We’re going to buy an electric car. No idea which one (THEY ALL LOOK THE FARKIN SAME) but that time has arrived. Mel wants a new car and in line with the zeitgeist it would be almost unthinkable for ‘her’ to buy the new Dodge Challenger re-do with a 6.2 litre supercharged engine delivering over 800 horses to the wheels. Which, being a Dodge, will slide around like… like… like a car chase in Bullitt, be fast as fuck, louder than an AC/DC concert and cause more pollution than 17 jet aircraft. That just wouldn’t be right. But oh my it would be fun.

Saving the planet is not about ‘fun’! Its about being conscious, aware, concerned, its about spouting off in Swedish every time someone lights a candle, its about being… holier than thou or, in the case of Boris Johnson its, yet again, about meaningless sound bytes which add up in total to the square root of fuck all. But more on him later. I’m off to buy a car!!!

And here’s the issue. Every manufacturer has ‘electric cars!!!’, won’t be making petrol cars after 2025, phasing out fossils altogether, blah, blah, blah. Like Volvo. The first to announce this. Yet they don’t make a fully electric, plug in car. Only ‘hybrids’. Those illegitimate devil spawn produced when Jeremy Clarkson fathered a child with Greta Thunberg. Not because I’m so opposed to hybrids but just because you get no benefits in terms of tax savings and allowances and free road tax and no congestion charge.

The problem is you can’t use the existing car bits and just ‘make them with electric motors’. Don’t work. You can get a hybrid like that but for a full electric you have to completely redesign and rebuild from the wheels up. So options are limited.

In fact once you eliminate the hybrids and the ‘plug in hybrids’ from the equation, you’re left with the I-3, old technology and common as muck, a few Teslas which won’t be delivered until 2033, a couple of Nissans and Renaults and the Jaguar I-Pace. Which we looked at. Mel needed a ladder to get into it but it is exceptionally beautiful. And incredibly massive. Immense in fact. (Didn’t look so big in the pictures). The hunt goes on.

Boris is putting hundreds of millions into OUR POCKETS!!! to get us out of the old gas boilers in our homes and into more tree-huggy ‘heat pumps’ which do the same thing. Almost. A new gas boiler: 2 grand. A heat pump: about 15!!!! Plus more radiators required, lots of plumbing needed outside the house (or flat???) So the PM has offered grants, not full payment but ‘help’ for up to 90,000!!!!! homes to replace gas boilers with heat pumps. Wow. Unfortunately there are over 25 million boilers currently in the UK. Which leaves… errrr… well, quite a few remaining after this current ‘carbon purge’. We’ll get back to you with some more sums later.

Happy Green Wednesday

A xxxx