Leaves

I heard today about Nissan's recent foray into the world of electric cars. This is the Nissan "Leaf", an all-electric car.


I have trouble thinking of a more wishy-washy eco-hippy sounding name than "Leaf". It's not even a good acronym; apparently LEAF stands for Leading Environmentally friendly Affordable Family car. Presumably the original plan was to call it the LEFAFC, and sell it in Poland.

I do not understand the point of this car, and I am speaking as a person who accepts the fact of man-made climate change.

The first thing is the range. I'm sure that, given it is electric, it will have good acceleration and regenerative braking, but the fact of the matter is that the quoted range provided by its lithium ion batteries is 160km - about 100 miles. This means that, if I wanted to get in one and drive to my parents house in Nottingham say I would not be able to make even that comparatively short trip of about 120 miles in one leg. I would have to find somewhere where I could plug in a cable to a 240-volt socket and wait 4 hours for the battery to charge, possibly a petrol station or convenience shop where the staff are either too bored or moronic to wonder why the lights in one of their display fridges have gone out.

I'm rather reminded of the rather optimistic claims that the manufacturers of my various mobile phones over the years have made regarding battery life. I have often wondered under what conditions they ever managed to get a phone to achieve those numbers, because I have never ever seen any phone match them, even when brand new. This is another concern; the batteries may achieve 100 miles when new, but what about after a couple of years?

I find myself thinking of the kind of back-up battery packs that one can buy for iPhones and wondering whether it'll be possible to buy a trailer with extra power packs. Perhaps you could get one with a diesel generator on it. Then you could boost your environmentally friendly car all the way to Scotland if you wanted!

This brings me to the whole "environmentally friendly" business. Let's be honest here, the best way to build an environmentally friendly car is not to get national grid electricity, in the UK over 60% of which is from burning fossil fuels, accept transmission losses between power station and the point of use, and then go through the terribly inefficient process of charging and then discharging the energy from a rechargeable battery. This is before considering all of the so-called "embedded carbon" in producing the batteries in the first place. You are not going to save the polar bears by buying a Leaf, far from it.

So what's this car for? Who is going to buy it? What are they going to use it for? The 100-mile range is suggested to be at city speeds, not motorway speeds, and so the implication is that this is supposed to be a "city car". So someone living in a city whose misguided sense of concern for the environment causes them to buy an "affordable" £20,000 electric city car is the prime candidate.

I have never understood the logic behind "city cars". Anyone who has heard me rant on the subject of cars might want to jump to the conclusion that I am one of those car-hating eco-mentalists. I do dislike cars to some extent, or rather what they do to the minds of the people behind the wheel, but my assertion has always been that cars have their place and that place is most definitely not the city. There is simply not the space to accommodate each individual person in their own car in cities, and when everybody tries to achieve this goal by driving into town en masse the roads get gridlocked, there's nowhere to park, pedestrians get knocked over, and the street environment is incredibly unpleasant.

This is the situation where it's best to just hop on public transport where there is no need for the stressful drive down congested roads nor the cost and inconvenience associated with finding and paying for a parking space. If you're the type of person who's set on going electric in the city in the name of the environment why not lobby for a metro, trams or trolley-buses where the power flows straight from the grid to the traction motors; it's much more efficient without this battery nonsense.

In any case, the fastest way to get around in cities is nearly always by bicycle. If you're going less than 5 miles there's no better way to beat the traffic and save the polar bears in the process if that's something you really care about. You can even smile and wave at all the motorists as they sit waiting in queues, steam coming out of their ears.

Both of these options are far more eco-friendly than a large battery-powered 5-door car weighing in at about 1.5 tonnes.

So it's not particularly good for the environment, it's not affordable (£20k?!), and it's no good for long journeys. What we have here is a car that is good for taking the whole family and sitting in urban traffic jams.

I rarely agree with Jeremy Clarkson on anything environmental but one thing he has said that I do agree with is this. If you want to cut your CO2 emissions, don't buy a new car, simply learn to drive the one you already have more efficiently. I would add my own comment that many journeys are actually much easier to make without using a car than the sort of person who drives everywhere by default would actually care to realise.

To be honest I think that this car fits into the same category as the Toyota Prius, which is that it's undoubtably excellent and cutting edge technology, but saying that it good for the environment is a bit of a gimmick to sell it to people who are far more environmentally conscientious than they are intelligent. Anyone who really wants to cut down their "carbon footprint" can make the biggest difference by living near where they work and dropping their mileage enormously in the process. This also has the effect over the course of a year of saving hundreds of hours of personal time and thousands of pounds, especially if one is within walking or cycling distance.

So here's to all you future leaf owners, what's important is that I know you mean well!

I'll start work on that battery-boost trailer, I'm sure there's a commercial opportunity there...

Birdstrike!

Well now we've finished moving house I am quite happily back to a routine of cycling to and from work. To be honest it's a brilliant way to wake up in the morning, and of course it helps keep the weight off and makes me feel less guilty about the bacon and stilton panini for lunch at work.

The trouble is that I'm doing overtime at the moment, which means I am leaving work after dark and negotiating farm tracks. To be honest this is not nearly as bad as it sounds because the front light I currently have installed on Gertie blasts out an almost infeasible amount of light for a small box with 5 LEDs on the front. I can easily see well enough to follow the path and to brake or avoid obstacles.

We are, however, getting to the stage where the warmer weather brings out the dog emptiers and the autographs some of them leave behind on the path. Of course, the further one gets from Didcot the fewer of these there are, and so I have been able to find routes that avoid the worst bits of footpath in favour of using the road. One simply has to take care, keep ones eyes open, and assume that any dark shape that is a person will probably have one or more other untethered dark shapes with them, ready to jump out directly into the path of anyone else coming down the path.

To be fair, some of the dog walkers I have seen in the last couple of weeks have gone out of their way to make sure their dogs are well out of my way and indeed have them impressively well trained, so I really can't complain too much. Most of them are cheerful, friendly, and happy to exchange a "good morning" as I roll past. Usually I can let my speed drop out of courtesy until I'm past, as opposed to having to slam on the brakes because darling Lindy the long wheelbase rat who can do no wrong has, out of stupidity, decided to lie down directly in front of my wheel.

Anyway, I digress, because what is more worthy of note was my ride home last night, which featured a very unusual lineup of animals. I saw three or four rabbits, two cats, both of which are species that have the good sense to get out of the way if there's something coming. I also nearly ran over a pheasant, and I've never seen one of those by night before. I certainly heard it for a good 200m before it leapt out in front of me; they have a very distinctive call.

The biggest first of that whole trip however was what happened just as I was leaving Chilton. There I was innocently cycling along when something struck my head, mostly on my helmet but also the area around my right eye. I never saw it coming, because there was no way that the light on my handlebars could have illuminated it, so there was no warning.

The impact didn't really hurt, but the dull "thunk!" came as a bit of a shock. At first I thought some kids had hit me with a ball of mud or manure, but when whatever it was appeared to bounce off I had to reconsider. After while I concluded that it must have been a bird. It had been soft, warm, and I wasn't scraping mud or manure off my face.

If it had been a shock to me, one can only imagine what the bird thought of the experience!

I guess it could have been a bat, but I was under the impression that bats were quite adept at avoiding collisions even in complete darkness. There was no quiet squeaky pronouncement of "Whoop whoop! Traffic! Pull up!".

So there we have it kids, another reason to wear a cycling helmet - birds.

High speed rail myths

Yesterday the government released its plans for High Speed 2, the next high speed rail line to be built in the UK, following on from High Speed 1, the new line from London to the Channel Tunnel.

Reading the reception in the press there are certain common themes that come up in comments to it, many of which lead one to doubt the intelligence of the reporter writing it, or at least whether they have actually bothered to research the topic they are writing about at all.

Here are a few pearls of reporterly wisdom that I have found particularly irritating, and my answers to them.

1. "Spending £X billion to save 30 minutes isn't a good use of money."
The main driver behind high speed rail in the UK is transport network capacity. We have a choice between building or expanding motorways, expanding airports, or building railways. Yes HSR trains are fast, but they are preferable to conventional speed rail because there is a much better business case for faster trains. They are more likely to attract travelers from other modes of transport.

2. "HS2 only goes to Birmingham."
Yes, in phase 1 HS2 only goes to Birmingham. Guess what, phase 1 of the M1 motorway only went from Watford to Rugby. There are two points here: Firstly the trains on HS2 will be able to run on to serve other destinations beyond the end of high speed line such as Manchester, Liverpool and Scotland. Secondly it's important to see HS2 as the first stage of a broader UK-wide network.

3. "Nobody will be able to afford a ticket."
I've no idea where this particular pocket of nonesense comes from. Perhaps this is because of the current high cost of tickets on routes like the West Coast Main Line where capacity problems lead to operators trying to manage excessive demand by increasing the cost of flexible tickets. Each train on HS2 will have up to over 1,000 seats and the line will have capacity for 18 trains an hour; that's a lot of seats! Tickets will be priced such that people use the service and fill those seats, otherwise the business plan wouldn't be viable in the first place.

4. "HS2 does nothing for communities between Birmingham and London."
No, it does a lot for communities between. Principally it releases an enormous amount of capacity on the overstretched existing rail network such as the West Coast Main Line, which can be used for freight - fewer lorries on the roads - and also for more local rail services.

5. "£30 Billion is too expensive."
£30 Billion is a lot of money, but the greater cost comes from not acting on the nation's increasing transport problems. As already states we have a choice between roads, air and rail. High speed rail is the best choice from both economic and environmental perspectives.

6. "Can't that money be spent on improving the trains we already have?"
£13 Billion has been spent in the West Coast Main Line upgrade program, and it will be at full capacity again by 2017. Incremental upgrades to existing rail lines are expensive, disruptive, and do not produce anywhere near the same levels of new capacity for the same amount of money as a new build line.

7. "We can't afford this in a recession."
Recessions come and go. We're in recession now, but most likely won't be when construction work actually starts in a few years time.

8. Why will it take 16 years to open just 130 miles of railway track? Surely it would take only a fraction of that time if this line was being built in France, Span, Germany, Italy, Japan, Korea, Taiwan, China, etc?
Oh, hang on, this is a question I too would like an answer to...