Okay, so I am making a wee point with the picture, but I like the song and I like the artist, so before you read me prattling on for a while have a listen.
I work for the government, and they have a green policy, part of that policy is the use of electric cars, they love the zero emissions. I sometimes have to go to our Datacentre and do “stuff”, I would also like to kid on that the “stuff” I do is cool but it’s mostly boring and consists of watching the network guys connect up the LAN and SAN and then I go and configure the shit outta stuff back in the office, so far so not Jack Bauer…
The closest I would ever get to that is standing next to a server rack and making peeow noises, but quiet so no one hears me!
That’s not the actual Datacentre and not my thumb, but you get the idea.
So, I needed to go over and the only car left in the pool was this ugly monstrosity,
However much I wished, it wasn’t this,
If only, really, if only.
So, I trooped down and with trepidation in my heart I looked at the thing and though, I wish I had booked something a bit earlier and wouldn’t have to go in this contraption, I didn’t have a clue what I was doing, but was told it’s an automatic.
I’ve driven an automatic, but that was a Mercedes, a hulking old beast of one, but my goodness me it was fun to drive, especially when the engine roared like a lion on the African plains, and here was me driving through Cork feeling quite the cool bad boy in this Merc.
I didn’t feel like that today, the Leaf is a horrible wee thing, build quality sucks, and when I took it out it started screaming at me that I needed to take the parking brake off, I thought, I have you fecker, so stop hassling me! On it went, till the car started making this buzzing noise and me slightly panicked pulled in to the side of the road and whipped the phone out…
Google searches included -
Then I stumbled across a youtube video and someone saying that a horrible wee pedal at the side of the brake hardly felt all electric and modern and was doomed to failure, but it was enough to give me a heads up so I could press the wee pedal and boof, what do you know, the screaming beeping noise stopped and it became that bit easier to drive.
Up unto this point I will admit it was my sheer doltishness that was to blame, I can’t blame the car for me not knowing about the parking brake pedal, or that no one told me what to do, as they say, own your own problems and don’t expect other people to solve them for you, okay I said that just now, but it sounds motivational and I am good with that
Confident that I might actually get to Hamilton alive I set out and here is my review of the whole electric car thing.
Unless it’s a Tesla it sucks,
My whole experience was watching the dial,
Fully charged the one I was driving had a range of 86 miles, being a kinda muggy hot day I turned in the air con, and watched the figure plummet by 8 miles straight away, so driving up the motorway I watched the figure go down, and down and down.
Now I get it, the whole carbon reduction argument, but I can go to a garage and fill a diesel or a petrol car in 5 minutes, pay and then go. The convenience of doing that is awesome, and that is what tech is meant to bring you, convenience, ease of use, abasically all the good stuff.
The indicator on the car told me that if I charged at 6kW I would be at full charge in 3 hours, on 3kW it would take 8 hours, so if I ran out of juice it would take me hours to get going again.
It felt like a big mobile phone, phones these days are always limited by how long you can keep a charge in them, so we buy extra leads and power banks and the things constantly demand electricity, so if as the papers are saying by 2040 or 2050 there will be no more petrol or diesel based cars anymore where is all the electricity coming from? The government can’t tell us, they were supposed to, but listening to the radio today a report said they had kicked the report where they would tell us into the “long grass” till at least next year, well that tells me something.
We are pushing this tech on a shaky platform, batteries are crap in electric cars, plus they use up precious and exotic materials, in fact I have posted on this very subject here, battery tech is incremental, not paradigm shifting, so we will continue to get crap batteries and poor car ranges and imperfect tech.
I’m not saying I have the answers, but driving the crap mobile today just entrenched the idea of electric cars that I already had, rubbish range predicated on expensive and environmentally wasteful tech in the batteries themselves, the conspiracy theorist I me wonders are we being drip fed this bullshit and the really cool efficient tech is being held back till they figure out how to make it inefficient enough that we have to pay through the nose for it and the holy grail of free clean energy never materialises.
You know what though, I now have a car I can always book for the journey to the Datacentre, because no one else wants to use it…
If you were entertained or somewhat diverted by this post please feel free to Upvote, Resteem and follow 
like raffles the gentleman thief i liberated most of the images from google, apart from the Eagle motivational poster, that's mine and i really like it, and i hope you do too.
