i love cars.

driving is one of my few passions. and i do it as much as i can.

environment be damned.

you give me an efficient car that takes electricity under the bonnet and i’ll drive it until the end of time. no problem. until then, i shall stick with my saab turbo. it’s not that i’m against clean fuels, it’s that i drive a fairly fuel-efficient car (35-40mpg) and, until they get this electric thing into mass-production and within my pocketbook’s postcode, i shall continue with life as usual.

but yesterday we thought about change in the last ten years. and i said we’d leave cars until today.

certainly.

ten years ago, cars ran on petrol. lots of it. and we heard rumors of clean fuels, hybrids that would save the planet, electric sports cars, clean diesel, hydrogen lorries, and personal train cars.

all to be had in the next ten years or so.

we still drive petrol cars. on the same petrol, give or take a few percent, that we did ten years ago. except that it now costs more than gold. or frankincense, for that matter. they are just as dirty as they were ten years ago. seriously. look it up if you don’t believe me. i drive a car that’s about that old. and it’s just as efficient in fuel as a comparable modern version.

hybrids are a myth. no, not their existence, their efficiency. the toyota prius is the prime example. let’s compare it to one of its largest competitors in the uk – the honda jazz. the prius has two engines, an electric engine and a petrol engine. the jazz has a diesel engine. the prius has two engines, neither of which is big enough to, well, drive the car. the jazz is peppy and light. which is not something that i would typically say of a diesel anything. (tractor?) but what about fuel efficiency? in the city, the prius gets something like 45-50mph. and that’s the official united states government of transport statistics. there’s no official test for the jazz, since it’s not sold in the united states and the uk government doesn’t do those tests, but anecdotal experience tells me that, in the city, the jazz can attain almost 75-80mpg. and without a fancy engine.

oops. toyota needs to buy more advanced testing equipment.

like a scientific calculator.

save the planet. sell your hybrid. buy a diesel.

everyone talked about electric sports cars before the turn of the millennium.

they talk about them now.

but who’s actually got one? tesla roadster? fantastic concept. where do i sign up? and where are we getting that electricity from? hydro? nuclear? not likely. much more likely to be oil-fired turbines. or (gasp!) coal. seriously, you sell me an electric car for the same price as my beloved coupe and i’m there. today. until then, please go back to your laboratories and get cracking.

clean diesel. enough said. i place this strictly in the category with “healthy rabies” or “sensible government”.

hydrogen lorries sound fantastic. no more smoke plumes. hydrogen anything. but that requires several things. first, they have to exist. then we have to find a way to extract the hydrogen that takes less energy than using it. zero-for-two. call me when you’re at even odds, please.

and then we get to my favorite. personal train cars. that’s the concept whereby all roads are replaced by tracks and we have intelligent train cars that we get in by our homes and link into the electric train lines to get us where we’re going. and they link with long trains that share parts of our pathways to improve efficiency and are only large enough for one person.

again i say it, you first.

build it and i’ll be there. today. tomorrow. whenever.

until then, could someone please answer one small question for me?

what’s changed?

forget it. i’m going for a drive…