not party political, all parties (other than possibly the Greens) are guilty of the same deep and soul-destroying corruption.

But this was a bit too obvious and nasty, Dave C did a bit of wriggling and excuse making but it wasn’t working, then the fuel tanker drivers handed him an excuse on a silver platter.

If you are Prime Minister and you’ve spent your life doing PR and you say ‘drivers should just top up their tanks and not worry about it’ you know what you’re doing.

It’s calculated, it’s been mulled over, the possible public reaction to this statement had been assessed and sure enough, the moronic Mail readers, fed a constant diet of fear and anxiety about foreigners, communist truck drivers and evil social workers waiting to take away your children responded by sitting in queues outside filling stations where there was no shortage like a row of brain dead numpties. Should I really be blaming the great British driver with our legendary foresight and innate intelligence? What about, as I’m sure I’ll get a Tweet to remind me to feel guilty, what about the mum taking her sick child to hospital who had nearly run out of petrol and had no choice?

What was incredible though was that there was no shortage, there was no need to panic buy, the tanker drivers didn’t go on strike and the spotlight of our proud British media was turned off Dave and his money grubbing crawling to large donors popping in for a take away at Number 10. Job done.

However, the flip side of this event was the innate fragility of our dependence on the fuel regular readers know I love to harp on about. Mr One-Note Samba starts to parp-parp-parp on his little tune. Maybe we need parp-parp-parp to think about parp-parp-parp our dependence on a fuel supply parp-parp-parp that is at best going to get ridiculously expensive and parp-parp-parp at worst just going to run out.

The non-existent fuel shortage instantly sent the country into a tailspin. How can we even live without our cars, how can we survive for 10 minutes without driving! Arrrgh, 2012, it’s the end of life as we know it! One old Etonian says ‘fill yer tanks’ and everyone feels nauseous with fear.

Energy independence, from national to community level, from huge industrial generating plant to a solar array on your roof, a wind turbine at the end of your street, a geothermal plant by the playing fields, a micro-nuclear facility buried in the ground near the re-cycling depot would change the way we operate.

It’s not a cure all, it would bring up fresh new problems and issues but a huge amount of our fragile transport and energy infrastructure would without doubt be more resilient to the vagaries of well dodgy UK politicians and even more dodgy Middle Eastern regimes. I’m #justsayin’

An Oily Mess

Oil is currently $120 a barrel and likely according to all sources, to go up in the coming year.

If you are in the UK, you’re under 25, have a reasonable job and you want to drive you can probably just afford to buy a second hand car. The idea of a 25 year old with a reasonable job is already narrowing the percentage considerably, youth unemployment is currently at an all time high. However even if they are able to buy an old clunker, doubtful they’ll be able to afford the insurance. When I tried to get my then 17 year old son added to my insurance policy the quote I was given was £4,800 for a year. Guess what, my son can’t drive. He has no interest in learning, he lives in a city, uses a bike or public transport.

It is becoming increasingly clear to motor manufacturers that a generation is growing up with little interest in cars and even less prospect of joining the masses ranks of car drivers. Obviously this is in the West, countries like India and China are in a very different situation with young people very enthusiastic to become car owners and drivers.

But if a generation grows up who can’t drive and don’t want to learn, the whole car industry and it’s complex associated resources will be very powerfully affected. 

On the other hand, the more the oil price goes up, the more energy will be put into developing and manufacturing electric vehicles. That has to be balanced against the fact that the oil price affects pretty much everything, cost of food, transport, medicine, everything really. We are all addicted, cold turkey isn’t going to be fun.

Electric Cars, the Silent Killers…. (Slight yawn)

This story comes up again and again in the microcosm I inhabit. People are worried about being run over by electric cars ‘because they are silent.’ I’m not saying for a moment there isn’t a problem but I am suggesting it’s a problem we already live with and electric cars aren’t going to make any difference.

A low speed traffic accident is a tragedy regardless of what powers the car. In the USA  (according to a recent National Public Radio show in the USA) there are over 300 fatalities every year in ‘backing up accidents.’ 

Out of the entire yearly death count caused by motor vehicles in the USA, 300 is a fairly small fraction but none the less it’s terrible for those involved. I just want to point out that we can be pretty certain that if one of those accidents had been caused by a reversing electric vehicle which killed someone we would have heard about it. 

It will happen eventually and we will hear about it, but will that person have died because the vehicle was silent? Who knows. Possibly. But how are the 300 people killed every year now by vehicles with internal combustion engines which make a noise. The answer has to be ‘it was an accident.’ The driver didn’t check carefully enough, the person behind the car was too small to see, i.e. a child. The number of children killed by their own parents reversing a three ton SUV is heartbreakingly high, now there’s a Daily Mail headline if ever there was one. 

So these accidents happen when the driver and/or the pedestrian were not concentrating for a split second and boom, end of story. 

My point is, the motive power of the vehicle has nothing to do with it. Cars are dangerous, we use them every day and we get complacent, we walk among them all the time and we don’t take enough care. We drive them every day and we get distracted. In effect, the silent electric car menace is a scare story, but why would anyone want to scare people about the impact of a new technology? 

I really wouldn’t like to say.

One last thing, if we stop driving cars especially at low speeds, there would be a reduction of these sorts of accident. When I say stop driving, I mean literally that, let the car do the low speed, urban driving. They are already capable of doing so, cars can already park themselves (my Prius has autopark) and it's only a small step to have them 'unpark' and safely join the traffic flow. 

Also cameras instead of mirrors. I would never reverse anywhere without first chedcking the brilliant reversing camera on the Nissan Leaf. It gives a very clear image of what is directly behind you, day or night. 

This House Believes...

The debate at the Oxford Union the other night was a very enlightening experience.

Not just for me, but I would suggest for everyone attending.

The proposition was: This House Believes the Electric Vehicle is the Future of Transport.

What it showed more than anything else was how different this debate is in the UK in comparison to the USA. Due to the torrent of social media and blogging punditry erupting from of the USA, it is not hard to get a handle on the way the argument is split there. If you hate Obama and ‘big government’ and you want to keep your guns, stop women having abortions and believe in God, you hate electric cars with a passion normally held for homosexuals or vegetarians. 

If you think electric cars may be one small part of a much bigger set of technological solutions we need to progress as a species, you are a left leaning liberal who may indeed have voted for Obama and you probably don’t hate Mexicans that much.

Or maybe it’s that if you can afford to buy an electric car now you are a wealthy optimist who believes the human race can solve their problems with technology, and if you can’t afford to buy one you are a bitter pessimist who blames lesbians and illegal immigrants and big government and anyway you want more guns. 

The differences of opinion evident in the hallowed hall of the Oxford Union last Friday were not split along traditional left or right lines, they were not split on party lines, the arguments were about the technology, the limits of materials and the potential for engineering to find solutions. Indeed as one of the very well informed members of the opposite benches (those speaking against the motion) put it, we have to be led by our heads not our hearts. We all want electric cars to work, indeed they are more efficient and have the potential to do far less damage to the world, but our heads tell us they simply don’t work.

This, obviously, is the point where I stopped agreeing with them. I’d driven the 45 miles to Oxford in the very trusty Nissan Leaf, stopping for a 10 minute top up on the way at a fast charger just outside the city of dreaming spires. (I din’t really need to, when I got back home at midnight, heater and headlights on, I still had 41 miles of range remaining.)

However the disagreements between the two sides were far less interesting (to me at least) than the agreements. Everyone, on both sides, agreed that we had to do something rather quickly, the nice man from BP, Dr. Richard Pearson said that indeed oil was going to run out, not next week or next year, but far sooner than we are prepared for. Not only that but due to a massive increase in demand, from India and particularly China, the price was only going to increase, and soon. He also pointed out a fast that I hadn’t heard before. We are presently using oil 1 million times faster than new reserves are being laid down by natural processes. 

Basically, if we stop extracting it now, in about a million years time there’ll be loads more. Excellent news. 

The oppositions argument seemed to be that we should develop ever more efficient engines, smaller lighter cars with smaller lighter engines to increase the range of these vehicles to eek out the limited and scarce resource we all rely on. I thoroughly approve, what’s not to like. What is becoming clear is that the term ‘range anxiety,’ originally coined by General Motors at the time they withdrew the EV 1 and introduced the civilian Hummer might well come back to bite the hand that created it.

People who drive heavy, large engined cars are going to suffer severe range anxiety as the fuel they rely on becomes not only more expensive, but more scarce. When I was a teenager in the early 1970’s, the most common site on our roads in the UK was massive queues outside petrol stations. Petrol was rationed, the price went through the roof and everyone panicked, had range anxiety and was stressed, depressed and confused. Except me and my smug hippy mates who all rode bikes.

I think that memory abides and I admit, may indeed colour my thinking, but that ‘oil crisis’ happened very quickly and had nothing to do with lack of supply, simply that the oil producing states who’d been bullied, invaded and fiddled with said, ‘hang on, cough up big time or you can’t have any more.’

We did cough up and, well, you know the rest, or, if you don’t, visit Dubai or Abu Dabi and see what we’ve been paying for. Obviously we can’t visit Saudi Arabia but that’s a whole other can of worms.

At the end of the debate the audience have to choose which door they will pass through, the ‘aye’ door, or the ‘nay’ door. The vote went in our favour, indeed “This House Believes the Electric Vehicle is the Future of Transport by 90 votes to 62. Not a landslide, but a respectable victory.

The debate was very well organised by the Oxford Union Engineering Society and was part of a two week season of talks and debates. I would guess that a full 90% of the audience was made up of engineers and by the calibre of the questions they were asking, fairly well informed ones. They would have been far more aware than I am on the true potential of the internal combustion engine, how much further it can be improved and the true limitations of battery technology, battery management and longevity.

And lastly hydrogen. I expected this to be used as an alternative example by the opposition, whenever men criticise the battery electric car (it always is men by the way) they all too often use the tired old concept of the hydrogen fuel cell being the future of transport. Not this time. 

Professor Richard Stone, a professor of engineering at Oxford University closed the lid on the hydrogen fuel cell car myth once and for all. He cited the fact that Daimler Benz spent billions of dollars trying to make small HFC  vehicles viable in the 1990’s and utterly failed to do so. The Honda Clarity HFX is magnificent and costs over $2 million per car. Where, asked the good Professor, will the hydrogen come from, how much energy are we prepared to waste in order to extract, store, compress and deliver this incredibly volatile and leaky gas. 

I disagreed with Professor Stone on virtually every other point he made, but on this one I’m with him 100%.

Tesla Model X

Yes, it's a big car for big families, it looks a bit like a Porsche Cayenne and has weird 'hawk wing' doors, but of course it is electric. I'll be discussing it at midday today on Transport Evolved.
http://www.transportevolved.com/live