Electric cars use electricity, generating less CO2 emissions than conventional cars do. The industry and the governments in the world aim to stimulate the global shift to these greener cars.
I know, you probably haven’t even driven one yet, let alone seriously contemplated buying one, so the prediction may sound a bit bold, but bear with me.
General Motors says it will make only electric vehicles by 2035, Ford says all vehicles sold in Europe will be electric by 2030 and VW says 70% of its sales will be electric by 2030.
This isn’t a fad, this isn’t greenwashing.
Yes, the fact many governments around the world are setting targets to ban the sale of petrol and diesel vehicles gives impetus to the process.
But what makes the end of the internal combustion engine inevitable is a technological revolution. And technological revolutions tend to happen very quickly.
Table of Contents
I- Electric cars, an electric revolution
Look at the internet.
By my reckoning, the electric cars market is about where the internet was around the late 1990s or early 2000s.
Back then, there was a big buzz about this new thing with computers talking to each other.
Jeff Bezos had set up Amazon, and Google was beginning to take over from the likes of Altavista, Ask Jeeves and Yahoo. Some of the companies involved had racked up eye-popping valuations.
For those who hadn’t yet logged on it all seemed exciting and interesting but irrelevant – how useful could communicating by computer be? After all, we’ve got phones!
But the internet, like all successful new technologies, did not follow a linear path to world domination. It didn’t gradually evolve, giving us all time to plan ahead.
II- The ride through the internet S-Curve
It’s actually an elongated S.
The idea is that innovations start slowly, of interest only to the very nerdiest of nerds. Electric cars are on the shallow sloping bottom end of the S here.
For the internet, the graph begins at 22:30 on 29 October 1969. That’s when a computer at the University of California in LA made contact with another in Stanford University a few hundred miles away.
The researchers typed an L, then an O, then a G. The system crashed before they could complete the word “login”.
Like I said, nerds only.
A decade later there were still only a few hundred computers on the network but the pace of change was accelerating.
In the 1990s the more tech-savvy started buying personal computers.
As the market grew, prices fell rapidly and performance improved in leaps and bounds – encouraging more and more people to log on to the internet.
The S is beginning to sweep upwards here, growth is becoming exponential. By 1995 there were some 16 million people online. By 2001, there were 513 million people.
Now there are more than three billion. What happens next is our S begins to slope back towards the horizontal.
The rate of growth slows as virtually everybody who wants to be is now online.
III- The disdain of Jeremy Clarkson
We saw the same pattern of a slow start, exponential growth and then a slowdown to a mature market with smartphones, photography, even antibiotics.
The internal combustion engine at the turn of the last century followed the same trajectory.
So did steam engines and printing presses. And electric vehicles will do the same.
In fact they have a more venerable lineage than the internet.
The first crude electric car was developed by the Scottish inventor Robert Anderson in the 1830s.
But it is only in the last few years that the technology has been available at the kind of prices that make it competitive.
The former Top Gear presenter and used car dealer Quentin Willson should know. He’s been driving electric vehicles for well over a decade.
The EV1’s range was dreadful – about 50 miles for a normal driver – but Mr Willson was won over. “I remember thinking this is the future,” he told me.
He says he will never forget the disdain that radiated from fellow Top Gear presenter Jeremy Clarkson when he showed him his first electric car, a Citroen C-Zero, a decade later.
IV- Conclusion
There is work to be done before electric cars drive their petrol and diesel rivals off the road.
Most importantly, everyone needs to be able charge their cars easily and cheaply whether or not they have a driveway at their home.
That will take work and investment, but will happen, just as a vast network of petrol stations rapidly sprang up to fuel cars a century ago.
And, if you are still sceptical, I suggest you try an electric car out for yourself.
Most of the big car manufacturers now have a range of models on offer. So take one for a test drive and see if, like Quentin Willson, you find you want to be part of motoring’s future.
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