Justin Rowlatt Promotes EVs
By Paul Homewood.
h/t Dave Ward
If there was ever any doubt about Justin Rowlatt’s credentials, his latest contribution shows beyond doubt that he is no more than a shill for the renewable lobby:
My mind is changed. At the start of an hour-long promo extolling the wonders of battery-powered vehicles, I admit I was slightly sceptical.
It seemed questionable that Britain could convert to electric transport and ban the sale of petrol cars by 2030.
There’s no lingering doubt now. The more desperate the hard sell became, in Electric Cars: What They Really Mean For You (BBC1), the more painfully obvious it was that the scheme is doomed.
One of two things seems certain: the government will pull the plug on its impossible deadline, or the era of mass travel in private cars will end.
Every argument the presenters served up only emphasised the technology isn’t ready, the infrastructure doesn’t exist and the green propaganda is bogus.
Presenter Michelle Ackerley promised us that there are 44,000 public chargers around the country. ‘That sounds like a lot,’ she added.
No, it doesn’t. There are more than 33 million private cars in the UK. If we all go electric, that’s one charger for every 750 vehicles. You’ll be queuing for a week every time you need to refresh the battery.
Michelle pulled onto an all-electric forecourt outside Bishop’s Stortford in Hertfordshire, with about 20 state-of-the-art zappers. ‘This is charging heaven,’ she announced, before plugging her vehicle in for ‘as little as 40 minutes’.
She sauntered into the adjacent service station for a coffee — all right if you’re on your own and in no hurry. Now try it with three fractious children, slogging across country on a wet Friday in August, with thousands of other holidaymakers, some on their second or third recharge of the day. See how heavenly that is.
To beat the queues, Michelle produced an ‘electric lance’ from the boot. This device, the size of a pneumatic drill, slots into a charging point like a water hydrant in the pavement. After a struggle, she managed to get it working, for an overnight charge.
Call me overcautious, but I don’t fancy plugging a metal pole into the electricity mains, in winter, in the dark, during a rainstorm.
Co-presenter Justin Rowlatt, the BBC’s Climate Editor, was trying to entice us with shiny gimmicks. He went for a spin in a converted electric VW Beetle, buzzing up a Welsh mountain road like the Lovebug on amphetamines. The acceleration far outstripped anything possible with the Beetle’s 40-horsepower petrol engine. But Justin carefully didn’t mention how far it went before charge-ups, or how much the conversion cost. He just talked a lot about ‘meeting challenges’ and dismissed any objections as ‘perceptions’.
There was no attempt to explain how HGVs or heavy construction vehicles can ever run on electricity, and after its zippy start in the electro-Herbie, the show ran out of energy. During a deadly dull interview with a Whitehall eco-spokesman, it slowed to a halt. There’s another episode next week — I hope that gives them enough time to charge up again.
The problems of electric transport have been glaringly obvious for 40 years, since Sir Clive Sinclair launched his ridiculous battery-powered tricycle, the C5.
It may have looked like a potential deathtrap but it has nostalgia appeal today, as proved on Retro Electro Workshop (Yesterday). A broken C5 was one of the clapped-out devices coaxed back to life in this soothingly watchable show.
It is not the job of any BBC journalist, even a crackpot like Rowlatt, to waste licence payers’ money on promoting EVs or any other product.
Comments are closed.
NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT 
I’ve just Googled it, £28k for the conversion kit & fitting, or £55k for a ready made Beetle! 🤣
And you will still end up with a pile of cr2p that like every other beetle is hideous to drive and past the end of its design life.
I have just seen a tesla engined(?) series two landrover conversion being carried out. 50k! plus the restoration costs.
why?
I have seen and inspected several ‘classic’ car conversions, if ever the was a process to which the statement ‘more money than sense’ could be applied this is it.
Hi Lordelate, my eldest son works in design for JLR at Gaydon.
The stories he comes out with about conversions he has seen are so hilarious that it’s hard to take most of them seriously.
100% agree. You have a (let’s be honest) unsafe old car with stone-age crash protection (by modern standards) and you remove the soul and the fun out of it and put in a heavy battery and and load of computer software.
Ray
I think there is hope!
My brightest ever apprentice went off to coventry and studied chassis and suspension design.
Prior to ending up with Gordon Murray’s team he did several years at JLR in r+d , he said that many of the engineers in JLR were petrol heads at heart and many had ‘old’ weekend cars, the carpark often looked like a classic car meet.Through this I have met some really interesting younger people.
When the UK Fires report ‘Energy Sector Innovation within Absolute Zero’ was published in April 2022 the cost was ‘only’ £25,000 to retrofit and £47,000 for new.
https://ukfires.org>absolute-zero
As I commented on a previous thread:
I watched the programme waiting for Justin Rowprat to talk about child labour in the Congo, EV fires and explosions, increased pollution due to excess tyre wear, increased damage to road surfaces and dangers to multi-story car parks. But I waited in vain, knowing it was just propaganda.
Years ago I had my bike converted into an e-bike. “Do you want the battery mounted in front of you or behind?” enquired the firm.
“In front, please, so that I’ll know if it begins burning.”
*8
I couldn’t bring myself to watch it, with Rowlett anywhere near a progamme, it was always going to be the promotion of electric vehicles. I’m guessing no mention was made of the excessive environmental damage in the production of vehicles and that Volvo etc. freely admit the fact that depending upon energy mix of the nation, anybody buying one ‘to do their bit for the environment’, would have to use the vehicle for many thousands of miles before making any net contribution to CO2 emissions?
I did (just) manage to sit through it without chucking a heavy object at the telly. I noticed the boss of the EV conversions company made considerable efforts to point out how light his motors were, compared to a Land Rover diesel engine, but not a SINGLE word about the weight of batteries needed to run them!
He did talk about the weight of the batteries later on. You must have switched off by then.
Yes it was quite misleading to people who are not in the know like us. It was stated early on in the programme that electric motors are much lighter than petrol/diesel engines plus their fuel, whilst not mentioning the weight of the battery pack.
Later in the programme it was indeed stated that batteries are heavy, and that 25kg of battery had about the same energy as 1 litre of petrol. It was then said that work needs to be done to improve that. As it it was simply enough to say “make it so”.
And of course the weight of the battery never changes – fires excepted – whereas your fuel does and can be varied. Oh how often they talk at the start of a race of how a full tank of fuel affects the handling of a motorcycle and how some riders go much faster once the load lightens.
The one and only advantage of an electric motor is instant torque but that is far out-weighed by all the disadvantages.
Just(in) as a ship goes up in flames off the Netherlands, killing one crew member, due to an electric car battery failure.
Would you charge one on your property?
Personally i felt in showed plenty of trap doors in the current drive for EVs and maybe could have gone down a few of them but it hardly painted a glowing picture that the outcome is rosy. Mind you i see Sunak already rowed back on moving the 2030 deadline.
Just in time for the second fire on a car transporter caused by …. EV! LOL
notify comments
Reading and hearing about Rowlatt’s religious fervour for BEVs and Sunak’s (sorry, Schwab’s) desire to ban (BAN! FFS!) new ICEs, I had this incredible vision of Henry Ford, having shown how good his Model T was, petitioning the US government to have every new-born horse slaughtered.
It’s the same Rowrat that flew to Rhodes to tell us how bad the fires are. The man is deranged.
Ideal for BBC climate propaganda duties then. Their victims, sorry audience/viewers are expected to believe that climate salvation is just around the corner if they throw enough money in the direction of so-called *green* schemes.
The bad news is that it isn’t, there’s no such thing.
Rowlatt is the new ninny in the ‘Shill 1000m endurance relay’ race after ‘Captain Hapless’ Harrabin.
Stop all subsidies for EVs, charge the same amount of tax on them as similar sized ICE cars, add on a fair chunk of tax to pay for all the charging points and if people still want to waste their money to be able to boast about their “green” credentials I’m quite happy for them to do so.
I am not sure whether car ferries allow electric cars on board but if they do I don’t fancy a trip from Pembroke to Rosslaire with a fire halfway across.
There are over 2 million new cars registered every years in the UK. Where will they all be made or even come from?
China.
Cough
https://apnews.com/article/cargo-ship-fire-netherlands-environment-sea-27535db6880a42084458fee8b10c3592
“THE HAGUE, Netherlands (AP) — A fire on a freight ship carrying nearly 3,000 cars was burning out of control Wednesday in the North Sea, killing one crew member and injuring others, the Dutch coast guard said.
The agency said it was working to save the vessel from sinking close to an important habitat for migratory birds.”
It’s amazing that in the past we managed to buy stuff that’s better than the stuff it replaces without a two part Panorama documentary. However did we do it?
Because buying something better is a matter of common sense. However, buying something worse needs a propaganda exercise to convince us to see the ‘merits’ of the offer! And to make it worse, this exercise is funded by our own money without any say so from us.
Even more amazing that there are some today who want us to buy stuff that is less practical and simultaneously more expensive than what already exists.
Why don’t they fix those “new” products rather than inventing taxes, regulations and even bans for anything that resembles competition?
>>It’s amazing that in the past we managed to buy stuff that’s better than the stuff it replaces
A fair market will decide what people want and that is usually the best solution. Doesn’t always work as back in the days of video recorders of the 3 systems on sale – Betamax, VHS and Video2000 – we ended up with the worst one VHS. To be fair they were variants on a technology that we all embraced as opposed to a radically different one as with cars. Just as we all then embraced PVRs when they came along as much better than video tapes.
And for those folks with a garage attached to your house…. Be afraid.
Why? My garage only contains a 33 year old petrol engined Fiat*. Oh, and some lead-acid batteries to power my mains backup. And an old style electricity meter. I’m sure you get the picture!
* It needs to stay inside when not being driven, as the previous example didn’t take kindly to all the “Global Warming” it was subjected to during typical UK winters…
It’s high time the BBC relieved Mr Rowlett of his job as their global warming fanatic, and have someone on the BBC to do balanced reporting on the questionable global warming subject. Sadly, most of the BBC management must be as stupid as he is since many of them have forecast the ‘end-of-the-World in five years time’, for the past 40 years. Why, I wonder are they seemingly so scared to discuss the opposite viewpoint on their (our) programmes, and ban airtime from anyone, no matter how intelligent or logical they are, from appearing on any of their programmes if they give a hint that they don’t believe in the scam?
The BBC is a lost cause that is best wound up as no longer needed. Somebody did suggest keeping the news section and making everything else either subscription or advert funded, but the left wing news section is at the heart of the problem.
The government should cancel the 2030 ban on the production or sale of petrol and diesel vehicles immediately, and relieve everyone from being forced to buy the far more expensive electric vehicles. This will remove many problems for many people, and is likely to have some beneficial effect on the country’s lagging economy.
It’s not only cars. Governments need to get rid of their “ban it” mentality for everything that already exists and that the market chooses voluntarily.
Was there any mention of electrifying the giant Danish artic full of bacon that just rolled past my front door? Pointless if not
All these fields around us growing maize and broad beans to be processed into E10 petrol should be returned to proper food production especially as I suspect that the fumes from E10 are more harmful than proper petrol.
The good news would seem to be that the E10 petrol is not 10% ethanol according to a test on youtube. 5% seemed to be the maximum although non-believers at Esso had just 2%. Makes you wonder if there is not enough ethanol, or is it too expensive, or is just as Esso do, exploiting the rules that state ‘up to 10%’. The Esso premium petrol is 100% petrol and they state this on their website. I searched in vain on the Shell site for any mention of fuel content.
@ David – Tony Heller’s latest post:
https://realclimatescience.com/2023/07/blaming-the-problems-they-created/
“Colorado uses 365 million gallons of water per day to grow corn for biofuels mandated by policies to stop global warming. Then the shortage of water they created is blamed by the same people on global warming”
This is an excellent video. – note if the USA shut itself down the effect of Climate Change would be miniscule and it certainly trashes Joe’s misguided initiatives pushed by the Greens
John Cristy at Congress hearing
John Christy Climate Change Denial Testimony Highlights May 13 – YouTube
Did anyone see today’s BBC Early Morning programme piece about battery fires in e-bikes and e-scooters. Apparently these now happen every other day and there have been a number of deaths and a lot of injuries.
Suggestions were made about recharging locations and safety, but no comment was made about similar problems with EVs.
I wonder why not?
I would suggest that the standards of production of batteries for scooters and bicycles is much less stringent than for cars. Cars have to conform to strict type approval tests to be allowed on the market. I wonder what approvals the scooters and bicycles have to go through but you don’t have to be a genius to see how they would be so far lower than for a car. And of course I suspect that near 100% of these batteries are from China.
I see it’s not only EV that are Junk. Rail company DB Freight U.K. has ditched its 24 x Class 90 Electric Locomotives, because they are too expensive to operate and put them up for sale or scrapping. Instead they are doing back to the cheaper to operate old Class 66 Diesel Locomotives of which it still has over 150.
And, of course, the diesels can operate anywhere on the network, including sidings into industrial sites which most likely won’t be electrified.