The future of motoring

Image courtesy of businessinsider.com

Hello you, my name is Luca but you can call me Luca. So it's no secret that one day, the world will run out of oil, it's a sad fact that is unfortunately an inevitability, so like how this world will one day be sucked into the sun, it's time the people of this earth has to look ahead for a solution, which in the latter's case is looking for another planet. But we are not talking about that today, we are talking about what we will do once we are unable to utilise petrol.

It's easy to roll our eyes at all those who speak so strongly about electric cars, and I am guilty of this but not for the reason all of you may be guilty for. The appeal of these electric cars are very clear, you produce zero emissions, you don't pay road tax, you get money from the government and everyone sees you as some life saver. But at what cost?

I am writing this because France and the UK announced that by 2040, it will outlaw the selling of fuel for cars and cars powered by fuel if I'm not mistaken, and this is alarming to me because as it is 23 years away, it seems they are settled on the electric car. Which in a certain way isn't a bad thing but I only take issue with it if it is powered by batteries.

Being an avid viewer of the fully electric series Formula E, I appreciate it for what it is and I take pride in the fact that I attended the finale of the first season where I saw Nelson Piquet, Jr. become Formula E's equivalent of Giuseppe Farina, the inaugural champion. The series is incredible but I am seeing so many manufacturers flocking to it, as it was announced recently that Mercedes-Benz and Porsche are ditching DTM and WEC respectively in favour of Formula E, joining manufacturers who have committed to the all electric single seater championship such as Renault, Audi, BMW and Jaguar.

As a racing series, Formula E is a great watch, today and tomorrow are the final races of the 2016-17 season, the championship decider with a double header in Montréal so I'd say if you haven't seen Formula E beforehand, seek it out and be entertained. However as ever with the electric car concept, it is being pushed as a means to develop technology for the future and it very may well be doing so, but not for battery powered electric cars.

Internal combustion engine powered cars may be something that you take for granted but with the surge in popularity of electric cars, you have to sit back and wonder why. Any normal car can go for many miles before you have to pull into a petrol station, it takes mere minutes to bring it back to life, and if what follows is something that goes for slightly smaller amount of miles but takes upwards of 10 hours to bring back to life, we have gone backwards!

I'm all for saving the world, even if we have to sacrifice petrol cars which does break my heart, but we need to make advancements in the solution. Honda has made a major advancement, although be it still not widespread technology, powered by electricity but not from a battery, but instead an electricity generating station which takes form of a hydrogen fuel cell. This car being the FCX Clarity, which is only on sale in California where hydrogen is sold, and it works just like a fossil fuel powered car and it emits water instead of carbon dioxide.

In conversation with a friend regarding this, she did make me see that at least if we require to have to put up with battery powered electric cars if it meant we could then wait for an advancement in any other better solutions as appose to sticking with the fossil fuel cars and further damaging the environment. I saw where she was coming from, because we can have a chance at braving the storm of having the incapability of travelling long distance but we couldn't go back if the planet was dying and we were already in the year 2100 and we still did not have a good alternative to battery power.

If there's one thing I want to end on, it's that we as the human race need to now get our knuckles down and begin carving a path for the next generation. Because we are too late to explore the world, we are too early to explore the universe, but oh so conveniently we are in the middle ground that we can't really do anything. But if we begin laying the bread crumbs, we must because we aren't here forever, as a species as well since our planet is destined to flood and overheat, the sun will become a black hole and by that point, I would hope we have colonised other planets and have made integrated our society with other species out there.

Fucking hell, this is meant to be about motoring, I even said earlier that this whole conversation about going out into the stars was for another time but that's all that needs to be said about it really. But the sacrifices we have to make in our lifetime, as painful as they are, they must be made for a better tomorrow.

Thank you for reading, and as ever, @TheLucaFormat on Twitter if you want to stay connected, actually a few of you hit me up every once in a while, I'd like to hear your input on anything I've ever said, I had that recently regarding my last article. If you don't have Twitter, put your email into the Follow By Email option and you can have my articles sent straight to you.

Again, appreciate you lot taking the time to read this, I hope you choose to return. So until we meet again.

Luca.