The problem with trying to sort out the environment is that politicians want flattering headlines now, not praise in the history books. So, they never really think about the long term, only what can be achieved immediately.
That’s why we are on a headlong rush to rid ourselves of cars with internal combustion engines. Politicians, who have been mesmerised by Musk, know that right now there is an electric alternative that sort of works, and they know that they can be just about charged up using renewable energy.
So that’s two boxes ticked, and now, in a bid for more back-slapping from the green army, they want to move on to the next phase — forcing us to live in houses with central heating systems that run on soil.
It all sounds very lovely and to the casual observer it is. But there are so many problems. Those graceful wind turbines, for instance, can need diesel generators to keep the power flowing. And ground source heating doesn’t work very well in the short term, and not at all after a few years.
And then there’s the business with electric cars. I had an electric sports car on test recently and God strewth it was wonderful — lovely to look at, lovely to drive and fast beyond belief. On a mate’s drive I hit 135mph. That’s 35mph more than I once managed in a big old Newport Pagnell Vantage.
But there’s no getting round the fact that child slave labour is used to source some of the ingredients in electric car batteries. And think about what you do when the battery in your iPhone starts to weaken. You throw it away and buy another. Well, soon you’ll have to do that with a AUD$170,000 car.
It’s not just me who has concerns. Carlos Tavares, the CEO of Peugeot, Citroën, Opel and Vauxhall, wonders “who is taking the 360-degree view”.
He explains that European governments currently get €448 billion a year from tax on petrol and diesel cars and asks what will replace it when we all go electric. He also says that even in the future electric cars will be expensive — in the same way that bio food is more expensive than conventional food — which means people on low incomes simply won’t be able to afford personal mobility.
And that’s just the start of it. Because he reckons the seismic shift in the way we move about will cause runaway inflation, and that no European country is remotely able to provide a satisfactory charging infrastructure. As a result of all this we will no longer be able to drop everything and take a spontaneous run out to the seaside on a sunny Sunday.
Most important of all, though, he says that if we charge headlong into a new electric future, we will be screwed if, in 10 or 20 years, a better alternative comes along.
Which brings me neatly to the door of the car you see in the pictures this morning. It’s the hydrogen fuel cell Toyota Mirai. It looks like a car, but it’s actually a power station in a car-shaped wrapper.
You fill the tank with hydrogen in the same way you fill up now with petrol and then off you go, in silence, with nothing but pure water coming out of the tail pipe. Looking further ahead, you could one day use your car to power your house. Even if you live in Blenheim Palace, you’d just plug it in and it will provide all the energy you need, while continuing to issue nothing but a trickle of water from its exhaust.
The science sounds simple. Hydrogen is the most abundant element in the universe. But it doesn’t like to be alone. It likes to bond with something else, oxygen mostly.
So, here’s what you do. You pass the hydrogen down a tube and on the other side of a membrane there’s air. The hydrogen can sense the oxygen. It can smell it. And it becomes as desperate as a teenage boy after 18 months of lockdown. It wants to bond. It wants to mate. And in its desperation, it creates electricity. And then, when that has happened, and the car is moving along, the hydrogen and the oxygen are allowed to merge to become … drum roll … H2O.
Brilliant. And elegant. And wonderful. But sadly, there are only a handful of hydrogen filling stations in Britain, and usually most of them are closed for one reason or another. So, you can’t actually go anywhere in a Mirai, even if you were daft enough to spend AUD$107,000 buying it in the first place.
You may imagine that if it were to catch on the cost would come down, but how will that happen? And how will we get more hydrogen filling stations if everyone is charging down the rechargeable electric route? It’s like we are all buying laser discs because we don’t know the internet is coming. And who’s guiding us? Yup, the government, the same organisation that told us, not that long ago, to buy diesel.
For years I’ve been tearing my hair out over this, utterly convinced that fuel cell technology was so obviously the way to go, and I was delighted that Toyota was swimming against the tide with the Mirai. But then I went to see some engineers at JCB and I’m not so sure anymore.
They explained that the Toyota Mirai needs a rechargeable battery to act as a kind of turbocharger, filling the holes where the fuel cell is not working at its peak. So, it’s not quite as elegant as I’d imagined, and I found that a bit sad.
There were a host of other issues too, mainly to do with the pressure needed to fill the tank, and how no one was working on solving this. And then they explained that they’d made a normal internal combustion engine run on hydrogen.
I went to a quarry where they test their new developments. There were little electrical diggers that could be used indoors as they are silent and produce no emissions. And there was a giant 20-tonne excavator that was running on a fuel cell. And then there, in the middle of it all, was a backhoe with the engine they’d been talking about.
I tried it and it felt normal. It sounded normal. It runs lean, really lean. Even leaner than Mrs Thatcher wanted engines to run before quick-fix catalytic converters came along — another disaster for the environment, by the way. But despite the apparent normality, the only stuff coming out of the exhaust pipe was steam. This is very intriguing.
The internal combustion engine has been around for more than a hundred years. We are all familiar with it and we are now very good at making it reliable and cheap. The cost to Ford of the 1.4-litre engine in your Fiesta is about AUD$1075. So, I now find myself consumed with the idea of using the familiar technology but tweaking it to run on hydrogen instead of petrol, so that the only waste product is water.
Yes, hydrogen is difficult and expensive to make — it really doesn’t like being separated from oxygen and clings on for dear life when you try to pull them apart. But it is possible and using solar or geothermal power to do this has zero impact on the climate.
And it seems that I’m not the only one who’s intrigued. Because earlier this year Akio Toyoda, the chief executive of Toyota, took part in a 24-hour race in a Corolla that was powered by a hydrogen-fuelled internal combustion engine. This is a company spending billions on fuel cell development, but its CEO is plainly saying, “Er, hang on a minute chaps.”
And that’s what we all need to do really. There are hundreds of thousands of engineers working in the car industry and they are simply not being consulted on what route we should take. Instead, governments are reacting to the noises made by a bad mannered Swedish schoolgirl.
We must do something. Everyone agrees on that. But before we commit to rechargeable electric cars, which is extremely risky, we must pause and seek advice from those who know what they’re on about. And we should start with Tavares, as it seems to me that this is a man who proves that heaven really is missing an angel.
The Clarksometer
Toyota Mirai Design Premium Pack
Powertrain: Polymer electrolyte fuel cell
Power: 180bhp
Torque: 221 Ib ft
Acceleration: 0-62mph (100kph): 9sec
Top speed: 108mph / 174kph
Range / CO2: 400 miles / 0g/km
Weight: 1,950kg
Price: AUD$110,000
Release date: On sale now
Jeremy’s rating: ★★★☆☆
