Over a decade ago, fans of BBC’s Top Gear will remember when it was Rowan Atkinson’s turn to have a go at the Star in a Reasonably Priced Car segment.
This is back when Jeremy Clarkson’s running gag centred around the BBC’s shoestring budget, meaning they had to torture their guests with various crap cars and see which of them could get around the (airport) track fastest without any tyres falling off. In Atkinson’s case, the car in question was a Kia Cee’d.
Better known as Blackadder or Mr Bean, in real life Atkinson is a proper car nut and a recreational race driver. At Top Gear, he snagged the fastest time without harming the poor cheap car (a time that would later be usurped by 0.00.1 second). Having been crowned top of the leaderboard, Atkinson gave a little bow as the crowd cheered. He was particularly pleased to learn that had beaten adrenaline junkie Tom Cruise.
Atkinson was also the star of the Johnny English franchise – a parody of James Bond – which featured plenty of car stunts, many of which Atkinson did himself terrifying his co-star and fellow comedian Ben Miller in the process.
Last year, he shared his selection of supercars, including a McLaren F1 which cost him $830,000 (US) to buy new and another $2,000,000 to fix after he ran it off the road. It was sold for $12,200,000. The rest of his collection features a Mercedes-Benz SLS AMG, a 1951 Aston Martin DB2, Aston Martin V8 Vantage Zagato, and an Acura NSX.
Mr Bean knows his cars.
‘Electric vehicles may be a bit soulless, but they’re wonderful mechanisms: fast, quiet and, until recently, very cheap to run…’ wrote Atkinson, in a recent article for the Guardian. He then confessed to feeling a little bit ‘duped’.
‘When you start to drill into the facts, electric motoring doesn’t seem to be quite the environmental panacea it is claimed to be…’
He added, ‘I bought my first electric hybrid 18 years ago, and my first pure electric car 9 years ago.’ That makes him one of the brave few with enough money to wade into the dawn of EVs when the charging network was patchy and range anxiety similar to a 90s-era mobile phone.
As a former student of electric and electronic engineering, he held out some hope that electric car batteries might one day save the planet, though he was not as sweet on the idea as the zealous climate mob that throw condiments at oil paintings.
Atkinson was prompted to write an article titled, I love electric vehicles – and was an early adopter. But increasingly I feel duped by the ban on selling new petrol and diesel cars from 2030.
This proposition is a nonsense given the acute shortages of raw materials, but the intent is there to force every single citizen into the seat of an EV, whether they want one or not. This is not capitalism, this is collusion between the state, manufacturers, and the mining companies sitting behind the EV ‘dream’.
Atkinson says the quiet part out loud:
‘Electric cars, of course, have zero exhaust emissions … but if you zoom out a bit and look at a bigger picture that includes the car’s manufacture, the situation is very different.’
He then quotes a Cop26 climate conference in which Volvo admitted its EVs produce 70 per cent more emissions during production than an ordinary car due to the lithium-ion batteries (which makes you wonder about those sprawling battery farms).
‘They’re absurdly heavy, many rare earth metals and huge amounts of energy are required to make them, and they only last about 10 years. It seems a perverse choice of hardware with which to lead the automobile’s fight against the climate crisis.’
Thank you, Mr Atkinson. That’s exactly what we’ve been saying since the start. It’s all well and good to want to ‘save the planet’ but you cannot make EVs ‘green’ through wishful thinking.
The bulk of his article contains a plea to stop using cars as a type of ‘fast fashion’ and instead make better use of the 1.5 billion cars already in operation. Atkinson’s fondness for Hydrogen will end up where everybody else’s does – in the hoverboard pile – but he makes a good point about synthetic fuels.
He doesn’t touch on the real problem, and that is the power grid’s complete inability to handle a nation full of electric cars. We’ll probably be issued with a ‘licence to charge’ and slotting into strict time slots like some kind of dystopian nightmare.
While trawling through the comments on the Guardian (some of which dismissed the article as ‘dangerous rubbish’ and another that came to the conclusion ‘the future will be horses’) I couldn’t help but notice one complaining: ‘Green spaces are public and no one expects to have their own garden.’ 15 minute cities aren’t just a ‘conspiracy theory’, they’re a genuine desire for some. Forget Atkinson feeling that EVs are soulless, the commentary from the Left about wanting to live in tiny flats with no space, no cars, and bland lives has made me wonder if this is why they fantasise about the concrete prison-style vista of communism.
That is an aside…
Electric Vehicles are a dream – a love affair for many. Myself, I remember queuing at Macquarie Shopping Centre to have a turn sitting in the ‘froot’ of a Tesla. They were fast, fun, and weird. A taste of science fiction.
They are a lot less fun now that they have become a tool of government edict and a command by an increasingly coercive and incompetent state.
Rowan Atkinson summed the reality up best when he was running laps in the reasonably priced car.
‘I know what you’re supposed to do. The problem is … doing it. That’s the challenge.’
Flat White is written and edited by Alexandra Marshall
