Let them drive Teslas!
After all, once driving is made too expensive for us lowly ordinary citizens, the roads will be left to the pampered enjoyers of public-sector largesse.
Cars are great, aren’t they? I don’t mean in the ‘corr Bugatti Veyron! Lambo! Ferrari!’ kind of way. The likes of Top Gear and young chaps doing doughnuts in car parks will appreciate those in a way I never could.
Instead, I mean the freedom they give. If you are ghastly enough to live outside the confines of the M25, not having a car is a sentence to extreme isolation.
One thing you will invariably notice is that the eco-clowns who want to see private automobiles banned or made even more horrendously expensive fall into two categories. Either they have no need to drive, living probably in London, or they are so financially secure that they can happily fork out whichever additional levy they assuage their consciences with.
But automobiles are not without their issues. The problems I keep coming across, however, are not necessarily the ones that are forever used by the green and good to keep us from behind the wheel and onto the bicycle saddle.
A recent article in the Daily Mail related how a nurse was banned from driving after speeding repeatedly. That she drove eight miles per hour above the speed limit in one of England’s vast and sprawling set of roadworks should evoke some sympathy. However, the issue was in the car she drove. According to the Mail, she, an NHS nurse, was pootling along in an NHS fleet BMW 220D M Sport Auto. Clearly the angels of Our NHS should have sporty cars – hence the 0-60 of seven seconds – so that they can tend to their patients without delay.
At over £28,000 a piece, however, one wonders whether Our NHS, forever in a situation of x-numbers-of-days-left-to-save-it, might economise by lumping for, say, a Dacia Sandero, which you can get for just over £11,000. Perhaps they could put the savings towards shifting the NHS’ multi-year backlog, but who am I to dare question that faultless institution?
It is not just the NHS, natch. Another public body caught my eye recently: Northamptonshire Police. This august constabulary has ‘joined the electric vehicle revolution’ by getting a new Tesla. The car maker has given some vehicles to the police to try out in the run up to the impending green Armageddon, the models in question costing around £60,000. With the banning of petrol and diesel cars on the horizon, no doubt the police will be investing heavily into these expensive road toys, shunning other thriftier, and of course duller, options. Not that our boys in blue should be driving anything less than a top-of-the-range motor capable of 0-60 in 3.1 seconds: all the better to more speedily deal with any nasty tweets that may have been sent from somewhere nearby.
If you are not an NHS angel or a copper, however, you are out of luck. For you, the road-going experience will be all the worse. Grotesque fuel prices, ceaseless congestion, the spectre of pay-per-mile tax, and the imposition of arrogant cyclists into prime position on a road system utterly inadequate to accommodate them: the system is at every turn designed to try and get you off the road.
And surely that’s the goal. After all, once driving is made too expensive for us lowly ordinary citizens, the roads will be left to the pampered enjoyers of public-sector largesse, whizzing around in their Beemers and Teslas. One thing’s for sure: the next time I see any talk of an ‘NHS funding crisis’, their fleet of BMWs will spring straight to mind.
