I sing the body electric
I sing the body electric
Why Italy's car capital is a signature example on how NOT to manage transport policy and electric cars
I never liked committees. I don't like them at work, and most importantly, I like them off work even less. So, when the periodic Condo full assembly is due, I am rarely surprised at announcements about the latest and greatest in Italian Bureaucracy(c). A while back, the hot topic was... Garage regulations.
Apparently, in order to mitigate fire hazards, every personal garage owner would have to refurbish his wiring/lightning (easy), install low consumption lights (ok, I can do it myself), install an EXTERNAL breaker (What the heck? What if I put a fridge in and kids cut it off just for giggles?) and..... get a government approved certification through a qualified electrician, 30 pages of gibberish for a paltry 120 EUR (Facepalm).
It was not the 250 quid all in that bugged me. It was, as usual, the sheer idiocy of the whole process, because even then, there were things that were clear to me:
having served in a branch of the military involved in civilian emergencies as well, I knew perfectly well that Firefighters don't even start the motor of the fire engine in the courtyard before calling the local utility and saying “We need you to cut power to the whole block”. When with my usual politeness I asked our condo manager where could I find in this new rule something compelling them NOT to do that but to come all the way and to use the external breakers on the individual garage units involved, he hem and hawed a bit.
Of course, it is not my case, but I was fairly sure that the political craze about hybrid/electric cars was not going away, hence some time down the line all that work would be chucked out of the window in favor of big, meaty three phase 380 V cables, all feeding an hefty number of possibly overheating batteries that when on fire cannot be put out with conventional means.
We're not there yet, but the electric craze has hit alright. And it's not a “popular” craze, contrary to the narrative, it's a marketing craze.
Hybrid
vehicles are not a new concept, and they do have some advantages, as
Ferdinand Porsche brilliantly captured in this vehicle:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elefant#/media/File:Elefant_USAOM-01.jpg
The "Ferdinand"
had a gasoline engine driving an electrical generator, providing energy
to electric motors driving the tracks. The torque provided by those
motors allowed an acceptable mobility in such an heavy vehicle. Also available with an MG34 machine gun.
Let me explain better with an example. New York, in the past, was facing a pollution problem of gigantic proportion. Traffic was chaotic, parking was at a premium, and there seemed to be no solution to the pollution problem. Serious health problems afflicted the population.
Then, of course, the Internal combustion engine came along and Harry Ford and others solved the problem for them. That brought both the removal of horse drawn transport, which had given the “Great Manure Crisis”, and the explosion of individual transport.
For that tough we had to wait for another “Significant disruption event”, World War 2. It's a arcane trivia that the German Army in World War 2 depended on horse for a significant part of its logistical tail, the average punter just thinks “Rommel” and “Panzers”, and the most sophisticated remember that the Messerschmitt 262 was the first jet powered swept wing operational plane, the grandfather of those boarded in these days by tourists the world over.
Yet,
there is a tenuous link between these instances (there are others): In
no case the government did anything else than go with a flow of
technological an economic progress, if it intervened at all. In the “Climate
crisis” instead not only the approach is much more dirigistic, but
it's unashamedly a step back, not forward. That brings a lot of of
troubles, but as in all market based economies, it boils down to one
aspect: money.
You know, in my opinion there are unspoken assumptions behind my City's obsession with bikes, public transport, reserved lanes etc.: the most glaring is that It doesn't make sense unless we assume that our parents were stupid and we aren't, which given that my City alone carries about 4,5 Bn. EUR in debt on a total headcount of a smidgen less than 900 thousand souls, doesn't look readily apparent. Because our parents could have bicycles, Public transport, reserved lanes as much as we do now, yet the generation that spawned the “miracolo economico” apparently was less than keen on them.
According to my late father, there was this ancient thing called “progress”, whereby people coming out of poverty wanted to have more comfort than before, not less. Even worse, those less fortunate had the effrontery of NOT wanting to pay more for that less, a key parameter in terms of price/performance of the entire new paradigm.
The second assumption is more subtle: Governments assume that they, not the individual citizens, are entitled to freely dispose of citizens' time and space. Electric vehicles can't satisfy the whole utility of an internal combustion engine car: they lack the range and versatility, and above all their ability to switch the logistics to electric vehicles, is, suspiciously I might add, something even the most enthusiastic proponents are not keen to talk about. There are prototypes and such, but the sad truth is that the best I could extract from an enthusiast was something similar to a wheeled train, getting continuous power from cables sunk in the road or highway.
Now, just to make you understand what I am saying: Suppose you are the supervisor of such a society. You have to pick three standard vehicles, an Ambulance / first medical response truck, a Fire Engine / Sapper unit, and a police intervention transport.
What engine solution would you pick for those? Me, I would go for a robust diesel/multi-fuel engine. Even with the electrical grid totally off, that will work. Diesel Fuel may burn but it doesn't explode and any fire is easy to put out1. If any vehicle is out of fuel, a couple of jerry cans are enough to provide enough to egress. The vehicles do not depend on outside infrastructure that might have been damaged or that could be actually the location that they would have to support.
In short, only political unilateralism and climate activism push going for electric vehicle instead of milking the advances that have been pursued in conventional engines. Suffice to say that Germany's Economy Minister, Peter Altmeier, proudly said that
Those were his words announcing that Germany has reached a goal of one million electric cars sold in Germany. I do have a trouble with the word "sold", because:
- given incentive enough, citizens would move on skateboards, or pogo sticks;
- the scope for a price reduction in electric cars is being postponed daily by the price increases in key materials needed that are mined outside Europe: rare metals, copper, Lithium etc.
There is also another perverse economic effect: My parents' generation, the “frugals”, changed their car when it ended its useful life or when about ten years had elapsed, so roughly they divided the initial price by ten to know how much it cost per year. But, due to the whirlwind of EU standards, that's not the case now: you buy an EUR4 car, it only takes five years before a new standard takes its place and so the effective yearly cost doubles, while cities enforce limits on YOUR car as soon as the new standard kicks in. That in a poor country like Italy has ensured that clunkers live on, since people can't afford an effective doubling in price, but mobility and hence utility (and productivity) go down. Yet, instead of deploying money in “cash for clunkers”, which would pay off if as the authorities say private transport was one of the main culprits, there is a “Vorwaerts!” mentality. Only not in the direction of progress, but in a Gosplan – like adherence to the approved religion. In fact, private citizen transport is a tiny part of total emissions, as if fact Europe is a small part of the World total emissions. The EU is one fourth of what is coily described as “Asia – Pacific”, meaning “China”. So, FROM A MORE ADVANCED INITIAL POINT, it takes four times as much to progress the same towards emission reduction, before taking into account that the easy pickings are behind us and the costs per unit here are much higher. In theory, I would expect the debate over here to hinge on “What polluting thingy are we buying from China that we could do without with a ban to imports?”, but that would imply a numerate political class, which is simply not there, see “Energiewende”.
1 The assault tank with the most attention to crew protection, Israeli's Merkava, uses the fuel tanks as a additional armour. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merkava
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