THE CARBON WAR

The Churchill of climate change? 213
says. Another slips just a little, but scrapes a wall hard. Its front left wheel
collapses sideways.
I have seen my first Formula E crash, and I have only been here a few
minutes.
The rain falls harder.
Taking pity on my ignorance, a member of the team explains to me that
this is good for Sam. He will be near the front of the grid for sure now.
But I am hoping the rain won’t be keeping the public away. The Formula
E organisation joined with the Low Carbon Vehicle Partnership to stage a
conference earlier in the week. At that, Alejandro Agag, the Formula E Chief
Executive, explained that 99% of people who come to Formula E races leave
saying they are more likely to buy an electric vehicle as a result of seeing the
racing. He finds that enormously encouraging, and so do I. But then it needs
to be. I also heard the President of the Automobile Association explain that
a poll of AA members who plan to change car in the next three years shows
only one percent currently favouring an electric vehicle. Richard Branson likes
to say that he hopes 10 years from now the smell of exhaust from cars will be
a thing of the past, much like the smell of cigarettes in restaurants. That one
percent had better expand fast then.
I look around the pit area at the technology on show. Most of the cutting-edge
stuff is below the shiny low bonnet of the car. At the conference,
I listened to Pascal Couasnon, Director of Michelin motorsport, speaking
with Gallic passion about how electric vehicle racing is driving innovation and
doing so faster than mainstream Formula 1. Vincent Geslin of Renault was
even more enthusiastic. You cannot imagine the kinds of things we discover
every day on batteries, he said. We cannot predict where we will be in 5 years,
except in a much better place.
Alejandro Agag thinks Formula E will have doubled the power of the
batteries within 5 years: a time frame – he foresees – in which solar will increasingly
be charging the batteries.
You won’t be doing this alone, I suggest to him. What about, say, Apple
and Tesla, and their plans? What might the world look like ten years from now,
five years after Apple says it wants to be mass producing electric vehicles; nine
years after Tesla completes its giant battery factor in Nevada? How might those
developments feed back into Formula E?
The more electric vehicles there are in the world, the more there will be,
Alejandro replies. The better they do, the better we do. Maybe in 5 years we
will see an Apple Formula E team and a Tesla Formula E team.