My new hybrid adventure has already gone on for more than 3,000 kilometers and I can confidently say that I’m glad I didn’t buy an electric car. The UK is so lacking in EV infrastructure that it’s fair to say that fully electric driving here negates the whole point of having a car – being able to go where you want, when you want.
Coping with train delays and taxi drivers who have no idea where they are going is significantly less stressful than having to nurse a dying EV. In addition, most public charging stations are broken or occupied, and charging at home is not always an option for me.
Not everyone agreed with the purchase
I’ve had a lot of trouble because of my choice for a hybrid. There are critics of two camps: the True EV Believers who want no other solution or argument, and branding anyone who disagrees with them as a murderer – at the very least.
And then there are the EV drivers who find problems with charging and range total nonsense, until it turns out that they have whole hectares of private land on which they can easily park, and for longer journeys they can comfortably sit in the back of a driver-driven S-class diesel steps.
But at the moment hybrid driving is going well in the UK – rolling silently around town and still having that combustion engine for the long, fast stretches. It seems to me the way forward, but of course the advance of the hybrid car is already over; governments are banning them, just like the conventional cars with only an internal combustion engine, and that is really a missed opportunity.
It will come, but it will take time
Bringing about major social change simply takes time, and there must be periods of development and transition. In no other contemporary British social sphere would the population be so quickly forced to realize such drastic changes without a transition period. The hybrid proves that there is a solution for the transition from fossil to electric, but unfortunately governments do not want to make the lives of the majority of their voters any easier. They prefer to please the noisy minority.
Well, the Polestar 1, my hybrid, is simply the best solution for the way I use a car. I can occasionally put it on the charger at night, which gives me about 70 miles of all-electric city whizzing. That’s enough for all short and medium trips – in Bristol and the surrounding area, I don’t think the petrol engine has ever woken up. I can’t deny that it feels really good, and that it almost makes me understand the moral superiority of many EV drivers.
If a charger doesn’t work or the batteries are dead I can always fall back on a 309 hp petrol engine, and with both on hand it’s a madhouse 609 hp that can make an RS 4 particularly troublesome.
Is the Polestar 1 really that genius?
Like anyone who has something new and clever, I’m very irritatingly itching to tell everyone how great the thing is. And like those other evangelical types who think their way is the only right way, I’m totally blown away when anyone questions the genius of my new car.
So when someone recently said ‘That’s all nice and nice Chris, but it costs £150,000, the steering wheel is on the left and you are the only one in the UK to have bought one’ I was speechless. . What I should have said was that if the auto industry had the chance to invest in these things, the technology in the Polestar 1 would now be available for a quarter of the price.
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