Electric cars

Where do you want to go? China or India? I have always found India infinitely more fascinating — for a simple reason. If you ask Sinophiles about China, they always quote statistics; Indophiles tell you stories. It’s fine to know that China has built 24,000 miles of high-speed rail track, or that its GDP is growing at an annualised rate of 8.27 per cent, but it doesn’t make me want to visit. It’s like reading an article about the film industry in the Economist: informative, yes, but it doesn’t make you want to go to the cinema. The electric car market is trapped in a similar numerical morass. The more

As a wise colleague once said: ‘Yesterday is a great time to buy a computer, because you have already enjoyed it for a day. Alternatively, buy a computer tomorrow. The computer you buy tomorrow will be both faster and cheaper than the computers available now. On no account, however, should you ever buy a computer today.’ One factor delaying our adoption of electric cars is that experience has taught us it pays to wait when buying anything with a plug. There is a huge impetus to buy property because, over time, your options get fewer and dearer. But when contemplating the purchase of an electric car we assume every year

When I first heard Abba’s magnificent 1982 swansong ‘The Day Before You Came’, I’d never come across the Americanised use of the verb ‘make’, meaning ‘reach’. So the line ‘I must have made my desk around a quarter after nine’ baffled me. Given the Swedish obsession with self-assembly furniture, I even wondered whether Björn was using the word conventionally, and Ms Fältskog was in fact kneeling on the floor aligning Tab A with Groove C, while looking for the elusive Allen key with which to attach the castors. On the other hand, if you are British, the lyrics to the Beach Boys’ song ‘Little Deuce Coupe’ are like the poem

The Tesla Model 3 is an astounding achievement, but one thing baffles me: why do electric cars lack even the most basic tea-making equipment? I can’t be the only Briton to wonder why you would travel around on top of a 75kwh, 360v lithium-ion battery without having the facility to plug in a kettle. Or indeed power an off-the-grid shack for a few days. I have become oddly obsessed with questions like this because of the many lockdown hours I have spent watching bizarre YouTube videos. One remarkable series concerns the tiny house movement, where people seek to simplify and declutter their lives by moving into little wooden huts. I