My friend Ade is the creator of World EV Day. He was a campaigner for green stuff long before it was trendy. His current focus is, along with Elon, accelerating the transition to electric cars. If you want to know what Ade is about, here's a clip of him taking on Nigel Farage.
The debate they have in the clip, which Ade wins, is whether - despite the current problems with batteries and charging infrastructure - EV's are better than their dinosaur-burning predecessors. I haven't done enough research, but I think they are.
This doesn't excite me much, though. If everyone switches from fossil to electric, we'll still be gridlocked. And there'll still be a massive footprint in the construction and consumption of new vehicles for everyone.
The only really exciting thing about the electric transition is that it paves the way for a more sensible transport system, based on autonomous vehicles. I thought by now we'd be talking about Transport as a Service. You'd be able to summon, from anywhere, the vehicle you need. But we're just buying Zoes, Polestars and Teslas, sitting in jams, and failing to park at both ends of our journeys.
Where I live in Bristol we have eScooters and now ebikes for hire. I am a regular user, and the system works reasonably well. There are also car sharing schemes. I use these too. However, the scooter bays are sometimes empty or too full. And the cars are just a little bit too far away, or they're unavailable.
It seems to me all of these problems - and many more - are solvable with technology we already have. Or technology we could already have.
If, like pigeons, vehicles could home, then the whole city could be served by much smaller fleets.
There are two reasons why this isn't happening.
The first is safety. Or more accurately, the trolley problem. But this could be worked around by having two modes of journeys: when humans are on board, sure, let them drive. They're not actually better than machines at the driving, but they sure know how to prioritise a group of pregnant women over a convicted paedophile when their car spins out of control.
When humans aren't on board, the vehicle could be restricted to homing / redistribution mode. Speed limited to, say, 10 mph. Only between the hours of 2am and 5am, for example. As people tend to go places and then come back again, fleets redistribute naturally. Homing mode would be there just to correct the distribution while most people are sleeping.
The second reason is much more problematic. The system only works if we move away from car ownership. While we continue to fetishise cars and treat them as status symbols, penis extensions, and hermetically sealed mobile rage cages, there's little to no chance of improvement.
In fact, if we start to adopt autonomous vehicles without first addressing the issue of ownership, things will get much worse. The number of cars on the roads will increase, as privately-owned vehicles will be incentivised to autonomously loop round the block rather than park.
As the plan for GoatRemote starts to come together, I realise it has a lot to do with sharing. I see hope in the sharing economy. Meanwhile, the idiocy and inefficiencies of individualism drive me mad. Today's rant was about sharing our wheels. I also have thoughts about sharing our walls, our desks, our time, and our skills. Hopefully, I'll have time to write about some of those next week.