Transcription
Electric cars, by the way. What? What do you get?
>> We have a Tesla.
>> Brilliant. The thing is, it's just a better car. Performance, quietness, comfort, drivability. You've managed to achieve in a reasonably affordable car that synthesis of performance and comfort, which previously you could get in a petrol car, but you had to buy a Bentley or an Aston Martin or something. You had to spend big money to get a comfortable, quiet vehicle.
Let's imagine this in reverse, right? Where all cars are electric and we're all nipping around in little electric cars and recharging. And this rogue Volkswagen engineer comes up with, "I've got a better idea." Okay, it's massively complicated. You put a huge tank of an inflammable liquid in your car, right? And then it feeds into these cylinders where we engineer an explosion. Unfortunately, it only produces torque in a limited range of of of the revolutionary cycles. So, we'll need a thing called a gearbox, which we'll need oil for, and then we'll need an air filter, and then we'll need a water filter.
Does it perform better in an electric car? No. Not really. Okay. Is it quieter? No. No. Quite the opposite. It's [ __ ] noisy as hell. Is it cleaner? No. No. It's farting stuff out of the background. Okay. Is it simpler to make? No. No. No. There are 250 moving parts in the drivetrain. I know the electric cars only have seven, but this needs 250. So, um, what's the upside? Well, you can refill it really quickly. Can you refill it at home? No. Obviously, you can't refill it at home. No. No. You'll have to go to a special place, which, by the way, won't just be a little thing on the side of the road with a rapid charger. It'll be a massive thing selling Ginsters and Mark suspenders.
Basically, that guy's career is over, right? But then you realize that car people, now I love Top Gear, but the one thing that really drove me crazy is when they test electric cars and they drive them till they ran out of power. And you're kind of going, you could have done that with any of the petrol cars you had for the last [ __ ] 25 years, right? You, oh, this new Aston Martin DB9 Volante, it's not very good because we kept on driving it. We refused to stop at a petrol station and now look, we're stuck by the side of the road.
Well, we've all had actually range anxiety in a petrol car once or twice, haven't we? Okay, it's not unknown. We've run two electric cars for three and a half years. I've had range anxiety of any significant extent once. And I suddenly realized, well, actually with petrol, that happened once every 3 years. And you can charge it at home, right? That's the other point. If you wouldn't need that many petrol stations, if everybody had a little hose pipe at home that produced like three pints of really cheap petrol every hour, not that many people would be charging up a petrol station.