Will my next motor be electric ?
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Will all cars go electric? Not in my lifetime I'm sure of that. I had a holiday in the Lizard, Cornwall last month. Down there on the most southerly point of mainland Britain, there was no mobile signal. If it hadn't been for the Wifi at the cottage, we'd have been completely cut off, not that that was necessarily a bad thing.
I can't imagine the Lizard (or the rest of Cornwall for that matter - substitute Lake District, Scotland, Wales etc as appropriate) being peppered with the thousands of electric charging points that would be required for this to work.
Besides which, our electricity power supply infrastructure would never cope with so many people having to charge their cars up. I think fully electric cars are a pipedream. Hybrid cars I can see a case for, but no way for fully electric.
Living in London, I don't feel I need a car, electric or otherwise. But I am interested in the electric revolution that is starting and look forward to a world in which there is less pollution on the streets and no need to buy fossil fuels from mostly repressive regimes.
Some people are comparing the newly released Tesla Model 3 as the motor industry's "iPhone moment", although they won't start arriving on these shores until 2018. It looks like the whole motor industry is being forced to react to that threat, with most other manufacturers looking to release new or updated electric and hybrid models in the next few years.
I believe market forces will be the driver that changes behaviour much more than government targets of banning new ICE sale cars from 2040.
At the moment electric car battery range with current lithium ion batteries takes you up to 310 miles on a charge (Tesla Model 3 extended range) and it takes several hours to recharge unless at a super-charger.
However, there is a huge amount of research into alternative energy storage technologies such as solid state and super capacitors. If is generally believed that if you can get these to produce a 500 mile + range and a recharge time of around 10 minutes then the ICE will become history.
Finally, there has been lot of progress in driverless technology in the past few years. Once that is perfected, most people will not even need to own a car any more - they will just hail one when they need it. Tesla's Elon Musk thinks level 5 autonomy is 2 years away. I think this is a bit optimistic - probably 5 to 10 is more likely.
The main thing to do is to hide away all those future classic cars in your barns/garages/similar; as they become scarcer their values will increase.
There will either need to be some form of licence permitting classic car runs , and a means to acquire the petrol for these , or the classic car clubs will need to start an underground movement to fight back, with a black market in petrol- maybe petrol supplies earmarked for lawnmowers and chainsaws can be diverted for nefarious purposes like a tour through the Borders or a motor trip into Sutherland.
Irrespective of legislation my yellow Scimitar SS1 (1987) is not going anywhere. (And that, with the proposals, may be the literal truth)
When I used to watch Tomorrows World in the 1970s we were heading for another ice age and would soon be in flying cars and working from home. Electric cars will catch on where the infrastructure is put in place but my old Jag and TR7 will be around for many years to come. By 2040 there will be other developments that we haven't even thought of yet. Perhaps teleporting will catch on.