Volvo going electric will have the same effect as Mrs Miggins turning down the heating in her front room
AT the moment the world’s power stations are barely producing enough juice to keep our phones and our laptops working
VOLVO announced this week that within two years, every car it makes would be fitted with an electric motor.
This was immediately leaped upon by absolutely everyone as the beginning of the end for the petrol engine.
And that’s seen as a good thing. No more smog, no more asthma, no more noise pollution and birds that became extinct in Britain hundreds of years ago would return to frolic once more in our garden ponds.
Yeah, well I’m sorry to relieve myself over your carbon neutral, sustainable vision of what’s round the corner. But here it comes anyway . . .
First of all, it’s Volvo we are talking about here.
And Volvo is a motoring minnow. They made around 450,000 cars last year.
And to put that in perspective, Ford on its own made more than six million. Toyota, meanwhile, made ten million. So did Volkswagen.
And that brings me on to the next thing. Volvo is NOT going all electric.
Electric cars don’t really work as everyday tools because they run out of juice after 100 or so miles. And it takes hours and hours to charge them up again.
At the moment the world’s power stations are barely producing enough juice to keep our phones and our laptops working
As a result, most of the cars Volvo makes will be hybrids, and they have petrol engines to keep the electric motors working.
They also have batteries. And there’s another problem, because at the moment there aren’t enough lithium ion cells in the world to keep even the Tesla production lines rolling at full speed.
Obviously it’s possible to make more and that will happen.
But how will these batteries be charged?
At the moment the world’s power stations are barely producing enough juice to keep our phones and our laptops working.
When we ask Drax B to charge our cars as well, it will emit a final Thomas the Tank Engine steamy sigh and expire.
And we can’t produce more power because every time anyone suggests a new nuclear facility, half the world turns up at the site and points at all the newts and grasshoppers and bats that will have to be rehoused.
You could get round that issue by developing hydrogen fuel cells but everyone I speak to goes white at the thought of running a car full of gas because when the world was in black and white, an airship once blew up.
I try explaining that petrol is also explosive but it makes no difference.
So I am sorry to draw a big brown smear over your Teletubbies vision of the future but the internal combustion engine is not going anywhere.
It remains the cleanest, best and most efficient way of moving people around and there is nothing realistic on the horizon that will change that.
MOST READ IN OPINION
Girls are out in front
Every single picture I’ve seen from Wimbledon this year is of one of the girls either bending over or with her legs at the angle of a set square as she stretches to return a tricky shot, like this one of Caroline Garcia of France
And I’m inclined to agree. Yes, men play a longer, faster, more exciting game but when it comes to publicity, they are very much in the background.
Every single picture I’ve seen from Wimbledon this year is of one of the girls either bending over or with her legs at the angle of a set square as she stretches to return a tricky shot, like this one of Caroline Garcia of France winning yesterday.
And things are even worse when it gets a bit, ahem, nippy.
Watts his problem
A JUDGE has ordered a council to give benefits to a man who claims he is allergic to electricity.
Peter Lloyd, from Cardiff, says he has to live in a tent in the garden and can’t have a fridge, or a cooker, or a computer, and he needs the handouts to pay for someone to do his shopping. If you squint a bit, this is vaguely plausible, but he then goes on to argue that he has to do his number twos in a bedpan. Why?
Because apart from a bog I once used in Japan, and the less said about that the better, all lavatories contain no electricity at all.
TRUTH AND LICE
IN the beginning we were told that mobile phones would cause our brains to explode. Then it was announced they caused cancer.
Er, a couple of points on that. If we aren’t going to be put off by cancer scares and the danger of our heads blowing up, head lice are hardly likely to drive us back into the phone box.
And more to the point, it’s said that the children most at risk are six-year-olds. Six-year-olds? With smartphones? Where did they do this survey? Round the Ecclestones’ breakfast table?
Welsh rare bit of sun
It’s better, apparently, than any in Portugal, France, Italy or Spain.
Hmmm. I wonder what exactly they look for in a beach.
Because I’m fairly confident it’s not what you and I want.
I like the weather to be warm and I like the sea to not be so cold that it turns my testicles into small sultanas.
Also, I like to share the sand with hot women. Not just women who are hot.
And I like the whole hinterland between beach and land to be peppered with bars. And ice-cold beer.
So I’m sorry, Welsh people. I’m sure your beach is very nice for walking a dog but this year I’m going, as usual, to the Med.
EUROPEAN lunar scientists are about to test their new four-wheeled moon robot on Mount Etna, in Sicily.
I couldn’t understand this. Why test a tool which will be used on the moon, where there are no active volcanoes, on an active volcano?
Well, it turns out that they would have liked to have tested it on Hawaii or the Canary Islands but, according to one of the boffins, it was “easier” to get the equipment to Sicily.
And in other news, the Navy will be testing its new aircraft carrier on a boating lake in Barrow-in-Furness.
Because it’s easier to get to than the sea.
EARLIER in the year I bought some plants to liven up the balcony outside my kitchen window.
And all of them died in last month’s heatwave.
So I bought some more.
And to make sure they were able to withstand the warm weather we had this week, I watered them thoroughly and often.
And now they’ve all drowned. Not sure gardening’s my thing.
Bristle fashion
THE Royal Society for the Protection of Birds and Jeremy Corbyn announced this week that the hedgehog – which even I know isn’t a bird – is becoming an increasingly rare sight in Britain.
So they’ve come up with some handy ways of making your garden more hedgehog friendly. None of which will work.
If you really want to increase the number of hedgehogs, you need to set up a network of sentry guns in your garden to blow the head off any badger which comes along.
Because in badger land, where there is much disease and violence, hedgehogs are not cute or interesting.
They are seen only as lunch.