Governments put all eggs into just one EV basket

I’ve got nothing against electric cars — or autonomous cars, for that matter. But they’re not for me.

The way I see the push for electric cars — and this promotion is all coming from governments, by the way — is this: governments see everybody as being the same and thinking and acting and behaving in the same way.

It sees everybody going to work and returning home from work at the same time and using the same route every day and nobody deviates and therefore electric-powered vehicles that drive themselves are the answer — just like public transit.

There, I’ve said it: because governments have failed completely to get everybody out of their cars and into public transit, they have changed tactics and are now promoting private public transit.

If this was a TV cartoon show like The Simpsons, I wouldn’t have to try to explain the following scene to you because you would be able to watch it.

So use your imagination and visualize a typical suburban subdivision where everybody leaves their houses at 7:30 a.m. and they jerkily walk to their cars (all round and white and all manufactured by Google, by the way) and they all push the GO button and back out of their driveways in unison and start down the street in unison and go onto the Gardiner or the 401in unison and etc., etc., etc.

I don’t know about you, but that’s not for me. I like to come and go pretty much when I feel like it. One time — this is a true story — I was coming home from the Indianapolis 500 with a friend and we were driving a Bricklin. I am not making this up when I say it was the sev- enth Bricklin built and was numbered 007.

We’d stopped in Detroit for hamburgers (the restaurant was frequented by professional athletes and I’d convinced a comely lass who was sitting at the bar that I was Lanny McDonald — I had a lot more hair on my head and face in those days) and it was my turn to drive once we got across the border. So we gassed up and my pal nodded off and I was bombing along the 401 and I got to Toronto and I didn’t feel like stopping and I drove all the way to Cornwall, Ont., before he woke up and had a fit because he’d had to be at work that day.

I — and you — couldn’t do that spur-of-the-moment thing in an electric car because even if you left Windsor with a full charge you’d be out of juice by Chatham. What fun is that?

My point is that for the free spirits out there, and I really hope I’m not the only one, electric cars are the death knell. Vehicle ownership is supposed to be a pleasure, not a chore.

Now, I am not promoting the internal-combustion engine as the only propulsion system for cars or light trucks. I believe in conservation; I also believe in alternatives — at least the ones that make sense. I really wish, for instance, that there had been more research, and more lobbying (and that’s a big part of what’s going on here), for fuel cells.

To me, fuel cells make much more sense than electricity because you can drive for 300 kilometres, stop to use the washroom, take out the cell and put in a fresh one and be one your way in about the same amount of time as it takes to pump in a tank of gasoline. It will be ages before consumers will be able to charge electric cars as quickly.

I could go on (as I did that time in the Bricklin) but it’s time I got to the real reason electric cars are not for me. If a Canadian bank fails, the government will only guarantee $60,000 of the money you have in there. So smart people spread their cash around. They don’t put all their eggs in one basket.

Governments everywhere are jumping onto the electric car bandwagon. In so doing, they are putting all their eggs into that one basket.

Is that wise? nmcdonald@thestar.ca