THE ELECTRIC REVOLUTION: WHAT'S NEXT?

BATTERY POWER FOR MOTORING SEEMS INEVITABLE NOW, BUT WHAT FORM WILL THE CAR OF THE FUTURE REALLY TAKE?

- Neil Briscoe

THE FUTURE OF MOTORING IS ELECTRIC. ISN’T IT?

Certainly, the current orthodoxy is that batteries are the way of the future, driven by the need to slash the carbon emissions of transport. It is, though, a lot more complicated than merely taking out an engine and replacing it with an electric motor.

Thirty-something years ago, I was sat on the floor of my grandmother’s living room, with a stack of old Reader’s Digest in front of me. In one, I found a piece on the 100th anniversary of Mercedes-Benz. In this feature, a senior Mercedes engineer was asked what cars we'd be driving in 20 years’ time.

“Well…” he replied with the confidence only a German car engineer can display; “We design our cars to last for at least 30 years, so we will be driving the cars we are making today.”

In many ways, the man from Mercedes was right—some 35 years on from me reading those words, we are for the most part still driving around in cars that are not fundamentally different from those then coming off the production lines in Stuttgart, in Tokyo, in Detroit, in Turin. In the next 20 years, though? Even the most confident engineer might now baulk at being too precise in their predictions. The rise of the electric car is going to change what the very word car means.