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’

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.

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. 

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%.

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

(While I remember, as the car charged overnight on off peak tarrif, that 15 mile trip cost just over 15p) 

When I got home it said 69 miles. I was doing rather immature tweeting that I was suffering gut wrenching range anxiety, the point is, in very cold weather, the cars range is reduced. Today we are hovering at around -5c.
I used the heater, the lights and the radio on the trip all of which have an impact on the overall range. This can be offset by pre-heating the car when it's still plugged in, which I also did.
I have discussed this issue with a couple of academics, both involved in fuel efficient internal combustion engine development, both petrol (gas) and diesel. I asked about a short (under 30 mile) trip in sub zero weather and how that impacted fuel efficiency in modern cars. One said 'catastrophically,' the other said 'dramatically.' Of course we don't notice that because the overall range of the car is greater, the re-fuelling is rapid and we're 'used to it. However the myth of the 60+mpg diesel is just that. On a short trip in cold weather, halve it for the first 20 miles until it's fully warmed up. Very inefficient, producing large amounts of SOX and NOX, the particulate filters (which cost a bomb and  sap power from the engine) don't work until they're warm, but we're used to it.
We're not used to electric cars which can be pre-heated while plugged in, have a range reduction of around 15% in very cold weather and take a long time to charge, unless you use a fast charger, of which 600 are being installed this year.
The thing is, I'm getting used to driving an electric car and to be honest, it's quite good.

In the UK, there’s plenty of resistance to electric cars but it doesn’t feel co-ordinated, charged with extremist politics and absurd ranting. It’s criticism, some of it very well founded, by people who are interested in the subject of either cars or our future energy needs and problems.

Essentially the British Conservative party make vaguely favourable nods toward the electric car along with the Labour party, oh, and even that other lot I keep forgetting. The fact that these political parties are now virtually indistinguishable is another story.

However, this relatively benign state of affairs isn’t the case in the good old US of A. For some reason I’ve long forgotten, I still get e-mails from the Tea Party on a regular basis. They go into my spam bin, but every now and then I check one out to see what they’re ranting about.

It’s mostly comical, childish fury at the fact that there’s a black man in the Whitehouse who is hugely popular both inside and outside the USA.

They will do anything to get him out, I’m not putting words into their angry little mouths, this is what they say, and anything connected to him in any way drives them utterly bat-shit crazy.

If you have a perfectly innocent technological interest in electric cars you will be labelled as an insane communist anti American pro Obama eco-Nazi. The American Tea Party TV station, Fox News, have picked out the electric car as the key symbol. Some dead eyed news jock with fake hair, tan and teeth spouts ‘The Nation we love is going to hell in a hand basket, and Obama is pushing it over the edge with his communist electric car that he’s ramming down the throats of good citizens of America.’

This is peculiar and pinpoints the rather scary fact that this extreme right wing minority have completely taken over the once sensible centre right Republican party in America.

Now even the arch conservative climate change denying ex General Motors boss Bob Lutz has said, ‘Hang on a minute there boy, this is damned ridiculous.’

You see General Motors developed the GM Volt, (the Vauxhall Ampera in the UK) General Motors were bailed out by the US government and have since done rather well, selling shed loads of gas guzzling trucks and cars, and a few thousand part electric cars. But now this multi national corporation with a very proud history of supporting the Republican party, even GM are now portrayed as commie anti Americans by the barking Tea Party.

‘They don’t work and they catch fire,’ said some ‘spokesperson.’ Giving this tragic individual a name check is beneath me. One GM Volt caught fire many weeks after it was in a serious road accident. Over 10,000 people a year die in fossil powered vehicle fires in the USA every year, not one person has died in an electric vehicle fire. They don’t catch fire and now everyone who knows anything about cars, batteries or related subjects knows they don’t catch fire. Everyone except Fox ‘news.’

The first electric car I had a ride in was developed in America, the Tesla Roadster. I know very little of the personal political thinking of one of the founders, Elon Musk, but seeing as he is a white South African multi millionaire capitalist, the chances of him being a wet liberal tree hugging hippie drop out seem rather remote.

But in the eyes of the Tea Party and most of the very odd bunch of loons that are hoping to be the next republican President, he is just that. A man who is trying to destroy America with his goddam commie electric cars.

As I’ve said previously, when I first had my neck strained by the truly breath taking performance of the Tesla Roadster, I had no idea this simple disruptive shift in technology would be so political. Yes there are plenty of theories that the fossil extraction corporations are shelling out money by the ship load to inform us that electric cars ‘just don’t work, I know many right wing people in the UK who are very pro electric cars, and very left wing people who think we should ride bikes or catch a bus or train and all cars are evil.

That’s what I like, a bit of balance.

Next month I am taking part in a debate in the hallowed halls of the Oxford Union. This training ground for the future political elite can be quite intimidating; it is laid out in exactly the same way as the houses of Parliament. Two rows of opposing benches with a big table in the middle and a raised chair for the chairperson.

I’ve taken part in these events previously, but only ever the end of term ‘comedy’ debates. Great fun and not in the least serious.

The one I’m doing next month, organised by the Oxford University Engineering Society and is titled, "This House Believes That Electric Cars are the Future of Transport"

I will be arguing for the motion obviously, alongside my good friend Nick Carpenter from Delta Motorsports who actually builds ground breaking electric sports cars, alongside Prof Nigel Brandon from Imperial College and Dr Mike Richardson from Jaguar Land Rover, neither of whom I have met.

We are faced with a formidable crew of academics; Dr Richard Pearson from Lotus, Prof. Peter Dobson, big pro-diesel chap, Prof Richard Stone, Professor of Engineering at Oxford and Prof. Nick Collings from Cambridge.

The opposition are all big internal combustion specialists, I think I’ve met Prof Richard Stone before, they all look like lovely chaps and I’m sure this debate will be fascinating.

I kind of wish I could just watch it and not take part, there’s no point denying it, I feel out of my depth. I was expelled from school aged 16 (just) and missed out on a huge lump of specialized education. As many kind tweeters have said, I have experience on my side and I accept that. Other than Nick Carpenter I will be the only person debating who’s driven electric cars 10’s of thousands of miles (and never run out of juice) but that said, it’s still a fairly daunting prospect.

I am hoping my passion for the subject, and the simple truth that the fuels we use now with such carefree abandon are going to become prohibitively expensive, even in my lifetime means that we have to do something rather rapidly.

It's the Quimera AEGT01 filmed at at Motorland F1 race track in Spain

Maximum power: 700 ps

Top speed: 300 km/h

He was talking about entering an electric car into the Le Mans race but at the time it all seemed a bit pie in the sky at the time.

Well check this.

The Lola/Drayson B12/69EV is an 850 hp 200 mph racing car. With a bit of luck I will be filming it later this year for the new series of Fully Charged. As you might be able to guess, I'm just a little bit excited by the prospect.

You can see the episode of Carpool I did with Lord Drayson here. It was recorded very soon after he had completed the Le Mans race (yes, he was driving) in a bio diesel powered Lola.

  You can read more about the car at The Charging Point