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| © Simon Poulter 2021 |
There was an irony about yesterday. The day before so-called Freedom Day was spent trapped in a car for the better part of seven hours on the hottest day of the year. The plan was quite simple: drive to Kent for a pub lunch with my girlfriend’s mother, who is visiting the UK, and because of the global lurgy, had been unable to come over for the last 17 months. Yesterday she was finally free from quarantine. What we didn’t bank on was the traffic jam from hell.
In fact, it wasn’t just a traffic jam. I don’t actually know how you’d describe it, but we were caught in it for the entire afternoon, and you couldn’t really make it up. Thanks to Twitter (which became our saviour authority, as there was absolutely zero coverage of this event on the radio or in any mainstream news outlets) we learned that piping had fallen from the underside of a bridge crossing the motorway near the Darenth Interchange, damaging three vehicles that had been driving underneath it. This led to the M25 being closed in both directions at one of its most sensitive pinch points, the Dartford Crossing. All this had happened barely minutes before we passed the M20 turnoff, seven miles further south, which we could have taken us cross-country to the pub. In the other direction, traffic queued from Dartford back round the M25 for several miles. Nothing. Was. Moving.
It was hard not to think of an episode of One Foot In The Grave in which the Meldrews and their friend Mrs. Warboys are stuck in the mother of all jams. It is an exquisite pantomime of in-car incarceration, culminating in the exchange where, first, Victor Meldrew lets out one of his trademark “Oh, God Al-mighty!!!” exasperations, to which Mrs. Warboys offers to ease tensions with a “sucky sweet”. “Sucky sweet?!” exclaims Meldrew. “I'll be sucking on that exhaust pipe in a minute, much more of this.”
He spoke for anyone ever stuck in a jam with little or no explanation as to what’s going on. In fact, were it not for Twitter searches of “M25” we wouldn’t have a clue what was going on and why, for four and a half half hours, we moved just two miles. On, let me say again, the hottest day of the year. It is, as my girlfriend remarked, a true test of character to be stuck in a hold-up like that, in heat like that, knowing that your day was totally wasted, without losing it. That line from Pink Floyd’s Time, “Hanging on in quiet desperation is the English way” kept running through my head.
It took perspective. Firstly, nothing you can do about it. You’ve drawn the unlucky card today, but be thankful that whatever it was that had caused the event, what you’re going through, is probably nothing compared to the poor souls in the accident. And then, as you sit in your air-conditioned car, in relative comfort, you ponder the irony that in Germany and parts of the Netherlands and Belgium, people are without homes and businesses because of catastrophic flooding caused, the consensus seems to be, by global warming. And what caused global warming? Well, us, mainly, and our cars stuck in traffic, with the engine running, aircon on.
I don’t mention this flippantly, but yesterday’s M25 horror came just 24 hours after we’d been at a car showroom discussing a new car. The finance agreement on my current ride is coming to an end, and with the global chip shortage affecting the supply chain, a brand new car won’t just simply be available at the end of September when, ideally, I hand over the keys. My dilemma is whether to finally go green and get an electric vehicle or, at the very least, a hybrid. By 2030, it will not be possible in the UK to buy either a new petrol or diesel vehicle, with the Government adopting a Year Zero approach to getting everyone to switch to “EVs” in order to break dependency on fossil fuels. I get that.
Science fiction has regularly depicted a future where people glide about in near-silent cars (TV’s Logan’s Run springs to mind), but this had nothing to do with saving the planet as, simply, futuristic mystique. In truth we’re almost there. Almost. Every mainstream manufacturer - not just Tesla - now offers fully electric and hybrid cars as part of their standard ranges, so you could say that things are moving in the right direction. But it’s still not enough. While EV ownership has moved beyond the early adopter stage, the UK still has a woeful lack of public charging points, rendering the usage of EVs as viable alternatives to petrol and diesel - especially for long-distance driving - to be limited.
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| Picture: Audi |
“Why risk an electric car if you can’t charge it?”, ran a headline in The Times last month, prompting letters from readers reporting their own frustrations. “We bought a fully electric Mercedes car earlier this year,” wrote one. “It’s great to drive, but I wouldn’t recommend it. The recharging structure is woefully inadequate and unreliable. I have just spent 40 minutes driving round my local area to find a point where I can charge the vehicle overnight.” Another wrote: “Vehicle charging is so slow it adds far too much time to longer journeys. Despite all the incentives and promises, the UK simply isn’t ready. It’s a shame.” Charging infrastructure is clearly part of the issue: “We live in a northern village, dominated by tightly packed terrace housing with no front gardens or drives,” wrote another Times reader, pointing out that many houses in older towns didn’t have easy access to on-street charging points or even from running a cable from the house to a parked car.
It’s clear that there is a desire to go electric, and eventually we all will, whether we like it or not. But there are still many obstacles to overcome. One is the premium EVs still command. Yes, over the ownership of one the lower cost of fuelling will more than compensate for the higher purchase cost, but consumers still baulk at the average £10,000 higher outlay for a brand new fully electric or hybrid model. Even worse is that a hybrid offers no tax incentive in the UK. All of that, says the government, will change. Transport minister Rachel Maclean recently predicted that the “total cost of ownership” of EVs would even out by 2025 as the cost of manufacturing fell in the way that technologies always come down in price as they are adopted in greater numbers. Grants and tax benefits, Maclean said, were still making fully electric, plug-in cars attractive, though the absence of any incentives other than fuel economy are preventing semi-sceptics like me from choosing hybrid models.
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| © Simon Poulter 2021 |
There are also concerns that, for all the environmental benefits and carbon reductions by going electric, EV batteries contain rare metals that are difficult and dangerous to extract, and that huge amounts of energy are consumed in their processing. On top of that, they have a shorter working life than conventional fuel engines. Questions, too, surround whether the energy to recharge them comes from renewable sources.
As admirable - in principle - as the shift to electric vehicles is, there are concerns that the strategic thinking isn’t fully thought through. Research published last month by the Institute for Public Policy Research called on the government to invest £6 billion over the coming four years to incentivise other forms of transport, like bikes an e-scooters, to break our dependence on private cars overall. This comes amid concerns that the number of cars on UK roads will rise by 2% over the next 30 years, with the shift to electric cars even adding to the congestion. More land, the report added, would be needed for parking.
Something has to give. I’m no nailed-on environmentalist, but having worked from home exclusively over the last 16 months, watching the world go by out of the living room window, it’s been easy to see how much traffic has been generated by the shift to online shopping, for example. Countless white delivery vans - probably mostly diesel - along with food delivery mopeds go up and down our street in the course of a day (and I’ll admit to having contributed to all of that, especially having been largely immobile for the last three months and relying on the likes of Amazon and Deliveroo). As ever, this is a tradeoff: by not driving myself, I suppose I’m easing congestion. The shift to hybrid working, with many companies pledging to never going back to five-days-a-week office working means that there must be a change to the sort of traffic our residential streets endure, as home delivery becomes even more the norm. Hats off, then, to DPD which is gradually converting its fleet of delivery vans to fully electric vehicles from Chinese manufacturer Maxus. It is, though, only a start - the 1,500 EVs DPD is buying will only be a fifth of its total UK fleet of 8,000 vehicles.
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| Picture: DPD |
Weighing it all up, the pros of EVs probably outweigh the cons. Yes, there is an environmental tradeoff in adopting battery-powered cars, but this is probably better than continuing to pump CO2 into the atmosphere, as well as fossil fuel-based pollution contributing to almost one in five deaths in the UK. But we’re not there yet. As much as I would love to own Audi’s splendid new Q4 ‘e-tron’, which has earned rave reviews from the motoring press for its handling, looks, equipment and comfort, £44 grand is a lot of money for a car, Replacing my equally good Q3 with a newer version would cost at least £10k less.
Of course, I could just not bother with either, and walk, cycle or take the bus, which would probably be, morally, the right thing to do. It just wouldn’t be all that practical on a sunny Sunday when you fancy a pub lunch.
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