REAL WORLD vs JOURNALIST WORLD + DAC I A vs DAC I A
SPONSORED BY
Indy success
I’m surprised by the photo caption ‘Peugeot breaks its Indy 500 duck’ in your June issue’s Peugeot 408 story. They won in 1913, totally upsetting the apple cart.
Sorry, my mistake. Tried to be clever and funny. Backfired horribly. Not for the first time. CO
Worse before it gets better
Having just returned from a long touring holiday in France, it seems clear how very dependent France is on the motor car and the inter-nal-combustion engine in particular. There is none of the buzz of scooters and motorbikes that is the backdrop of Spanish or Italian cities, nor the half-a-million pushbikes clinging to the railings, posts or each other found around the cities of Belgium or the Netherlands.
It is possibly because the large number of semi-rural towns have significant distances between them and all lie in river valleys – the only way out is up.
French cars are often homeless, no garage and often no street lamp to consider tethering an electric vehicle to. Will the next decade thus witness yet more social discord as electrific-ation becomes compulsory in 2035?
Politicians can’t dictate the time-line for scientific discovery. Sure, it is flavour of the month to ‘lead the world’ in fighting climate change, to extract lithium instead of oil, but, for the last century, science has not real-ly achieved that much in building a better battery. It has a significantly lower energy density than fossil fuel, hence the weight load, and suffers from damage by neglect, over-charg-ing or lack of use.
To simply dictate that the world will change and scientists will find a way to facilitate it, is no better than the pipe dream that James T Kirk will travel back in time and present us with dilithium crystal energy cells to show us how it should be done. If he doesn’t, roll on cold fusion.
Cars you can use
I was a car salesman when cars were fun. I sold Peugeots in the age of the 205/309 GTI. Are cars fun a
