Swap your diesel Golf for a Volts-wagon

As a local, it was a proud moment last week when I saw that Chichester had made the national papers; as a fight broke out at Sidlesham fuel station over the lack of petrol supplies. I hope you can detect the sarcasm... Clearly, a fuel crisis is an absolute pain for many of us, but should we not take this moment in time to look at the alternative solutions, rather than putting on our boxing gloves and behaving like Neanderthals – while NHS and other key workers are unable to get to work?

Electric car searches soared 1,600 per cent in just the few short days after the fuel shortage announcement.

What might you find when looking up this search term online? BEVS

HEVS, PHEVS and MHEVS – it’s all a bit confusing.

As we know, the UK Government has banned the production of fossil-fuelled new car sales from 2030 – that’s just nine short years away.

Wind back nine years and you’ll have been watching the Olympic Games throughout Great Britain; doesn’t time fly?

Let us learn from Norway, where already, 80 per cent of new car sales are fully electric.

The Norweigans are seeking to become the first nation to end the sale of petrol and diesel cars by 2025.

Norway exempts fully electric vehicles from taxes imposed on those relying on fossil fuels, and they are an oil producing nation.

Norway is also looking to ban the sale of petrol and diesel cars by 2025 – five years sooner than the UK.

But let me give a little slack to the UK government, this kind of mass-adoption doesn’t happen overnight; Norway has been an advocate of the electric car for almost three decades now, and is the global leader in the EV transformation.

Too expensive? Well you can now enter the all-electric car world from as little as £15,000 with the Skoda CITIGOE, or if you’re a, well, erm, petrol-head(?) then you can spend £129,000 on the top of the range Tesla Model S, achieving 0-60 in under two seconds.

Our local area has many charging points around Chichester.

According to the Chichester District Council website and www.zap-map. com, there are over 70 public charging points around our local area, including Bosham, East Wittering, Selsey, Midhust and Petworth to name a few.

And for convenient charging at home, for those fortunate enough to have offstreet parking, there is still the OLEV Grant which provides up to £350 off the cost of purchasing and installing a home charging point.

I’m no Greta Thunburg; I’m about to get in my polluting internal combustion engine car – with a full tank of diesel.

However, I am part of the statistic who went on Google after hearing of the crisis and started looking at the alternative, and I’m sold on it.

Perhaps one day, the mainstream media will use their powers of control to persuade the UK population to panic buy electric cars instead, although hopefully without a punch-up in the showroom...

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