Some excellent thinking this month from the Italian complexity theorist Luca Dellanna:
Two days ago, the EU parliament approved a ban on new fossil fuel cars starting in 2035. While I like the idea of greener cars, I’m not too fond of a fast and complete transition.
Let me use the metaphor of the Summer Olympic Games – an event with attractive economics during the planning phase that predictably overruns its budget by enormous amounts (an average of 213 per cent!). The Olympic Games are the only infrastructural megaproject that always has cost overruns. Why? Partly because it has inescapable deadlines – and everything is more costly when rushed.
I am terrified that putting an artificial deadline to the electric transition might cause a similar scrambling, making it more costly and worse executed than otherwise.
It is one thing to offer people digital TV, quite another to switch off the analogue signal
I think this is right. And I sincerely hope this legislation was devised as a shot across the bows to frighten the car industry into action, only to be quietly ignored as the deadline nears.
Never forget that Luddites often have a point. When a new technology emerges, it usually arises as a novel alternative to something that already exists. As such, it seems a bit silly to denounce it. ‘If you don’t like it, don’t use it.’ Unfortunately, over time, the new may supplant the old entirely, to a point where you are left with fewer choices than before. Take the parking app: this was a godsend when the only alternative was carrying £7 in pound coins to feed a ticket machine. But it wasn’t long before ticket machines disappeared altogether, so anyone without a smartphone finds it almost impossible to park. In the same way, it is one thing to offer people digital TV, quite another to switch off the analogue signal. Do we really want all our refining and fuel distribution infrastructure to wither and die? Do we want all vehicles to be electric? Why waste a battery on someone who drives 60 miles a week?
It is rare for the optimal mix of A and B to be 100 per cent A or 100 per cent B. Many people should perhaps never change to electric cars. If you are aged 80 and have driven a manual transmission for 60 years, switching to two-pedal driving late in life is potentially dangerous. Or if this legislation causes petrol-heads to hang on to older cars for longer, it could be worse than if they were free to buy newer, more efficient conventional cars.
The natural and healthy pace of change in the adoption of any new technology is rarely linear and it is never simultaneous. This more gradual pace of change is healthy if you want to benefit from the recursive and experimental process of learning that makes evolutionary change more intelligent and enduring than the mandated alternative.
Besides, I am not even sure that compulsion is necessary here. Most evidence seems to suggest that most people who buy an electric car never go back to internal combustion. I suspect this has almost nothing to do with environmentalism: electric cars are just markedly pleasanter to drive, offering the comportment of a luxury car with the performance of a sports car – a combination unachievable before in anything less than a Bentley or Aston Martin.
In other words, it is possible that electric car technology, even if it is slow to spread at first, is behaviourally sticky. Something that, once experienced, changes your expectations to such an extent that it is difficult to give up.
All these products have stickiness in common: duvets, mobile phones, multichannel TV, air-fryers, home internet access, credit cards, heroin. People may resist them for years, but few who have experienced them revert. Once such products reach a certain critical mass, there is no stopping them. There may hence be no more need to mandate electric cars than to mandate indoor toilets.
