Blog News

1. Comments are still disabled though I am thinking of enabling them again.

2. There are now several extra pages - Poetry Index, Travel, Education, Childish Things - accessible at the top of the page. They index entires before October 2013.

3. I will, in the next few weeks, be adding new pages with other indexes.

Friday 14 January 2011

How long did you say?

Interesting how different people can look at the same thing and have a totally different idea about what it means. As a bit of a stunt the BBC have had someone drive an electric car from London to Edinburgh using only official recharging points. I suppose the purpose was just to see if it could be done. And, apparently, it can be done. The journalist's response was to suggest that this proves that electric cars are becoming a viable alternative to petrol. The problem with that analysis is that a journey that, in a petrol car, would take around eight hours, took four days and that each refuelling stop took ten hours instead of five minutes. Factoring in the recharging times the average speed for the journey was a massive six miles per hour. What this tells me is that at no time soon will electric cars become a viable alternative to petrol as anything other than a purely local runaround.
I know the technology is improving all the time but until the charge time for an electric car is measured in minutes (and preferably single digits of minutes) rather than hours it will never be a sensible option for long distance travel no matter how many charging stations are available.

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