Mike's Minute: A deeper dive into EVs

The Mike Hosking Breakfast

What we need is an "are we sure we know what we are doing before we rush into this" catalogue or guide.

The EV story might turn out to be one of the world's, and certainly the transportation industry's, biggest headaches as company after company admit they leapt in way too quick to electric, bought into all the Government-led madness on climate and invested, God-knows how much to transfer to a mode of movement the world wasn’t ready for, or wanted.

EVs were sold as way more than they ever were.

Now even the scientists are waking up. There's a good piece of reading from Dr Caroline Shaw published in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health, whereby they do what we really should have done at the start and look at the EV in totality.

It said don’t get all hyped and hooked up on emissions. Yes, emissions in an EV vs petrol debate do drop. But what about the rest of it? They looked at all sorts of things like the extra weight, therefore the extra wear and tear, the weight and therefore the potential for injury, the cheapness of driving, therefore you drive more, therefore our fitness drops as we drive and don’t walk.

They looked at a myriad of things that should have been thought about and scoped out on day one and weighed up.

Because here is the end result: when you add all that stuff up, the good, the bad and the ugly, electrifying cars would lie somewhere between harmful and neutral.

Are you serious?

Going electric could be harmful? Would it have not been useful to crunch a few of those ideas to understand this at the start of the obsession that drove the thinking?

Or, like so much ideology, do the details not matter as long as we can leap on the old bandwagon, take a small piece of the bigger picture and then milk it for all its worth, knowing that we can leave the reality and the clean-up for another day?

This by the way is not anti-EV.

It’s the realisation that like most things, what was the answer, and the obsession, and the next new thing, actually turns out to be just another piece in a way bigger, more complex, picture than the obsessives ever care to learn about.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.