Current events

While “going green” and purchasing an electric car seems to be the way forward, sadly, the drawbacks are so large that general ownership of electric cars can never take place.

The small draw backs are surmountable, like lack of charging points and faulty charging points and breaking down without fuel. The lack of raw materials for manufacturing batteries will be a great difficulty as time moves on and will finally dictate just how many people will own an electric car: our planet does not have enough Lithium, for example, to supply the world's needs. The Government states that “All new houses are to have charging points”. That sounds fine, but any family living in a present home and owning even a single electric vehicle would have to increase their domestic cabling and uptake of electricity by about 45 per cent.

Leaving financial worries to one side, if a street had, say, 50 houses then that means that the main under-street cable would be unable to cope with the increased power requirement and would need to be dug up and replaced. Even if that street managed to get away without such an arduous task, the underground cable supplying electricity to that area of the town would definitely have to be replaced in order to carry the increased current. The time required to re-cable most streets in all towns and cities would be truly horrendous and the burden upon the taxation system would be unsupportable!

Vehicles running on hydrogen would give us none of the above problems and yet supply us with transport at reasonable cost and with refuelling times roughly the same as for our current diesel/petrol vehicles. We will have no choice in the matter eventually.

ARCHIBALD A LAWRIE

Kingskettle, Fife