The UK government says it will give you £5000 to buy an electric or plug-in hybrid car, as part of its "green transport initiative". It's probably a meaningless promise -- there won't be any cars available that meet the technical specs until 2011, and who seriously expects the current lot to be in power by then?
But let's ignore for a second the rapidly dwindling life expectancy of the Brown government and treat the idea on its own merits. Two thoughts come quickly to mind:
(1) aren't we going to run out of electricity some time in the middle of the next decade, thanks to the government's endless procrastination about planning for a new generation of power stations? A £5000 grant to buy a car that you can't use? Hmmm. Of course, the electricity supply gap may be filled by building more gas-powered stations. I can't claim to be up on the physics, but I'm pretty sure it would be more efficient, and thus in an important sense greener, to burn the gas in the cars themselves, rather than losing so much of the calorific content in generation and transmission.
(2) hasn't this selfsame government just committed to buying a whole batch of new diesel trains, which will last 30 or 40 years, rather than electrifying more of the rail network? Private Eye contends that the Treasury opposes rail electrification because it makes so much money from the fuel duty on diesel. Maybe nobody's got around to telling the Treasury that owners of electric cars won't be paying much fuel duty either.
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