11 April

I talk a lot about cars not because I love cars, but because they’re key to understanding our wider culture. Notice the debates around EVs are all about the technical pros and cons people see. But that’s not what this is all about. Societies don’t run on information. The people who resist EVs are nearly all older people. Older people tend to resist change, that’s been the case forever. They’ll also tell you their music is the best music, it’s the same cultural mechanism. Technically EVs are far superior technology, but that’s not the issue. The issue is older people not wanting to change, to surrender their existing social status. And because we live in an ageing society, that’s meant a hard slog to get acceptance for EVs. That will get easier as the old die out, unfortunately that’s how change usually works. Planck said it about science, that it progresses ‘one funeral at a time’.