Special rules for electric cars.
Electric cars could be given priority at traffic lights and exempted from one-way systems, under new proposals.
The government’s planned clean air zones are intended to encourage drivers to choose less-polluting electric cars.
Proposed for five English cities by 2020, the clean air zones will also introduce restrictions on older, polluting commercial vehicles.
But AA president Edmund King said drivers would be “baffled” by separate rules for electric cars.
I’m not sure baffled is a word I would use. This is, again, obsession over pragmatism. Cars are cars, no matter how they are powered – and, frankly, any suggestion that electric cars are not polluting is an admission of ignorance about how we produce electricity. The roads will become a nightmare. So, no, they should not be treated any differently to any other car on the roads. And, no, I don’t intend to buy one. When you can recharge a vehicle after a range of at least equivalent to my current ones (minimum of 300 miles) and do it in around five minutes, I’ll take a look. Until then, no chance.
Idiots.
It’s a totally mad suggestion. Having different rules for different types of car makes it much harder to predict what other drivers will do and therefore makes collisions more likely. The fact that other road users often won’t be able to tell which of the cars in the traffic around them are electric and subject to different rules would make it even more dangerous. The political class really has become detached from reality.
“…exempted from one-way systems, under new proposals.”
They really haven’t thought this through at all have they?
Will electric cars be shuffled off into underused bus and cycle lanes? Better still to stop the subsidies and let the Electic car die a natural death, yet again. Why people are still so keen on this impractical technology beggars belief. Better to use the under utilised rail lines for a more scalar solution like automated small scale rail cars.
That is the thing about subsidies, they are only needed for things that don’t work. If electric cars were cheaper and better than conventional cars, people would buy them without having to be coerced with other people’s money. The other thing that hasn’t been thought through is the extra demand millions of electric cars would put onto the electricity supply. This is at a time when power stations that actually work are being closed down to make way for solar and wind power.
I look forward to leaning out of my car window and telling the impatient owner of the electric car behind me to f**k off