Rock on up to any car salesman with a walletful of cash and they’ll be on to you faster than a greyhound with a butt full of dynamite. You’ll be their new best friend and – providing your wallet can hack it – able to pick and choose from the automotive bounty. 10 Minutes of paperwork later, you’re off down the road with the new car smell enveloping you like stale cigarette smoke the morning after the party.
It’s what we’re used to. You got money? Great! This means you get to choose, then, you get the car. Easy peasy. However all that is about to change as car manufacturers prepare to roll out their electric vehicles to the unwashed masses.
Regardless of who you are in the world, Chevrolet BMW & Nissan aren’t going to let you get your grubby little mitts on their electric car range if you don’t meet certain criteriea.
The excuse is that car companies “Want to make sure they find the right kind of buyers” and this justifies the questionnaires and interviews. You’ll be asked about your driving history. Got any speeding tickets? Don’t kiss your car goodnight often enough? Planning on actually pressing the acclerator to the floor at some stage? If you answered yes to any of those questions you’re two things: Firstly, human. Secondly, not suitable material to own a new electric car.
The nitty-gritty of the situation is that it all comes down to publicity, and bad publicity is hard to get rid of. Remember the Ford Pinto fiasco? Chances are you don’t remember the exact outcomes, but you still remember it and you know Ford did something very bad. That’s proof that “dirt sticks”, no matter what the details are.
Like a toilet made of matchsticks, this new electric car industry is still a brittle and very fragile thing, which could conceivably fail due to repeated bad press and word of mouth. This sort of thing works – just look at the sales figures of SUVs in countries like the UK over the last 5 years. It could have much more severe consequences with the brittle electric vehicle industry.
Nissan, Chevrolet and BMW are all terrified of normal people with normal human tendancies getting behind the wheel of their cars and complaining about it’s shortcomings. Now while I love electric cars and while they’re undeniably superior to internal combustion vehicles in the majority of scenarios, they also have their share of downsides too, with the biggest one being slow recharging times.
In reality, you can charge your electric car in just a few minutes – if you have a whopping great power supply. If you have an American 110 volt supply however you’d better start watching all three Lord of the Rings movies before even thinking about going to work. For most EVers this is a non-issue, but if you’re draining your battery pack flat every few hours then this could be an actual problem. This is the sort of thing car makers don’t want getting spread around the internet because as I mentioned, dirt – whether justified or not – sticks.
This means people like me and you could be completely unsuitable to buy their cars next year sometime. It’s also another reason why I’d rather convert my own car to electric for a quarter of the price.
