You may know Rwan Atkinson as the comic actor who created Mr Bean, but to many of us he is Petrol-Head Royalty. The list of cars he has owned includes some of the rarest of the rare and he is also a bit of a racer as well. He is also known for his newspaper articles which are published in the UK’s Daily Mail, and it is one of these that has recently caught my eye.
Atkinson started life as an electrical engineer so when you combine this with his passion for cars it would not surprise you that he was an early adopter of hybrid and then all-electric cars. Whilst he struggled with the lack of a charging infrastructure in the UK he professes to have enjoyed his past nine years with his EV Cars.
In a recent article Atkinson described EV’s as undoubtedly soulless but wonderful mechanisms fast quiet and relatively cheap to run until recently when the electricity tariffs were changed in response to the growing number of EV’s on the road. But now on reflection he is feeling like he has been lied to as it is now obvious that electric cars are not the environmental solution to all of our environmental concerns, I think that we at Automology have warning that EV’s may be the next big flop for a while now.
Across Europe governments are preparing to restrict or even stop the sale of Petrol-Powered Vehicles (aka ICE) from 2030 but the problem with this is that the entire idea of banning ICE vehicles is that it is based only on one part of the equation, one part of the cars operation and that is the exhaust that comes out of the tail pipe.
What Mr Atkinson points out is that the claim of EV’s having no exhaust emissions when you drive them, by zooming out a little and look at the manufacturing process that then the picture changes remarkably and not for the good. Recently Volvo published a figure claiming that EV’s produce 70% more greenhouse gases during the production of the vehicle than those for an ICE vehicle.
As you have read on this blog before, the problem is the Li-ion battery which is environmentally costly to manufacture, costs too much and weighs too much and simply does not last long enough. In fact we can think of about 19 reason why you shouldn’t buy an EV (Part 1 & Part 2)
It is gratifying for this particular writer to see more and more industry insiders and well known petrol-heads questioning the lunacy of the inexorable push to an all EV future particularly when there are some many alternatives out there that will be less disruptive and promise so much more. Just look at how much hydrogen power could help us or how about the new Bio-Fuel developed with the help of Porsche.
Still if you would like to read all of what Rowan Atkinson said you can see the full article here;