John Simister
John ponders the classic cars of the future
John asks what real classics of the future might be.
We’ve asked the question often enough before, but I’m asking it again now. What will be the classic car of the future? This time, though, I mean really in the future. Not Focus RS, or Porsche Cayman 718, or Aston Martin DB11. I’m talking about when most cars are electric, and have been for a long time. Maybe 40 years from now.
That sounds ridiculously far in the future, and I for one won’t see it unless I can hold out for a telegram from King William V, but does a P-reg MGB or Escort MKII really seem so impossibly ancient today? It’s said that electric cars will be making real inroads into new-car sales by 2020, and already a Tesla Model S, a Nissan Leaf, a Renault Zoe and a BMW i3 are everyday sights.
In 2056, the oldest of the above electric cars (the Leaf) will be 45 years old, plenty old enough for a classic. But will there be any of them left for car club charge-ins and swapmeets of power inverters? Will owners be reminiscing about the days of range anxiety and charging points that didn’t work, or had laughably filthy petrol cars parked in the way?
I suspect not. People just won’t have been interested enough in the Leaf ownership experience to have bothered to preserve them. Maybe a Tesla or two, for the thrill of the standing-start acceleration (a thing of wonder, it really is), or a BMW i3 because it’s such a neat design, but I’m struggling here. Because the fact is that an electric car, acceleration potential apart if you have the right one, is not an involving drive.
Electric avenue
All electric cars whine a bit. They have a go pedal and a stop pedal. They tend to feel quite heavy, because they are. As for the subtle interplay of throttle, clutch and gear lever, the sense of an engine whose torque starts low, builds up and then reduces again as the engine speed rises; as for the sound, the voice that can be a burble or a hum or a roar or a howl like a living creature; as for the smell, even if only of warm lubricant and hot metal if the catalytic converter is doing its job: forget it. An electric car does none of that, and if some clever engineer says you can have the electronically-synthesised sound of a Ferrari V12 or a Can-am racer, you can only reply that it’s fake and you don’t want it. An electric car can offer a driving thrill of a sort, of course. Anything fast can do that, and the Formula E racing series (in which drivers have to change to another freshly-charged car half way through the race) seeks to promote that thought
in its eco-friendly way. But there’s no bonding with the machine, no sense of one-ness with and love of one particular car. And if people don’t love a car, then they won’t want to preserve it. They won’t even want to own it, as is already happening as people move towards leasing contracts.
All of this makes writing about driving electric cars quite hard, because there’s so little in the experience to differentiate one from another, so little to stir the soul. This was brought home to me a couple of months ago, when I drove a concept car made by Nano Flowcell – the Quantino– and wrote a story about it for Autocar.
Nano Flowcell makes liquid batteries in which two types of electrolyte are mixed together to create electricity. The idea is that you fill up your electric car’s two electrolyte tanks as you would a petrol tank, and off you drive with no range anxiety because there’s no charging-up to worry about. It’s potentially brilliant, a game-changer even.
I was the first journalist to drive this car and to sample this amazing new technology. But the magazine wanted me to play down the first-drive bit, because it was an electric car and frankly there was not much of interest in the driving experience. Instead we played up the chances of a deal with a major carmaker. My weekly modern magazine employer for the day was simply being pragmatic.
So, should we be scared, or should we embrace the new Utopia? Keep this column and let your children read it in 2056. I’d love to know what they think, if I’m still here.