UK govt subsidises electric cars, but are they backing the wrong horseless carriage?
'Appalling little snot-boxes that take all night to recharge, then take half a minute to reach their maximum speed of 40, and then run out of juice miles from anywhere.' Such is the opinion of Top Gear's James May on the subject of electric cars.
To be fair it's a pretty accurate summary of where we're at. Electric car performance doesn't even begin to approach that of traditional combustion-engine cars, the batteries are generally so massive you don't have room for luggage (or in all probability passengers) and recharging takes hours if the infrastructure is available to allow it. Which it isn't.
But now the government is proposing to help us buy electric snotboxes to call our own, with the . It's all part of a new £250 million scheme to promote low carbon transport.
To be fair, the focus is on 'next generation' electric cars - predominantly electric-petrol hybrids - which should hit the showrooms in 2011 and perform quite a bit more like you would expect a car to perform. There will also be £20m put aside to address the lack of recharging infrastructure. This may sound a lot, but it isn't if you consider that it costs . Infrastructure is a frighteningly expensive beast.
In the same edition of Top Gear in which James May delivered the above devastating critique of our electric future, he also proclaimed the 'future of motoring' in the world's first production hydrogen fuel cell car, the Honda FCX Clarity. .
And the reason? Because it conforms to our idea of what a car is now and that's important, because history tells us consumers are more likely to buy the thing that conforms most to their expectations. Has the government just backed ? Only time will tell.
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