This week I thought we'd take a deep dive into the world of electric vehicles because whilst people have lost interest in the coronavirus, the 'car owner virus' for electric vehicles seems to have infected a large swathe of the population and it too is being heavily pushed by the government and the BBC, plus it was also designed in America but manufactured largely in China.

Owning an electric car these days offers the buyer the sort of dinner party bragging rights that used to only be attained by going on a safari holiday or joining an exclusive golf club. Ironically golf clubs were probably most peoples' introduction to electric vehicles but the vehicles being put out by the likes of BMW are quite different from the electric golf cart although just like a golf course, people are still very concerned about the range. If you hear a golfing buddy claim he can just about drive 300, he's not talking about yards.

The range of electric vehicles is something that few people are even concerned with, until that one trip when they suddenly realise that they were lied to. The advertised range is with a completely empty car, not one with luggage and kids, or the climate control turned on, or a journey that isn't a flat straight line. Battery performance drops by a third in sub-zero temperatures and we can talk about fast charging but good luck when you discover you're third in line and it will take 2 hours to charge your volts-wagon until you're back on the road. For me though the platform killing fault is that these batteries, like the ones in your phone, only last around a thousand charging cycles except my iPhone battery costs about £100 whereas a car battery costs closer to £20k. The people that love electric cars live in a world where it is normal to buy a brand new car every 2-3 years, whereas most normal people are used to buying second hand cars and riding them into the ground. There are thousands of people being coerced into buying a car that is supposedly cheap and yet are going to be unable to either use them or replace them in a couple of years and I honestly don't think the ruling classes have any idea what they're going to face in a number of years when public resentment to this grand con comes to a boil. I was actually given a pamphlet about anger management the other day, and I lost it.

Let's just run with the idea though, if Spiderman bought a Tesla he'd quickly discover that with great power comes not great responsibility, but great electricity bills and these things are not cheap to run either. The cars charge a lot, and that's before you charge them a lot. You won't have a petrol bill but they do cost around £20 to 'fill up' (so to speak) when you plug them in and that charging infrastructure is going to cost you thousands to have installed at your house, most people will see that cost as part of a monthly loan repayment that more than cancels out the cost of visiting a petrol station once per week. We could talk about the lack of electricians to install the home charging infrastructure but that's the least of concerns, the UK doesn't have close to the sort of spare electrical capacity to replace 30m petrol cars with electric equivalents, most of which are expected to charge when much lauded solar power is producing nothing, because it's night. Generating capacity, like the quality of Radio 4, has been declining for years and we're already at the precipitous stage where the government is only managing to keep the lights on by granting emergency permissions for coal power stations to remain open for years beyond the legally binding net-zero targets.

I could talk about the batteries themselves and millions of children enslaved in the cobalt mines of the Congo. I read a report about the human trafficking and modern slavery industry is right now going through a transformation as it pivots from Asia towards Africa, where millions of people will be required to work in the next decade to sustain the move towards green energy but according to the car industry they're not responsible for the battery manufacturing, that's all outsourced, it's not their problem and the government is as liable to claim they're made out of rainbows, unicorn fur and whatever magical stuff it is that Keith Richards must be snorting in order to somehow remain alive.

It's all just another part of the grand lie though. You've been lied to about the cost, the green credentials, the range, the lifespan, the economics, the ability of the grid to cope with them. But hey, it's all fine because the car can connect to your phone with an app, and it comes with additional features like as a self driving mode although the owners tend to more often talk about the built in virtual signals. Personally the tech puts me even more off, imagine missing a payment on a self driving car and then it drives itself back to the dealership until you pay a reactivation fee. Or it listens into your conversation and reports you to the police because you don't agree with what a left wing gender activist was trying to teach your child. My one hope is that, just with so many things, the tech industry make a mess of it all. I remember there was talk for a while that Apple has partnered with Tesla to make a new car, but they were having trouble installing windows.