I hired a hybrid Fiat 500 recently. Worst car I’ve ever driven. Underpowered to the point of being dangerous, you had to drive inefficiently in order to charge the battery, it drained when you didn’t want it to and left you with no power when you needed it. It was incredibly stressful to drive. Whoever designed the power management system should be forced to drive one for the rest of their lives because, honestly, I can think of nothing worse. When you’re in second gear driving up a slight incline at 40kph and still slowing down from 90 even though your foot is flat to the floor, because it just doesn’t have the juice to manage in the real world… yeah, that’s a big fat NOPE from me! Dangerous, dangerous, dangerous.
I think at the moment electric cars are a false “green economy”. They’re just not better for the environment as far as I can work out. They do nothing to solve the fossil fuel issues and batteries are terrible for disposal. Of course, a first step is a positive thing, and I’m sure the clever scientists are beavering away on making all parts and processes more efficient, but while electric cars still have such a huge reliance on the consumption of fossil fuels, I can’t see them as an environmentally friendly option. The only EF option is to drive less.
Not to say we’re not considering getting an electric car ourselves, but that’s because we have free electricity with our solar, so it would be financially beneficial long term, and not impacted by whatever happens to the cost of electricity from the grid. But I don’t fool myself that even solar power is “green”. Those panels and batteries take an awful lot from the ground to make, and are horribly difficult to recycle.
) and nothing has performed as badly. The only thing that came close was a Nissan Micra I had when my car was in for a windscreen replacement, but we’ll give that a pass because I was driving it in the mountains. And it still did better than that Fiat POS.