Irish to be laboratory bunnies for electric cars

Forget about the Germans, who claim to have invented the car. The Americans too, who say something similar. Disregard the French, the British and the Italians, all with their impeccable motoring heritage. Then there’s the Japanese, with their cutting-edge automotive technology. They are all in the ha’penny place in comparison to Ireland.

You see, Irish governments have always been highly innovative when it comes to the subject of motoring. Or, more accurately, they have always been highly innovative when it comes to devising ways of taxing Irish motorists, who pay far more to buy, run, tax and insure their cars than most other Europeans. But that’s where the Irish expertise on motoring ends.

Funny then, that energy minister Eamon Ryan thinks that we - ahead of the automotive manufacturing nations that actually make the vehicles - are somehow qualified to blaze a trail in electric car technology. You see, it looks like we are all to be volunteered as laboratory bunnies, with Ireland becoming a “testing ground” for the electric car (along with that other famous motoring nation, Portugal). “Bunnies” is the operative term, of course, given that we are talking about motor cars propelled by Duracells.

Of course the airy notion is that all our electric cars – and Ryan envisages 10% of them will occupy road space by 2020 - will eventually run on wind energy. In the meantime, however, they will work on electricity generated from fossil fuels – or imported from nuclear power stations in Britain. So they are as green as a peat bog.

The fact is, we are very lucky that electric cars are so crap, because if everyone went out and bought one, then plugged it into the mains, the national grid and the ESB would go up in a big puff of acrid, electric smoke quicker than you could say “AAA”. But that does not stop our tin-pot politicians from letting on that we are world leaders in a technology that’s about as high-tech as the old Scalextrix set I had as a kid.

Some manufacturers have been working on electric cars for years, but even so, most of them only have a claimed range of about 160 kilometres. Most have to be left plugged in overnight to achieve full charge from the mains – and try doing that if you live in an apartment in town – and most will take about half-an-hour to achieve 80% charge from the so-called “fast” chargers being rolled out… and that’s assuming any of the chargers are unoccupied and available. The truth is, if you tried to go any distance in an electric car, your nerves would be in absolute tatters by the time you arrived at your destination…. assuming you did.

Today’s Sunday Times claims that Richard Tol, research professor at the ERSI, believes that Ryan is “taking too much of a risk by investing so early in an “infant” technology”, pointing out that “other alternative fuel options, such as hydrogen, are also in development and that it could be 15 years before the winner emerges”.

I’ll hold off until then thanks, and not even a Tesla Roadster with a 0-60 time of 3.7 seconds would tempt me into its sterile embrace. What’s the point of that if you are going to conk out and be stranded a few miles down the road? In the meantime, I think leccy cars are best left to those who want to feel smug, and have something to talk about at cocktail parties.

And Eamon Ryan, of course.

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