Are you thinking of buying a new car?

Read this first...

In this article, Sam Abuelsamid lays out the reasons we won't see electric cars anytime soon, and he gives it from the established carmakers' point of view. Too hard to retool, too many years from concept to factory floor, I have heard these whinges before somewhere. Now where could that be?

Oh yes, lightbulb manufacturers. For about the last ten years they have been selling small quantities of CFL light globes and large volumes of inefficient incandescent light globes, because while they tacitly admit in their advertising how much more energy efficient and ecologiccally sound the CFLs are, they have more invested in the old production equipment and haven't squeezed the last dollar of value from the incandescent light globe yet, and to Hell with the enviromment hey?

We've heard the same things from carmakers for decades. A load of crap of course, they have so much invested in fossil fuel vehicles that they just plain won't stop before global weather change has tipped past the no return point - and then they'll be right there saying their loyal customers gave them no mandate to change technology and it's all our fault for buying FF vehicles.

The world won't go with a bang, nor with a whimper, but with a bunch of greedy manufacturers all busily blaming everyone else except themselves for it. On the Last Day, there will be some advertising guy with a respirator putting up a billboard that says "XXXX autos, we made clean cars before the others ever did! So buy XXXX..."

Can I give you my readers a quick clue? The quickest way to force car manufacturers to re-evaluate their positions is to not buy the bloody things. Make your current car last for another year or two, and then buy an electric or hybrid so that your FF car can sit in the garage for maybe another two years doing very few miles, and believe me after just one year of silent treatment they would get the bloody idea! By the time you'd be ready for a new major manufacturer's car, you'd actually have some choice.

Are you in the market for a new car then? Well just imagine if you and 19,000,000 other Australians all don't buy a new vehicle for a year. All it would cost you is one more year in your old car. Go on, do it for our climate!