VIJAY PARMAR

Vijay tells you the sad truth about the guts of an electric vehicle

I am not a Greenpeace activist by any means, but I was really chuffed at the idea of electric powered motorcycles

YOU CAN NEVER TELL WHAT IS COMING UP next. I walked into a restaurant for lunch and at the bottom of the menu read the strangest thing — “All our meat is ethically sourced”.

I’m a hardened carnivore and completely unapologetic to the fern gobblers that inhabit this world of ours but this declaration had me flummoxed. What constitutes ethics when you are sawing away at the jugular of a fattened goat, or better still severing its head with a single, well-timed swing of your favourite axe? You take the life of an animal for a plateful of fine kebabs — fair play to my mind but to add that this act is ethical, takes the cake!

And now with this seemingly pointless trivia out of the way, we turn to the 32 Chinese manufacturers who have displayed their electric two-wheelers at the Auto Expo 2023. Lithium is the backbone for powering their ecologically friendly mopeds but none of the manufacturers are loudly calling attention to their powerpacks, crying out that their “lithium is ethically sourced”! Because it is not.

I’m not a Greenpeace activist. Despite owning four SUVs and eight motorcycles that run solely on the bones of dinosaur donors from 12 million years ago, I was really chuffed at the idea of electric powered bikes. No cooling circuits required, no flat spots that need a timing advance, no timing chains that need periodic maintenance, no burnt valves or holed pistons. The mechanic in me almost giggled with delight. A utopian world awaited me if I managed to live out this decade, I thought.

The final crown to this wonderful world was watching Carlos Sainz and my all time hero Stephane Peterhansel, championing the cause of a greener world with perfect blue skies, in their Audi RS Q e-tron futuristic machines! Hearing them squirreling off the start gate was a bit of a downer, but knowing they would win a stage soon was reason enough to rejoice. Then something else caught my attention. When videos showed the Audi e-tron cars spraying cameramen with sand atop a dune, the growl of a full-on gasoline engine startled me. I replayed the clip again and again and there it was. The growl of a rally engine. Further research revealed a gasoline engine on board, to charge the batteries, once they lost oomph! The media, so full of the all-electric cars at the Dakar never whispered a word about the gasoline they burnt. Never ever. The subterfuges that we live with. No wonder when we were witness to all manner of strut replacements and what not, we never once saw a single car being ceremoniously plugged into a high capacity battery charging unit capable of recharging the packs in 20 minutes!

It therefore came as an equal shock to me, as it did to Nasser, when halfway through the rally the so called alternate fuel vehicles were permitted to apply a screwdriver to the magic screw that yielded an extra 11bhp to the rear axle! It, however, was no surprise when ‘Instant Rally Karma’ hit and both Sainz and Peterhansel, who benefited from this mid event ruling, retired from the event. Though the Dakar is undoubtedly the Holy Grail of Rally Raid some strange rulings have happened in the past as well, curiously almost all benefiting French participants mainly.

The utopian dream crumbles further. The battery packs of an electric vehicle overheat and now need cooling systems to keep the packs cool. Coolant manufacturers can once again celebrate the increasing demands for their poisonous chlorophyll. And that is another point. Merely colouring it green doesn’t make it ecologically friendly. No. Coolant is poison, in any colour.

And yet we promote the mining of Lithium, mostly by our unfriendly neighbours, who own most of the Congo by now by subscribing to their shoddily put together machines. At 10 mg/L of blood, a person is mildly lithium poisoned. At 15 mg/L they experience confusion and speech impairment, and at 20 mg/L Li there is a risk of death. But we must hand it to the Chinese — they are not hypocritical. At no point do they claim that their Lithium batteries are ‘ethically sourced’ through ‘responsible mining’.

They just show up — ‘shamelessly capitalistic’, to the Auto Expo in India and hawk their wares. And we gawk at the cheap prices and embrace them like lost brothers.

Electric bikes or cars are not an ecologically beneficial alternate. Their carbon footprint might not be evident up front but in those lands that are coughing up Lithium the damage is immense.

And in another three years when a globally huge stockpile of Lithium waste is threatening to grow bigger than the state of Sikkim, will Elon Musk run his spaceships to bury it all on Mars?

Of course — at a price! ⌧