Bob Dylan went electric at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival. He played Maggie’s Farm on a Fender Stratocaster. To digress, he left it on a ‘plane after the festival and it wasn’t found until 2012.
Guitars are suited to electrification; are cars? It depends. If a small urban runaround is your desire, maybe. Expensive: a basic Renault Zoe costs almost £30,000. Overnight on street charging is convenient. The range is fine for urban driving: max 60 miles if it’s chilly, 90 miles when the weather is warmer. If it’s really hot I suppose the AC depletes the battery and the range. But if you fancy a motorway trip anywhere further than Heston service station and drive at 70 mph the battery will be dead before you can say Swindon.
Hmmm, maybe a bigger model is worth it? A Jaguar I-Pace costs about £65,000 and looks just the ticket. To digress, it has plenty of room for luggage in the boot and under the bonnet, as the batteries are somewhere else. (Translation into American: in the trunk and under the hood.) Just the thing for weekends in the country and even a foray to France, Macron permitting. I’m glad I haven’t popped into a Jag garage. Simon Aspinall owns one and has a letter in FTWeekend. He explains: “so, in reality, the car is effective for trips of no more than 60 miles from home (assuming a return), without needing a significant time for recharging on route”. He points out “a typical UK motorway ‘fast’ charger of 120 kw capacity takes 1.5 hours” if you are lucky to find one not in use. On the other hand Tesla have chargers exclusive to Tesla owners and an app showing if they are busy. An entry level Tesla costs about £40,000.
It’s unfortunate that Teslas look like Ford Mondeos and are not suited to beagles. But electric car technology improves all the time and Tesla have a low cost (circa £25,000) hatchback in the pipeline. That may be the one for us in 2024.
Beware Teslas are surprisingly unreliable and only a Tesla dealer can sort the problems – in their own time!