Rowan Atkinson Why I’m feeling flat about electric cars

Electric motoring is a subject about which I should, in theory, know something. My first university degree was in electrical and electronic engineering, with a subsequent master’s in control systems. Combine this, perhaps surprising, academic pathway with a lifelong passion for the motorcar, and you can see why I was drawn into an early adoption of electric vehicles. I bought my first hybrid 18 years ago and my first pure electric car nine years ago and (notwithstanding the UK’s poor electric charging infrastructure) have enjoyed my time with both. Electric vehicles may be a bit soulless, but they’re wonderful mechanisms: fast, quiet and, until recently, cheap to run. But increasingly, I feel duped. When you drill into the facts, electric motoring doesn’t seem to be quite the environmental panacea to which it lays claim.

As you may know, the UK government has proposed a ban on the sale of new petrol and diesel cars from 2030. The problem with the initiative is that it seems to be based on conclusions drawn from only one part of a car’s operating life: what comes out of the exhaust pipe. Electric cars, of course, have zero exhaust emissions, which is a welcome development, particularly in respect of air quality. But the bigger picture, which includes the car’s manufacture, is different. In advance of the Cop26 climate conference in Glasgow in 2021, Volvo released figures claiming that greenhouse gas emissions during production of an electric car are 70% higher than when manufacturing a petrol one. How so? The problem lies with the lithium-ion batteries: they’re heavy, many rare earth metals and huge amounts of energy are required to make them, and they only last about 10 years. It seems a perverse choice of hardware with which to lead the automobile’s fight against the climate crisis.

Unsurprisingly, a lot of effort is going into finding something better. New, so-called solid-state batteries are being developed that should charge more quickly and could be about a third of the weight of the current

ones – but they are years away from being on sale. Hydrogen is emerging as an interesting alternative fuel, even though we are slow in developing a truly “green” way of manufacturing it. Such a system weighs half of an equivalent lithium-ion battery and you can refuel with hydrogen as fast as you can with petrol.

If the lithium-ion battery is an imperfect device for cars, it’s a complete non-starter for trucks because of its weight. JCB, which makes those yellow diggers, has made huge strides with hydrogen engines and hopes to begin production within a couple of years. If hydrogen wins the race to power trucks and filling stations stock it, it could become a popular choice for cars.

But let’s zoom out further and consider the whole life

Rowan Atkinson is an actor, comedian and writer

cycle of an automobile. The biggest problem we need to address in society’s relationship with the car is the “fast fashion” sales culture that has been the commercial template of the industry for decades. On average, we only keep our new cars for three years, driven mainly by the ubiquitous three-year leasing model. This seems an outrageously profligate use of natural resources when you consider what great condition a three-year-old car is in. If the first owners kept their cars for five years, the CO2 emissions associated with production would be vastly reduced . We would have the same mobility in slightly older cars.

We need also to acknowledge what a great asset we have in the cars that already exist (there are nearly 1.5bn worldwide). In terms of manufacture, these cars have paid their environmental dues and, although it is sensible to reduce our reliance on them, it would seem right to look carefully at ways of retaining them while lowering their polluting effect. Fairly obviously, we could use them less. As an environmentalist once said to me, if you really need a car, buy an old one and use it as little as possible. A sensible thing to do would be to speed the development of synthetic fuel. The environmental problem with a petrol engine is the petrol, not the engine. Formula One is going to use synthetic fuel from 2026. With more development, it should be usable in all petrol-engine cars.

Increasingly, I’m feeling that our honeymoon with electric cars is coming to an end, and that’s no bad thing: we’re realising that a wider range of options need to be explored if we’re going to properly address the very serious environmental problems that our use of the motor car has created. We should keep developing hydrogen, as well as synthetic fuels, to save the scrapping of older cars that still have so much to give, while simultaneously promoting a quite different business model for the car industry, in which we keep our vehicles for longer.

Friends with an environmental conscience often ask me, as a car person, whether they should buy an electric car. I tend to say that if their car is an old diesel and they do a lot of city centre motoring, they should consider a change. But otherwise, hold fire for now. Electric propulsion will be of real, global environmental benefit one day, but that day has yet to dawn •