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Home / Hawkes Bay Today

Roger Moroney: Take (or leave) it EV, don't let the sounds of electric wheels drive you crazy

By Roger Moroney
Reporter·Hawkes Bay Today·
17 Jun, 2021 05:00 PM4 mins to read

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They'll ban vintage car rallies next, reckons Roger Moroney.

They'll ban vintage car rallies next, reckons Roger Moroney.

It is the catch-phrase of today and it goes along the lines of Slashing Carbon Emissions.

Which for a country of our modest size is an interesting desire, given that what we apparently "emit" is not on a globally major scale.

Mind you, our government did in the coal business and now we are importing thousands of tonnes of the stuff back in to stow up the creation of power.

I don't quite get that one.

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Why didn't we just keep mining the stuff and sell it off to China and those other industrialised consumeristic empires who burn anything to create the power needed to make cheap shoes, or cars or ships or missiles or whatever.

Roger Moroney - he's driven a hybrid, but not sure he'd want an EV.
Roger Moroney - he's driven a hybrid, but not sure he'd want an EV.

Because the big lands will also keep pumping stuff out, in one way or another.

Oh yes, we are doing our bit, which is to be applauded, but I suspect the cost could hurt down the line.

For there's a taxpayer funded club called the Climate Change Commission and they aim to eventually ban imports of new petrol and diesel-driven vehicles … and they want to put pressure on the agricultural sector by slashing cattle and sheep numbers because they fart too much apparently.

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Trimming both the auto and ag' sectors is going to rattle the economy.

If we cut sheep and cattle numbers other countries will step up and introduce more to make up the market.

That'll cancel out our emission slashing move on that front.

If we hammer the petrol and diesel numbers to promote electric chairs, I mean cars, then they'll have to up the chances of winning Lotto so average income folk can afford to buy a silent electrical thing which, when the time does come when it may need a new battery system, the cost will be about what it cost in the first place.

I see the cheapie ones are still running around the $60,000 mark.

Oh you'll get a slight discount, but at the expense of the industrial community who need the big vehicles for their work and will be taxed accordingly.

Everything just seems to be happening too fast these days and the foundation of thought behind this sort of stuff doesn't seem that firm.

How in electric-only years do we create all the required juice?

A few years back the winter was so bleak down south, and the dam levels so low, they had to introduce power cuts … we didn't have enough.

I reckon it'll end up being nuclear power stations, like pretty well everywhere else already, whether we like it or not.

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We always jump in too fast.

Like the way those electric scooters arrived (en masse) and took to the streets, literally.

No laws in place.

No licensing requirements despite the fact they'd do 30km/h, helmets not required, and braking systems dodgy.

I suspect in the ACC head office there's a picture of a lime scooter on the dartboard.

Vaping came in equally unopposed and without serious thought.

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Just another commercial enterprise able to slip under the radar.

Not to mention the radar of health.

The only vapour-type stuff that should go into people's lungs is oxygen.

The minuscule amounts of other stuff in the air can be dealt with but when great billows of effectively unknown stuff is ingested I just fear that way down the track there could be health consequences.

I also fear that tonight I will have a dream and it will be a vision of two vaping folks in their electric car on the way to a health clinic and passing by the newly built nuclear power station.

Oh, and bouncing over another new speed hump.

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On the subject of the latter, I watched a couple of guys on motorcycles the other day aim between them, at good pace, because they could and didn't have to slow down.

I probably have another 15 or so years of driving left and those years will take place using a car with high clean-burning petrol technology.

I'm not anti EV (I've driven a hybrid and was very impressed) but this all kind of worries me.

They'll probably want to ban vintage car rallies next.

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