28 December

An electric taxi in the early 1900s, New York. There’s an assumption that electric vehicles today are the new technology, replacing petrol and diesel. But electric cars were built 50 years before either petrol or diesel cars. At the turn of the 20th century they were the most popular cars in the world. What changed things was the power of the oil industry, lobbying for combustion engines. Inefficient, ridiculously complicated, stinking and noisy technology, but with the money from big oil behind it, it won the day. Now over a century later, justice is being done as hopeless combustion engine technology is replaced with technology that was always far superior to it. On ‘range anxiety’, where people have these bizarre ideas about petrol and diesel vehicles having longer range…for the first 25 years of petrol cars, there were no service stations. The only way you could fuel your car was carrying tins of fuel home from the shop, to fill it. It didn’t get you far. Now within a handful of years of the resurgence of electric, there are already thousands of options for charging (including at home), and it’s still just early days. You also don’t need fleets of thousands of petrol tankers continuously travelling highways to re-fuel service stations, which creates the illusion that combustion vehicles have greater range. The electricty just uses wires, no semi-trailers needed.