In the dead of night

I find it quite amusing that Mercury Energy has spent a huge amount of money to first, convert a classic Ford Fairlane convertible to electric power, and then to conduct a massive advertising campaign to tell people all about it.

The idea, it seems, is to try to make electric cars more interesting. But to me it’s self-defeating – it’s admitting to everybody that they’re, well, boring!

Getting a couple of old guys to sneak out in the middle of the night – in their pyjamas – seems both pointless and ageist. Does this mean electric cars are aimed at the older generation? Certainly, looking at the sort of people you see driving some of them, it would appear so.

Electric cars may well be the future (and I say MAY because other options, such as hydrogen power, could be a better choice moving forward) but forcing the issue and pushing it down our throats every five minutes isn’t going to make it come any sooner.

As we all know, the future comes in its own good time! The irony is that Mercury chooses to advertise its old car stunt rather than its special 20 percent off EV fuel package for Mercury users who recharge at home “after hours”. This seems to me to be a much better way of enticing people into electric cars, but you’ve got to go to the Mercury website to find out about it – and you’d probably only do that if you were an existing Mercury customer checking your account.

Uber not alles

Well, it had to happen. Tragically we’ve had a death caused by an autonomous car, an Uber selfdriving car which hit a women crossing the road in Arizona, US. It’s being billed by the mass media in the US as the first death involving a driverless car, but in fact the first death involving a car in selfdriving mode was the crash last year where a Tesla driver in auto drive mode crashed into a truck and was killed.