FOR years I’ve told people until I’m blue in the face that electric cars don’t have enough range, that they take far too long to charge up, that they will always be too expensive and that they aren’t even very environmental.
Happily, people are now starting to listen, so it’s time to move the argument along a bit with this: Electric cars are also bloody dangerous.
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As I write, a massive ship is on fire off the Dutch coast and one person has died.
No one knows for sure what caused it, but it was carrying 25 electric cars, and experts say it’s likely that one of them had a faulty battery pack.
Earlier this month, much the same thing happened on an Italian car transporter in the port of Newark, New Jersey.
Two firefighters were killed putting that out.
And then there was the Felicity Ace, which was carrying cars powered by lithium-ion batteries when it caught fire in the Atlantic Ocean and sank.
In total, there have been ten major fires on ships carrying electric cars in the past 20 years.
And it’s not like salt water is to blame.
Because in the last five years, the emergency services have been called out to 753 electric vehicle fires in the UK alone.
Last weekend the World Rallycross Championship at Lydden Hill in Kent had to be abandoned when a faulty battery pack destroyed the pits and burned out two Lancia Delta Evo E racing cars.
And it’s not just cars. A safety charity announced this week that e-bikes have caused hundreds of catastrophic house fires.
People have died, and that’s not surprising when you learn that a fully charged e-bike contains the same explosive energy as six hand grenades.
And to make matters worse, fires in electric bikes and cars are often very difficult to extinguish.
The electrical car that Richard Hammond rolled down a hill while filming for the Grand Tour burned for days.
And then, after the fire had died down, something in the battery pack called “thermal runaway” caused it to rear back up again.
And this went on for weeks.
The fact is this. It’s only a matter of time before an electric car bursts into flames on a cross-Channel ferry or in the Chunnel. Or in an underground car park.
Of course afterwards, the electric car enthusiasts will continue to say that petrol cars catch fire too (yeah right, happens all the time, especially in Hollywood films) and that electric cars continue to make sense.
True, if you’re a weak-brained, bleeding-heart liberal.
Not so true if you’re a child slave in Africa who works round the clock mining the cobalt all those electric car batteries need to work properly.
CREWS OUT OF ODOUR
AFTER reading about chef James Martin’s sweary rant at a TV crew who’d broken his kitchen, I rolled my eyes and thought: “Does this man know nothing about TV?”
Because as anyone who works in the industry knows, rule number one is: Never let a film crew in your house.
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I’ve worked with the same guys for 20 or more years.
I admire their skills with the cameras and the sound recording equipment, and I truly enjoy their company.
But I would never let them in my house because they’d drag their heavy boxes over the wooden floors, do a reverse-Ikea on all the furniture as they moved it to make way for their equipment and then, because all film crews live on a diet of chilli sauce, make the most godawful smell in the lavatory.
I FOILED THE NO OIL MOB
FEARFUL that I’d be caught up in a Just Stop Oil protest if I went to London in a car this week, I decided to go on something called a “train”.
And then, after arriving in the capital, I used an amazing thing called the tubes.
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And apart from making a small mistake at Oxford Circus and ending up going the wrong way for quite some time, it was all very successful.
However, just in case the Just Stop Oil people think they can chalk up my day on public transport as a victory for their cause, they should know this.
I fired up the engine on my diesel Range Rover before going to London, and left it running all day.
How ’shrooms tripped up writer Huxley
LAST week, we were told that magic mushrooms could soon be made available to women with ovarian cancer.
And this week we heard they could be used to stave off the effects of anorexia.
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Hmmm. I know that ’shroom enthusiasts believe that the mescalin contained in these little mushrooms is the elixir of life, but let’s not forget that after the great novelist Aldous Huxley tried a quarter of a gram of the stuff, he spent quite some time admiring the legs on his chair before writing “How miraculous their tubularity, how supernatural their polished smoothness”.
All in all then, I think I prefer beer.
GRET AWAY
THE increasingly smug Greta Thunberg was in court this week, charged with something or other.
Being annoying, probably.
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And after she was given a 2p fine, her friend, Irma Kjellstrom, said she will continue to blockade oil tanker ports in Sweden because she “must be where the harm is being done”.
OK then, love – well, if you really believe that, then off you go to China.
Because if you’d bothered going to school instead of sitting in the playground on a stupid strike, you’d know that in the climate war, they are the real villains.
RIGHT IN LINE OF FIRE
SO the sustainable and diverse Coutts Bank refused to handle Nigel Farage’s account because they didn’t like his politics, and then the uber-boss, Dame Alison Rose, told a BBC reporter they’d actually kicked him out because he wasn’t rich enough.
The whole episode was shameful, and it was obvious she’d have to go.
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Everyone was agreed on that.
Except everyone wasn’t agreed on that. Because the lefties, including Shadow Chancellor Rachel Reeves, are now lining up to say Rose was a pioneering woman who’d done a tremendous job in the past.
And that firing her was tantamount to bullying.
Really? So what if a prime minister went to a party and had some cake? Should he be fired?
Or what if a Health Secretary hugged his girlfriend?
Would it be called bullying if he was dismissed?
Or are we now living in a country where the lefties can do what they want, and Tories have to be sacked for walking on the cracks in the pavement?
A GREENGROCER called Gregg Wallace has made a documentary on Channel 4 saying that we should eat humans.
Sadly, a large number of people complained, not realising that it was a spoof.
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How could they be so daft? Obviously we can’t eat humans because, as a rule, we don’t tend to eat anything that eats meat.
That’s why we don’t eat dogs or cats or hyenas. But we do eat sheep and cows and pigs and, if you’re French, horses.
However, where things get tricky is that human vegetarians don’t eat meat.
Which kind of makes them eligible.