Electric vehicles

"Electric cars are less environmentally friendly then petrol ones. It's down to the efficiency, much more energy is wasted in burning fuel, converting that energy into kinetic energy to drive generators, generating electricity, transmitting it over long distances, transforming it down to domestic voltage, charging batteries, then using those batteries to drive an electric motor, than in simply burning fuel to convert into kinetic energy to drive a vehicle. Plus the fact that electric cars are generally heavier than petrol driven ones (all those lead/acid batteries) so take more energy to move around.

Then there's the manufacture of all those lead/acid batteries, and their disposal when they're worn out.

The only advantage of this is to move pollution out of city centres.

The reasons for all these supposedly environmentally friendly initiatives is political. Politicians want to be seen to be doing something about this issue. The problem is that journalists pick up on all these pointless (and expensive) ideas and spread them around as gospel.

In fact according to figures I've read only 5% of pollution is attributable to traffic the rest being generated by industry. Political parties get a lot of funding from large industrial concerns so don't like to hit industry with enormous taxes or stringent anti-pollution regulations or the party will lose funding. So they hit Joe (and Josephine) motorist instead as an easy target. They've now done such a good job of portraying the car as the great evil of the twentieth century that anyone who complains about these measures is branded a right wing loony. However I don't think it was Alec Issigonis who said "Now I am become death, destroyer of worlds" was it?"