Retirement Today: Crystal Ball
Looking out of our hotel room window in a small town in Portugal I noticed an oversized parking meter with a car connected by cable. It wasn’t a parking meter it was an electric car recharging point. It made me reflect on the number of electric cars we see in Europe and on the dominance of the internal combustion engine for all of my lifetime. My generation has seen enormous change in so many aspects of our lives. Our grandchildren roll about laughing when I tell them about gathering around the wireless set to listen to children’s radio or putting coins in a telephone box to make a call. It was a different world, but the one thing which has remained constant is the internal combustion engine. It began life around 1890 and our current car engines still work on the same principles today. The pistons pop up and down and the valves flick open and closed in a complex coordinated dance as the fuel gets sucked in. It’s a lot of bits and pieces to go wrong but thanks largely to the Japanese production methods we now seem to have achieved remarkable reliability. Surprisingly electric cars existed before the internal combustion engine with the first one going into production in London in 1884. In 1919 Harrods ran their customer delivery service using 1 ton electric vans from America, (no respectable Harrods customer would be seen actually carrying a parcel home in the 1930s!). The vans had a range of 50 miles and a top speed on 18 miles an hour. Things have changed and Harrods has recently bought Nissan e-NV200 vans with a range on one charge of 100 miles and a carrying capacity of three quarters of a metric ton. The early vehicles had one big problem, batteries, and that problem hasn’t gone away. Battery technology has improved immensely but it’s still holding back the sales of electric cars. The power is there, there’s no problem pulling a boat or carrying a tradesman’s tools. Electric buses are running in many European cities and are being trialled in Australia. Garbage trucks are ideally suited to electric power and are also being trialled in Australia. Even aircraft are being powered by electric motors and batteries. The problem with batteries is not power it’s cost. Petrol tanks are cheap by comparison. Electric cars are expensive, and you would have to travel a very long way to recover the capital expense from lower running costs. I’m sure that will change. There has been a big change in batteries in the last ten years and I’m sure there will be big changes in the next ten. Electrical Engineering departments in Universities around the world are working on new battery technology and one of them will succeed in increasing the storage capacity or decreasing the cost or both. Harley Davidson owners will still want to enjoy the thump, thump of their long stroke engines and car enthusiasts will still want to take their engines apart and rebuild them to perfection. For the rest of us the writing is on the wall but electric car dominance will still be a long time coming. Even the Tuk-Tuk has had a makeover.![](https://marcustoday.com.au/member/webpages/images/report/20190524/image(14).png)
Harold