How fatuous to blame Mr Bean for the slow sales of electric cars when we all know the REAL reasons...

MY gRANdPARENTS bought one of the first colour televisions on the market after the BBC began broadcasting in colour back in 1967. To me, then 13, it was a thing of wonder, as remarkable as the earliest black and white TVs must have seemed to my parents’ generation when they were in their teens.

My siblings and I would look forward eagerly to visiting the old couple, for the awesome experience of watching something — anything — on their miraculous new set.

But though the TV had cost our grandparents a small fortune, I have to say the quality of the colour was pretty abysmal. Every red was a dazzling orange, fuzzy at the edges, every green as vivid and uniform as Astro Turf, with no gradations of tone whatsoever.

To be fair, this was partly grandma’s fault. Always careful with the pennies, she liked to get her full money’s worth on those rare occasions when she splashed the cash — and since she had paid through the nose for colour, she was damn well going to get as much of it as possible from her new set.

She, therefore, kept the colour control knob on the front of the TV turned to somewhere close to the maximum. But even when we turned it down, the results were a long way short of true-to-life.

Though the technology was not exactly in its infancy — Americans had been watching colour TV since the early 1950s — it was still in the early stages of development. Certainly, it had reached nothing like the heights of perfection we take for granted these days, with our (much cheaper) flat-screen sets.

Indeed, if only my grandparents had been wiser and less impatient, they might have waited a bit until colour technology improved and prices came down.

Pressure

I thought of grandpa, grandma and their telly this week, when I read that the green Alliance pressure group had lambasted poor old Rowan Atkinson, of Blackadder and Mr Bean fame, for offering similar advice to would-be buyers of electric vehicles (EVs).

In written evidence to a Lords committee, this coalition of eco-zealots suggested — preposterously, in my view — that a newspaper article written by the comedian last summer had contributed significantly to depressing the sales of EVs, whose share of the UK market has remained stuck at 16 per cent for two years, while ten out of 11 private buyers still opt for petrol or diesel.

On learning of this claim, my first thought was: Wow! That’s one helluva claim to make for the power of a newspaper column!

If it’s true, then I must have been doing something very wrong all these years. After all, I’ve been offering helpful suggestions to politicians and the public for nigh-on half a century of writing columns about this and that, to almost precisely zero effect. But then along comes the inventor of Mr Bean, and with a few strokes of his pen he apparently influences the buying choices of millions — or so says the green Alliance.

Oh, dear. If I’d hoped to make any serious difference in the world, perhaps I should have spent my time pulling funny faces on TV and film, before bursting into print.

But then, of course, it’s not true that Mr Atkinson can be held even partially responsible for the stagnation of sales of EVs. We all know the real reasons for that, to which I’ll return in a moment.

It’s not even as if Mr Atkinson is antielectric. On the contrary, he declared in his nuanced article — published first in the privacy of the guardian, but then laid before a much wider and more diverse readership in the Mail: ‘I love electric vehicles.’

He went on to sing the praises of the technology (and he wrote with some authority, since he has a university degree in electrical and electronic engineering, and a subsequent Master’s in control systems), revealing that he had bought his first hybrid 18 years earlier, and his first pure electric car nine years after that. He had enjoyed his time with them very much, he said.

‘Electric vehicles may be a bit soulless,’ he wrote, ‘but they’re wonderful mechanisms: fast, quiet and, until recently, very cheap to run.’

But this wasn’t good enough for the ecowarriors. Mr Atkinson’s cardinal sin, in their eyes, was that he went on to question the environmental benefits of EVs.

Increasingly, he said, he felt a little duped by the claims made for them, pointing out that Volvo had released figures in 2021, claiming that greenhouse gas emissions during their production were 70 per cent higher than for petrol cars.

He then mused that perhaps greener technologies might become more commercially viable, citing synthetic fuels, hydrogen and solid-state batteries, which are much lighter than the lithium-iron variety currently fitted to nearly all EVs.

Ending his article, he repeated the advice he would give to environmentally-conscious friends who were considering buying an electric car: ‘I tend to say that if their car is an old diesel and they do a lot of city centre motoring, they should consider a change.

‘ But otherwise, hold fire for now. Electrical propulsion will be of real, global environmental benefit one day, but that day has yet to dawn.’

As far as the green Alliance was concerned, this was akin to blasphemy. Atkinson’s article had been ‘one of the most damaging’, fumed the group — and although it had been ‘roundly debunked’, this had failed to repair the damage it had done to people’s perceptions of electric cars.

In its evidence to the Lords committee, the Alliance went on: ‘EVs already cut planet-warming emissions by two-thirds on a life-cycle basis relative to combustion engine cars in the UK — and the benefits are growing.’

Well, I’m wholly unqualified to know whom to believe. But I do know two things. One is that eco-preachers, in general, have a history of plucking dubious figures from the air, and then trying to silence anybody who questions them.

Only this week, for example, the Advertising Standards Authority ruled that a radio commercial made for the London Mayor, Sadiq Khan, had cited misleading figures for the environmental benefits of the Ulez zone, basing them on little more than guesswork.

(Is it monstrously cynical of me, by the way, to suspect that Mr Khan’s expansion of the zone has far more to do with his power-hungry greed for our money than his love of clean air? Whatever the truth, no doubt small businesses, saddled with non-compliant vans, will draw consolation from knowing their daily Ulez charges will contribute to such essential mayoral spending as Khan’s grant of £70,000 to a drag act called duckie Loves Fanny).

Woeful

The other thing I know is the true explanation of why so many of us are reluctant to buy EVs just yet — and it has precious little to do with Mr Atkinson’s article, thoughtfully argued though it was.

Yes, many owners are extremely happy with their electric cars (Uber drivers are for ever telling me they love theirs). But the fact is that these remain much more expensive to buy than combustion-driven vehicles, while costing more to repair, losing their value more quickly and taking longer to refuel.

Meanwhile, the woeful inadequacy of today’s charging network means EV drivers have to live with the constant fear of a flat battery.

Things are changing fast, however, and I haven’t the slightest doubt that, like colour television, zero- emissions automotive technology will soon become much cheaper and more satisfactory in every way.

I know readers won’t be swayed by what I write — nobody ever seems to be — and on this subject, at least, I have no special wish that they should be.

But speaking for myself, I’ll hang fire for now, and cling on to my trusty petroldriven A- Class Merc for a little while longer, before I take the plunge into electric.

Our politicians and eco-warriors can posture for all they’re fit. But let’s face it, little we can do in this country — which emits less than 1 per cent of the world’s greenhouse gases — will have the slightest perceptible effect on global warming.

To claim otherwise is as fatuous as blaming Mr Bean.