Saturday 27 April 2019


MOTORING: 

TRUMPED UP CHARGES

Dave Randle

File:Dairy Crest Ex Unigate Wales And Edwards Rangemaster Milk Float.jpg

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not a lover of electric cars, either in principle or practice.

I’m old enough to remember milk floats and trolleybuses, both of which worked remarkably well in their dedicated urban environments, despite technology and infrastructure that was antedeluvian compared to today’s possibilities.

And I’ve driven Teslas and experienced the gods’ quantities of torque and acceleration on offer.

Trolley buses picked up their electricity from overhead cables. Milk floats returned to base at the end of the round and charged their batteries overnight.

But private cars don’t follow a fixed route or a daily routine. You might need yours to collect a takeaway or rush to the side of relatives across the country. How long will you have to wait for the thing to charge up sufficiently? And will the infrastructure exist on Dartmoor, the Lake District or the Highlands to get home again.

I don’t know about you, but the prospect of stopping even for half an hour at a time in today’s mostly ghastly and poisonous motorway service stations appeals to me not at all.

For all that - and regardless of my personal feelings - I feel it is right to get the situation with regard to the purported cleanliness and ‘zero emission’ claims for electric vehicles into proportion.

There has been a lot of comment on and sharing of the conclusions of Munich’s Department of Economic Research study that electric vehicles are more polluting than diesels. These results do not seem to be based on like for like.

The research takes into account the fossil fuels that produce most of the energy used to recharge electric cars, the toxicity of battery production and chemicals, and the environmental impact of the manufacturing process, in all cases set against the emission of CO2, which is not actually a pollutant, but the gas that feeds plants and thereby provides the oxygen people and animals need to survive.

The diesels on the other hand are reckoned only on emissions of CO2 from the cars themselves in use. But they, too, must be manufactured using power from coal fired power stations, their workforce has to drive to and from work, the paint shops, body presses, plastic formers and robots are also part of the entire environmental picture.

The greatest single diesel pollution event was engendered by legislators when huge numbers of cars with much of their useful life before them were prematurely scrapped, completely unbalancing the equation between manufacture and return and causing a spike in the inevitable emissions from destruction.

What the effects on the atmosphere of scrapping a Tesla and its batteries might be, I leave to your imagination.

What this study should have been based on is actual pollutants - hydrocarbons and electricity itself. We are ever more surrounded by electrical devices, wifi, ‘smart’ meters, microwaves, 5G - even common or garden electricity arcs through our lives - behold the flashes along the tunnel when the tube train is coming.

Ignored by the medical profession, power companies and regulators, electricity is a much more serious pollutant than carbon dioxide, and implicated in numerous health problems currently (pun intended) suppressed by drugs.

The Munich study is not a ‘science bombshell’ as some are claiming. The conclusion may well be correct, but too much of the ‘science’ is missing.

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