How much of a con are electric cars..?

Look a little deeper and they're snake oil on the roads.

In case you haven’t noticed, the future is not flying cars as perpetually dreamed of, but instead involves driving household appliances around with an expression of ill-researched superiority on your face, whilst ignoring child labour, devastating environmental impact of open-cast mining in Africa, and that so-called greenhouse gas emissions during production of an electric car are nearly 70% higher than petrol cars. It also takes about 100,000 miles of sweating about how much charge you have remaining before they become more co2 neutral than a petrol car. SUVs may continue to take five minutes to overtake, if you can get past their body-builder width, but they now have an E in their name so everything is alright. It’s electric, so it saves the planet. The planet - that has survived thus far for 4.5b years - must be so grateful for the sacrifice of leather upholstery, road blocking and constant recharging by electricity that is presumably provided by the same gods that can build a 2.7 tonne vehicle* with zero environmental impact.

I’m unsure if the self-regard at ‘saving the planet’ comes free with EVs, but it certainly suggests a blind spot so large you could reverse a Belaz 75710 mining truck and the 20 tonnes of cobalt needed to manufacture lithium batteries through it. It’s not dissimilar to face masks, which served to remind people of the need to be constantly afraid of Covid; promotion of EVs and the vilification of petrol cars serve to advertise the so-called manmade climate ‘crisis’. The Nissan Leaf even boasts ‘zero emissions’ on its boot, which is a lie; even calling it a leaf is akin naming a heavy-calibre machine gun a petal caresser.

As an EV owner, you have plenty of time for pondering your virtue while stuffing your face with overpriced service station Lion bars and crisps as you charge your vehicle, while watching petrol cars swoosh past without a care in the fast lane. How much thought is given to this latest green lie sold to us by those living upstream from us minnows?

Kolwezi is the Democratic Republic of the Congo’s cobalt capital, a city so defined by mining that communities sit on the rim of the giant craters, presumably to reduce the morning commute, which is the only environmentally friendly thing about these godforsaken industrial complexes that pollute local rivers and arable land. The European middle-class staple of hand-picked asparagus clearly stretches to hand-dug cobalt by children on less than 30pence per day. Voting Labour of course offsets that, who promise to impose self-destructive Net Zero policies with increased speed and vigour by Heil Starmer. That’s if difficulties in defining a woman doesn’t distract them from their mission to dismantle western society.

Co2 is a trace gas, and our geologic period has the lowest average Co2 in the history of the earth. Co2 is plant food, without which life on earth ceases to exist. Yet, the fundamentals of how we live - heating homes, eating and travel - are impacted by the unquestioning, cultish pursuit of Net Zero. There’s a poignant moment in the masterful Yellowstone prequel 1923 when Harrison Ford’s character is told the horse tethering posts have been removed to make way for car parking spaces. In that moment he knows he lives in the past, but as with all developments, there is loss that is never considered, perhaps because the irrepressible tsunami of progress prevents it. Yet can it even be called progress when forced upon populations by national governments in service of the global supranational organisations?

The UK government has doubled down on its diktat that no more petrol cars can be sold after 2030, even Beijing has mandated that 40 percent of vehicles sold in China by 2030 must be electric, not that it has stopped them from adding two new coal power stations per week to their 1, 118 collection. In 2030 the roads will be unusable due to broken down EVs. Our house falls into disrepair while the house opposite fits plush curtains and poolside uplighting.

There’s something fundamentally real about cars, the older they are, the more real they become, until you regress to the necessity of goggles in the absence of a windscreen. EVs on the other hand are fake. It’s pretty easy to guess what Holden in Catcher in the Rye would call electric cars. He’d call them phoney, and he’d be correct. Electric cars don’t even make a noise, but a low hum like an insect. Human beings are programmed to buy Toblerone at airports and to hear things. It’s why we fear snakes, because unlike dogs crashing through the bracken barking about how it’s the best thing they’ve ever done ever, snakes slither silently; an invisible yet present threat. It’s what EVs do, they slide about, pretending to be proper cars which they’re not, while pretending to be better for the planet than their petrol acquaintances. Their blank grills look moronic when parked beside the simmering brutality of an AC Cobra; they’re the soy boys of the car world. EVs are not really cars, but household appliances that jumped the back fence. They should read Wind in the Willows and blush:

‘..the magnificent motor-car, immense, breath-snatching, passionate, with its pilot tense and hugging his wheel, possessed all earth and air for a fraction of a second, flung an enveloping cloud of dust that blinded and enwrapped them utterly, and then dwindled to a speck in the far distance.’

That’s a motorcar ladies and gentlemen, all blood-rush and passion, not something looking more at home in a line-up of washing machines and tested by Which magazine. Not something you plug in to charge, and drive around terrified that you might end up sleeping the night in a field with a flat battery.

There’s little more to Teslas than scuffed rims and plastic trim and fakery. Children love Teslas because they have no door handles - that’ll be useful when the battery is dead - and have a massive iPad screen on the dashboard. Choosing a car based on the size of its computer screen is like smokers in the 70s selecting their car based on the size of the ashtray. EVs are appliances that sit on an electrical grid that can of course be switched off, instantly returning transportation to the dark ages, only this time without horses and stabling. And let’s not forget the creaking of multi-story car parks barely holding the weight of these cars. You’re likely to find your EV on the floor below where you parked it, covered in concrete and brick dust. I guess it saves climbing another flight of stairs. It may even have spontaneously combusted, another defining feature of EVs. Lithium battery fires are notoriously difficult to extinguish, and infinitely more toxic when alight. There’s a big difference between landfill and landmark, and we know where all these cars are really heading. The same place cons always do.

It’s not only the cars that are phoney, but the entire Net Zero cult, which demands sacrificial offerings of petrol combustion engines that have thrilled children and petrol heads since their inception, and which drove the wealth the West enjoys today. The now vilified Co2, currently at its historically low levels, is good for the planet, (currently greener than it was 100 years ago), and Co2 emissions peaked 50 years ago. Mankind contributes 3% of CO2 and we are emerging from an ice age. Somehow the impact of ocean degassing and Milankoitch cycles ( earth rotation, orbit and tilt drive glacial-interglacial changes) on earth temperatures are conveniently ignored. It’s Co2 and NOTHING else that drives temperature. If your Toyota Prius can impact planetary tilt then its other optional extras will definitely warrant serious consideration.

Those buying the lie - surely advertisers and government campaigns are truthful? - will cry ‘luddite’ at this point, but at least automobiles were demonstrable better than horses, even if you didn’t bond with them in the quite the same way and have to shoot them when they were old, EVs are demonstrably worse than petrol cars.

The unelected global elite, through their control of puppet national governments, impose their new-world order under the banner of fighting climate change. Enforced EVs are part of their plan, endlessly promoted as an answer to a question that doesn’t even exist. They are a sanitised modern convenience that are rinsed of significance and less exciting than a sandwich maker. It’s not only encouraging us to replace products with those that we already own, to make manufacturers’ profit, but moving from car to appliance makes them easier to control. EVs are on a tighter leash than petrol cars. You relinquish all control when buying an EV. Without wanting to sound too Mad Max, you can’t store electricity in your shed or in jerry cans strapped to the bonnet, so what happens if the State decide personal agency is too damaging to the planet and switch off the network? Like bumper cars at the fairground no matter how much you pump the accelerator you’ll be incapable of regaining the electrical current required to smash the driver of an opposing car onto the floor. Out we all climb, helpless and sad that the fun has ended, ruing the day we believed yet another lie. We look upwards to see another private jet scar the blue sky, and strain our ears to the sound of the penny dropping.

*This refers to the Audi Q8 e-tron SQ8, which in a moment of impulsive honesty is driven by utter twonks.

My book on writing Idle Thoughts of an Idle Writer: Reflections on life and the creative process is available on Amazon (whom make more money from it than I do, despite them never having once head butted their desk).

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Idle-Thoughts-Writer-Reflections-creative-ebook/dp/B08ZJJRBGM/ref=sr_1_2?crid=2576UQ0YDJ6GG&keywords=thomas+hocknell&qid=1694951661&sprefix=thomas+hocknell%2Caps%2C79&sr=8-2