6:58 am, June 4, 2023
Mr Bean star and car nut Rowan Atkinson says he feels ‘duped’ by electric cars – and wants people to focus on making their cars last longer instead.
The petrolhead star of Blackadder said that while electric cars are better for the environment from a ‘tailpipe emissions’ perspective he is concerned about the damage their manufacture does to the environment.
Atkinson – who famously has an extensive collection of supercars, including a McLaren F1 – is concerned with ‘fast fashion’ car sales that he says encourages owners to change every three years.
Writing in The Guardian, he said: ‘Currently, on average we keep our new cars for only three years before selling them on, driven mainly by the ubiquitous three-year leasing model.
‘This seems an outrageously profligate use of the world’s natural resources when you consider what great condition a three-year-old car is in.
‘When I was a child, any car that was five years old was a bucket of rust and halfway through the gate of the scrapyard. Not any longer. You can now make a car for £15,000 that, with tender loving care, will last for 30 years.’
Atkinson thinks car owners should keep their new vehicles for five years instead of three to help reduce CO2 emissions associated with car production.
‘We’d enjoy the same mobility,’ he said. ‘Just driving slightly older cars.’
The TV star also wants car owners to focus on keeping their own used cars on the road for longer.
Following a crash in his multi million pound McLaren F1, Atkinson revealed in 2013 he had spent nearly £1m getting the car fixed and back on the road.
He said: ‘We need also to acknowledge what a great asset we have in the cars that currently exist – there are nearly 1.5bn of them worldwide.
‘In terms of manufacture, these cars have paid their environmental dues and, although it is sensible to reduce our reliance on them, it would seem right to look carefully at ways of retaining them while lowering their polluting effect.
‘Fairly obviously, we could use them less. As an environmentalist once said to me, if you really need a car, buy an old one and use it as little as possible.’
On the subject of electric cars, Atkinson said he doesn’t believe they are the right choice for the future of the car industry.
He said: ‘The problem lies with the lithium-ion batteries fitted currently to nearly all electric vehicles: they’re absurdly heavy, many rare earth metals and huge amounts of energy are required to make them, and they only last about 10 years.
‘It seems a perverse choice of hardware with which to lead the automobile’s fight against the climate crisis.
‘Increasingly, I’m feeling that our honeymoon with electric cars is coming to an end, and that’s no bad thing: we’re realising that a wider range of options need to be explored if we’re going to properly address the very serious environmental problems that our use of the motor car has created.
‘We should keep developing hydrogen, as well as synthetic fuels to save the scrapping of older cars which still have so much to give, while simultaneously promoting a quite different business model for the car industry, in which we keep our new vehicles for longer, acknowledging their amazing but overlooked longevity.
‘Friends with an environmental conscience often ask me, as a car person, whether they should buy an electric car.
‘I tend to say that if their car is an old diesel and they do a lot of city centre motoring, they should consider a change. But otherwise, hold fire for now. Electric propulsion will be of real, global environmental benefit one day, but that day has yet to dawn.’
You can read the article in full on The Guardian website.
