“GUARDIANISTA” – A regular reader of the Guardian newspaper – a middle class left-liberal holding politically-correct woke-ist opinions. 

I love electric vehicles – and was an early adopter. But increasingly I feel duped | Rowan Atkinson | The Guardian

“Electric motoring is not the environmental PANACEA it is claimed to be.” 

The problem is that it is largely based on conclusions drawn from only one part of a car’s operating life: what comes out of the exhaust pipe. Electric cars, of course, have zero exhaust emissions, but if you zoom out a bit and look at a bigger picture that includes the car’s manufacture, the situation is very different.  Volvo released figures claiming that greenhouse gas emissions during production of an electric car are nearly 70% higher than when manufacturing a petrol one. Lithium-ion batteries are absurdly heavy, huge amounts of energy are required to make them, and they are estimated to last only upwards of 10 years. It seems a perverse choice of hardware with which to lead the automobile’s fight against the climate crisis.

New, so-called solid-state batteries are being developed that should charge more quickly and could be about a third of the weight of the current ones – but they are years away from being on sale, by which time, of course, we will have made millions of overweight electric cars with rapidly obsolescing batteries. Hydrogen is emerging as an interesting alternative fuel, even though we are slow in developing a truly “green” way of manufacturing it. It can be used in one of two ways. It can power a hydrogen fuel cell (essentially, a kind of battery); the car manufacturer Toyota has poured a lot of money into the development of these. Such a system weighs half of an equivalent lithium-ion battery and a car can be refuelled with hydrogen at a filling station as fast as with petrol. 

But let’s zoom out even further and consider the whole life cycle of an automobile. The biggest problem we need to address in society’s relationship with the car is the “fast fashion” sales culture that has been the commercial template of the car industry for decades. Currently, on average we keep our new cars for only three years before selling them on, driven mainly by the ubiquitous three-year leasing model. This seems an outrageously profligate use of the world’s natural resources when you consider what great condition a three-year-old car is in. When I was a child, any car that was five years old was a bucket of rust and halfway through the gate of the scrapyard. Not any longer. You can now make a car for £15,000 that, with tender loving care, will last for 30 years. It’s sobering to think that if the first owners of new cars just kept them for five years, on average, instead of the current three, then car production and the CO₂ emissions associated with it, would be vastly reduced. Yet we’d be enjoying the same mobility, just driving slightly older cars.

We need also to acknowledge what a great asset we have in the cars that currently exist (there are nearly 1.5bn of them worldwide). In terms of manufacture, these cars have paid their environmental dues and, although it is sensible to reduce our reliance on them, it would seem right to look carefully at ways of retaining them while lowering their polluting effect. Fairly obviously, we could use them less. As an environmentalist once said to me, if you really need a car, buy an old one and use it as little as possible. A sensible thing to do would be to speed up the development of synthetic fuel, which is already being used in motor racing; it’s a product based on two simple notions: one, the environmental problem with a petrol engine is the petrol, not the engine and, two, there’s nothing in a barrel of oil that can’t be replicated by other means. Formula One is going to use synthetic fuel from 2026. There are many interpretations of the idea but the German car company Porsche is developing a fuel in Chile using wind to power a process whose main ingredients are water and carbon dioxide. With more development, it should be usable in all petrol-engine cars, rendering their use virtually CO₂-neutral.

Increasingly, I’m feeling that our honeymoon with electric cars is coming to an end, and that’s no bad thing: we’re realising that a wider range of options need to be explored if we’re going to properly address the very serious environmental problems that our use of the motor car has created. We should keep developing hydrogen, as well as synthetic fuels to save the scrapping of older cars which still have so much to give, while simultaneously promoting a quite different business model for the car industry, in which we keep our new vehicles for longer, acknowledging their amazing but overlooked longevity.

Friends with an environmental conscience often ask me, as a car person, whether they should buy an electric car. I tend to say that if their car is an old diesel and they do a lot of city centre motoring, they should consider a change. But otherwise, hold fire for now. Electric propulsion will be of real, global environmental benefit one day, but that day has yet to dawn.   Rowan Atkinson

“We must steer clear of all cars, including EVs” (a Guardianista responds)

I read Rowan Atkinson’s article on electric vehicles with great interest. I also did my first degree in electrical engineering many years ago. He has made some very good points about the wastage caused by people changing their cars unnecessarily often, and also about the enormous carbon footprint and greenhouse emissions of building new cars and making batteries. But there is also another vital element of vehicle emissions which is widely ignored, and that is the production of all sorts of tiny toxic particles of rubber, synthetic plastics, dust and roadbuilding materials from the continuous friction between tyres and road surfaces.

 I worked for years analysing vehicle efficiency and support Rowan Atkinson’s arguments. Many in the industry agree that electric vehicles are environmentally a stepping stone, not the solution. But Atkinson doesn’t mention two possible quick wins. Current popular electric vehicles (in affluent countries) mimic their predecessors in size, weight, etc, but they could actually be far lighter, consuming fewer resources, and still suffice for everyday purposes.

Also, we do not need to have our own car. Shared ownership (especially with better public transport) would permit a far smaller fleet, intensely used and regularly updated, enhanced with ride-sharing. Working out efficient logistics would be a benign application of AI.

Heavier vehicles – such as electric SUVs – produce far more of these particles, and they get into the environment everywhere, not just into the air where they can be absorbed into people’s lungs and bloodstreams, but also washed into the soil, watercourses and, eventually, the sea.

The only answer is, as Atkinson has suggested, not to produce vehicles unnecessarily and certainly not to scrap old ones prematurely. We must also keep new ones small and light, and use them sparingly.

 Rowan Atkinson is grappling with the problem that cars pollute the atmosphere and contribute to global warming whether they’re powered by electricity or fossil fuels. They are also the cause of road accidents and create a hostile environment for people out on their feet or on bicycles. The only solution is to have fewer of them.

“The way to do this is to develop roads fit for walking and cycling, improve public transport and try to organise things so that most of our everyday needs are accessible without having to resort to motor vehicles.  Everyone should simply use their cars less..!”

I have 2 words of advice for this gentleman – OASIS-CITIES..!