Well it had to happen sometime, I s’pose. The bloody car arrived. The ‘lectric one. Having ordered it in November 2021, it just became one of ‘those things’. Santa Clause coming at Xmas, Spurs winning a trophy, new car arriving. And then, out of nowhere!!!! (Ok, we had monthly apologies telling us of components troubles, assembly difficulties, delays in transportation, shipping disasters, delivery postponements, Brexit bollocks…) it just… CAME!!! Oh. What do I do with it? Are the batteries included? Do I need a 200-mile extension cable to play out when I go up the motorway? Will it drive like ‘normal’? Will it be more ‘milk float’ than ‘racer’, what will… how do you… why is that light red… WTF???

And yet. Its just a car. You get in, you press ‘start’ and you drive it. End of. The rest is just so much ‘glitz’. You need a steering wheel, check; you need to know how many miles before it dies, check, you need a ‘celerator and brake, check. Off ya go then, what‘s the fuss?

They do drive differently. If you (dare) put your foot down, electric cars just fucking fly. And the power is ‘instant’. There’s nothing mechanical, nothing pumping, nothing ‘injecting’, just power. And shit-loads of it. That’s scary thing number one. Number two is that the car brakes for you. Take your foot off the accelerator and it feels like you’re braking, when you’re not. Its a ‘retardation’ thing which sucks up the power wasted on slowing and pours it back into the batteries. They all do it. But it feels different. For 10 minutes, then it feels perfectly normal and I know that next time I drive a petrol car I’m gonna run into the back of the car in front. Not that I EVER would again be a polluting, environment-destroying, polar-bear killing, carbon emitter!!

But to just ‘drive’ a car like this is like buying a state-of-the-art i-book to use as a calculator. You download the manufacturers app (everyone and everything has a fucking app, essential, innit) you can check the charge, where it is, all sorts of useless shit, BUT; you can get it to defrost itself before you go out there. And if it happens to be plugged in, that will cost you ‘nothing’ in miles. Just in electricity, but that don’t count.

The car has two tiny little black ceramic ‘tiles’ on the steering wheel. They are the mouses (yeah, I know, but ‘mice’?) for two of the screens. And I thought of Mel and I thought… naaaaaaah. Not gonna happen.

Its so clever it has hundreds of computers in it and I only worry that it may ‘go rogue’ on me, like the robots in Terminator. I want to go to Waitrose but ‘it’ wants to go to Middlesboro’. Or ‘home’ somewhere in Ursa Minor? Like WTF?

So we have much to learn. Very much. You can even talk to it. I asked for some toast yesterday, with marmalade and chips. Ok, it has limits. I just have no idea what they are.

Happy driving

A xxxx