While I’m not at all into cars, I have a vague policy-level interest in electric vehicles. I think they present fascinating dilemmas.

We desperately need to rapidly reduce the burning of fossil fuels if the planet is to remain habitable, and it seems inevitable that the adoption of electric vehicles will be an important staging post on the journey to a less carbon-intensive future.

Yet, it’s not an easy transition: there are all sorts of complicated policy problems, from the need to more rapidly develop the charging infrastructure, to developing better ways of tackling battery fires, to working out how best to manage life-expired battery-powered vehicles.

From an emergency planning perspective, allowing a controlled burn of a battery-powered vehicle isn’t a great solution if the vehicle is a battery-powered ambulance parked outside a hospital, or one of an entire fleet of fire engines parked next to one another. Decommissioning cars containing batteries which have simply expired is one thing, but safely transporting and managing vehicles whose cells have been compromised in major road traffic accidents is quite another. And so on and so forth… electric vehicles present 99 big problems in the service of solving the biggest planetary problem of all.

I therefore particularly enjoyed this article in the New York Times by Dionne Searcey, which profiles the introduction of an electric school bus in a US town. The ripples from that particular pebble were far-reaching. The one which surprised me most was, perhaps, the simplest:

The bus was so quiet that Mr. Nielson could hear his metal straw rattle in its travel mug as he navigated the brick streets downtown. And when he pulled up to some bus stops, where were the kids?

It turned out that children had been accustomed to running outside when they heard the loud diesel engine come roaring down the street. The new bus was almost too quiet.

“I told parents that, hey, you’re going to have to start looking because I don’t like to honk. It’s generally rude,” he said.

It’s well worth reading the full thing.

The image at the top of this post was generated by DALL·E 3.