Is it All Worth It

A Crisis of Confidence in a Medieval Italian Town

I’m not good at strategic thinking, bumbling along in a fog is a better description. But is it just me or have some of the things we report on in our Everything Electric shows become, well, a bit normal.

I’m talking about the rapid proliferation of electric cars in the UK and mainland Europe. From what I can gather this is also happening in India, Malaysia, China Australasia and now even Africa.

Yes okay, the USA is on a short hiatus from the modern world but I predict a massive spurt of growth there when Mango Mussolini has finally been put out to grass, poor sleepy old sausage.

I’m talking at the jaw dropping speed of the adoption of solar panels, wind turbines, massive grid batteries all over the world.

Okay, not in the USA so much, although they are quietly getting on with it as the ancient emperor snoozes in his office.

It really feels like the awareness, acceptance, knowledge and uptake of electric vehicles has changed, and surely that’s a good thing.

There was a time, not so long ago, when doing a journey like the one we’ve recently undertaken would have been a big adventure, a genuine challenge. Something very few people had done and many would have been sceptical was even possible.

My wife and I have just driven 2,339 miles across Europe and back, in a Polestar 3, very kindly loaned to us by Polestar UK.

A screenshot from the very useful and usable Polestar app.

I have been pottering around in electric cars for so long the entire experience of completing a long journey is just normal. So, am I wasting my time trying to argue the point that we should consider this relatively new alternative to burning fossil fuel?

Here’s some stats that might suggest I am: It took 15 years (from 2009 to 2024) for the UK to go from a mere handful to one million electric cars on the road.

It took just under two more years to go from one million to two million. Already in 2026 a quarter of a million more 100% electric cars are on the road, and remember, these are new cars and this is at a time of another ‘cost of living crisis.’

A small aside. I can never remember a time when there hasn’t been a cost of living crisis of some kind. It’s what the rich and powerful tell us to keep us worried and acquiescent. This is not to say the economy is fine, it never has been, it crumbles along and most people suffer, always have, and without a fundamental and probably extremely violent revolution, they always will.

Back to electric cars, it’s now possible to sit in a traffic jam in big cities in the UK and to be surrounded exclusively by electric cars. It happened to me the other day in west London, every car I could see waiting at the traffic lights was electric, including the Waymo Jaguar iPace that’s currently learning the ways of London roads.

This tells us two things, there are a lot of electric cars in London, the air is cleaner and life is massively improved for all residents. Also worth mentioning that electric cars do not solve all problems. I was sitting in a traffic jam in a car, I was part of the problem. A tram can replace 120 cars with one occupant in each and is a massively more efficient way of moving people about.

And yes, I am fully aware that you could also sit in a traffic jam in Loughborough, Taunton, Northampton, Halifax, Newcastle or East London and not see one electric car. But that is getting to be a rarer event anywhere in the country, indeed anywhere in Europe.

So is the motive force behind the Everything Electric series we have been making for 16 years now pointless? Are electric cars finally just cars, with many of the problems that all cars bring to our lives as well as the multiple advantages? Would a more relevant YouTube series be about how cities are starting the fight back against total car domination?

That movement is certainly gaining ground around the world. Places like Paris, Amsterdam, London, Berlin, Munich, Barcelona, Milan, Rome, Florence and Oslo have all brought in more and more restrictions on using cars in cities.

Is the now famous quote from Fernández Lores, the mayor of Pontevedra in Spain a signal for our changing attitudes?

In 2022 he stated:

“It’s not my duty as mayor to make sure you have a parking spot. For me, it’s the same as if you bought a cow, or a refrigerator, and then asked me where you’re going to put them.”

He’s got a point. Someone buys a car from a big car company, that big companies responsibility ends at the point of sale. It then becomes a collective responsibility to facilitate the use of that car, as in people who don’t own cars have to pay towards facilitating that purchase. If one penny of general taxation goes on roads, traffic calming systems, any form of parking facility, safe crossings, anything to do with roads and the massive, brutal fuel subsidies all governments shower the fossil fuel industry with, we are all paying for it.

And of course, especially if it’s a fuel burner, we all suffer the consequences of that individuals decision. We all have to breath the toxic gas that vehicle generates when it is in use, and find our way around the damn thing when it’s parked.

I’m maybe more aware of some of the absurdities and negatives of car use because I am writing this while staying in the medieval town of Lucca, Italy. It’s a tightly packed cluster of incredible old buildings contained within a giant wall. Narrow streets, small piazzas and shaded alleys, a city where 90% of human movement is done on foot or bicycle

An average street in Lucca

.In Lucca, cars are a pain in the culo.

Bald Boomer stands near sensible urban vehicle, the Citroen AMI. We saw loads of them

That said, there are a few cars in the old city, mainly tiny Fiat’s and small delivery vehicles parked on medieval flagstones, and of course police cars, ambulances and fire engines. Stubby fire engines that can just about get around the corners of the ancient buildings.

We drove down here from the boiling hot UK and I parked the large Polestar 3 in a boiling hot municipal car park just outside the city walls, an area where, as with most of Europe, America, China and Australasia, cars still dominate.

So maybe we should be making shows about reclaiming cities for human beings, we should strike a radical anti car stance, we should be pro public transport, bicycles, walking, ultra low impact neighbourhoods with everything anyone needs within 15 to 20 minutes walk.

I haven’t lived in a city for 35 years hence my partial ignorance of the changes taking place, but I know plenty of people who do. What is obvious is that people who live in a Low Traffic Neighbourhood (LTN) seem to like them, and people who want to drive their big cars through them are apoplectic and bemoan the curtailment of their freedom to roar through quiet neighbourhoods.

So how do we marry a YouTube series that actively promotes the ownership of electric cars, vans, trucks, busses and bikes and the rising pushback against cars in cities.

That is what I’m struggling with at the moment, however, after much reflection I don’t think they are mutually exclusive.

There’s no argument I’ve heard, regardless of any other consideration, which suggests continuing to rely on burning fossil fuel in combustion engines is acceptable.

I know there are a handful of of men who make those arguments, but they know they are wrong and they are diminishing in number and influence. It is patently absurd, self harming, short sighted and dangerous to do so.

Sadly, those few backward looking, ultra conservative men are backed up by some major global powers, Russia at the forefront, and of course the lovely old fossil fuel industry.

The really unpleasant and very powerful men who manage this massive global industry are very keen to maintain the status quo. I believe history will come to question their decisions and actions and judge them harshly.

When you consider their continuing negative impact on our world, how much money they can spend spreading lies about alternatives to their business, then the job of some micro niche channel like the Everything Electric show might take on greater importance.

I’m under no illusions, the impact we can make, even after thousands of episodes promoting EV’s, batteries, renewables, and everything associated with not burning stuff. When you consider the 29 live events we’ve held around the world, facilitating over 170,000 test drives in electric cars at those events, the impact is modest to say the least.

I was reminded of the importance of standing up and making arguments against the fatalistic, dismissive attitude of some people when I encountered some happy English people wandering around this small, medieval Italian town.

They were around my age, old boomers on holiday in Italy.

One of them was a Scrapheap Challenge fan, which is how the conversation stated. He wanted a selfie, now this doesn’t happen very often but it’s fine when it does.

This encounter was charming, funny and only slightly intrusive. My wife stood at some distance with her Australian pals and ignored the whole thing.

In amongst the comic banter another man in the group asked if I’d driven to Italy in one of my fancy electric cars.

I’ve been doing this a long time, I couldn’t sense what was coming. I said yes, it was very fancy, a Polestar 3, He then asked, in a jokey, dad humour way, how many months it took to complete the journey. ‘Because,’ he said look at his compatriots to make sure they heard the joke ‘they take 3 weeks to charge.’

I explained how it actually took a year to do the journey as I also had to throw away 3 batteries during the trip because they all have to be thrown away all the time, like Jeremy Clarkson said in 2009. There is a strange compulsion some old boomer men have (and I want to remind readers I am an old boomer) to repeat quotes from the Daily effing Mail and old Jezza from 15 years ago.

He happily informed me he couldn’t drive an electric car because he lived in Essex and his aged mother lives in Somerset. He has to visit her regularly and it’s a journey of 220 miles and, according to this chap, there was no way he could do that journey in an electric car.

I admit dear readers, I sighed. I had stupidly forgotten that, of course, there are still millions of people who will use some dated, half-baked excuse like this not to change their behaviour.

A perfectly reasonable excuse is that all cars, even 2nd hand ones, are expensive. But this man informed me that he had recently bought a new diesel SUV, in 2026! He could easily afford an electric car, and of course he could visit his mother in any old electric car. For a start 220 miles is a piddling journey, there are thousands of chargers along the route. Two days before, my wife and I had driven 590 miles in one day.

So of course he could add to the growing number of people who don’t buy petrol. But he won’t and I told him not to bother, it’s too much effort to explain in the incredible heat Italy is experiencing once again. And France, Spain, Portugal and most shockingly, the damp, grey, cold UK.

I didn’t explain that driving 1,900 kilometres (1,200 miles) across Europe in an electric car was as easy as doing it in a petrol burner but much cheaper.

I’m such a fool, I had decided that driving that distance in an electric car is not interesting, it’s now such a common experience for millions of people and indicative of the shift that has taken place.

The Polestar 3 has a large screen as many modern cars now do. I don’t want to do an advert for Polestar but their software design is really top level and very easy to use and understand. Using built in Google maps, the software can show you where all charging points are as we drove along the autoroute through France and Italy.

Thousands of charging points showing up on either side of the road, in villages, outside shopping centres, everywhere. They have become normal.

I will admit that Italy is more of a challenge in an electric car but in the little town we are staying in, just a random car park outside the medieval city walls has two 50 kW DC chargers.

There were also 4 low power chargers at the same location, I had the app that would connect me to those, I had €35 credit from my previous visit. I plugged in . . . . and it didn’t work.

I faffed around for a bit trying to make it work because I’m a weirdo, a normal person wouldn’t waste the time. We still had 52% or 229 kilometres range in the car so it really wasn’t a problem. Whatever, I wasn’t going to be defeated, I rang the very prominently displayed support number, a man called Mirko answered the phone! I need to add this was on a Saturday afternoon when the ambient temperature around the car and charger was 39c. Toasty.

Mirko spoke perfect English, he told me to leave the car plugged it, he would make it work. An hour later I got a WhatsApp message from him, it just said “Solved. You are now charging.”

The Polestar 3 plugged into the 11 kW charger

I’m recounting this tale because it is the single most complex charging challenge I’ve had on 7 different trips across Europe. Everywhere else I’ve plugged in and charged without a second thought.

Anyway, 7 days later, (we didn’t use the car while we were in Lucca) we completed the return trip.

Easy peasy lemon squeezy. The Polestar 3 is big, luxurious, the back seats are incredibly comfortable, the glass roof is brilliant when we drove through the Alps, just sit back and stare at mountains and snow.

We took turns driving and snoozing, eating up the kilometres with ease.

The only time I got a bit confused about which side of the road we should be on is when we came off the Le Shuttle train back to the UK.

Embarrassing.

So thanks Polestar UK, all in all, it was a great trip, and we all should walk more, cycle more, use public transport more, but if we do drive, I think it is still worth advocating for electric ground transport after all.

Here’s a couple of places we charged on the way home.

Chamonix. I think that’s Mont Blanc surrounded by clouds in the background

Tesla Superchargers under a solar canopy outside Dijon

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