car crazy actors Rowan Atkinson has said that despite being an early adopter, he feels “betrayed” by the electric vehicle trend.
in a comment piece Guardian on SaturdayThe 68-year-old wrote that he got his electric hybrid 18 years ago and his first all-electric car nine years later.
“Electric vehicles may be a bit bland, but they are wonderful mechanisms: fast, quiet and, until recently, very cheap to run,” he wrote.
“But increasingly, I’m feeling a bit cheated. When you start drilling down to the facts, electric motoring doesn’t exactly seem like the environmental panacea it’s claimed to be.
Atkinson is known for his love of cars and studied electrical and electronic engineering at university before later earning a master’s degree in control systems.
Star replied The government is proposing to ban the sale of new petrol and diesel cars from 2030. Atkinson said, “The problem with the initiative is that it seems to be based on conclusions drawn from only one part of a car’s operational life: what comes out of the exhaust pipe.”
“Electric cars, of course, have zero exhaust emissions, which is a welcome development, especially with regard to air quality in city centres. But if you zoom out a bit and look at the bigger picture in which If car manufacturing is involved, the situation is very different.
He said in the lead-up to the Cop26 climate conference Volvo revealed alarming figures that greenhouse gas emissions from the production of an electric car were 70 per cent higher than those from the manufacture of petrol due to the resource-saving lithium ion battery. ,
‘Solid-state’ batteries are in the pipeline to revolutionize the sport, but are said to be “years away” from sale.
“Hydrogen is emerging as an interesting alternative fuel, even though we have been slow to develop a truly green way of producing it,” Atkinson said.
“The biggest problem we need to address in society’s relationship with the car is the ‘fast fashion’ sales culture that has been the business blueprint of the car industry for decades,” he wrote.
“Friends with an environmental conscience often ask me as a car person whether they should buy an electric car. I say that if their car is an old diesel and they do a lot of motoring in the city centre, they should consider a change. Should consider. But otherwise, hold fire for now. Electric propulsion will one day be of real, global environmental benefit, but that day is yet to come.
“As an environmentalist once told me, if you really need a car, buy an old car and use it as little as possible.”