Photographed by user Michiel 1972 source: Wikipedia C5
My first job was at Timex in Dundee which was one of the main manufacturing plants for the Sinclair Spectrum (sadly gone the way of most manufacturing in Scotland). Every day I used to cycle up to the plant up the Hilltown and naturally when the Sinclair C5 came out I just loved the idea. But it was just so impractical. Much heavier than a cycle, too bulky to manoeuvre up the steps to the flat and worst of all, with a driving position level with the exhausts of drivers and beneath their line of sight so you risked being run over by a driver who would never have seen you. Quite rightly it was shunned by the Spectrum buying public.
So, you can imagine my thoughts when I heard that Edinburgh Council, the centre of most eco-lunacy in Scotland, have decided to go “green” (as in sick or naive they don’t say) and start using Electric Scooters. It’s the same madness as the Sinclair C5 but this time dressed up as “eco”. The idea of electric scooters is just bizarre, particularly when the government have been actively trying to discourage “unsafe”, but energy efficient, ordinary motorbikes and scooters and replace them with cars for the last 30 years.
But in principle electric is just so awful for a lightweight vehicle like a scooter. The one thing I have learnt from riding my own cycle since a kid, is that you have to keep the weight down. Just a few kilos of extra weight significantly adds to the drag and turns an enjoyable cycle ride into a drudge. There’s a reason why the world economy relies on gasoline for transport, and that is because no other energy source (except nuclear) has anything near the same energy density per kilo. Petrol, when used, is entirely consumed. All the energy in the petrol goes to power the vehicle – and better still, half the chemicals involved (O2) come from the atmosphere and don’t have to be carried around. A battery is a container, in which there are conductors and chemical plates on which the chemical reactions occur to store the energy. Both petrol and batteries are a chemical store of energy, but the big differences are that only a fraction of the weight in a battery is the actual chemical store of energy and that a battery has to hold both sides of the chemical reaction.
So, you have to lump this big battery around all over the place which either means the vehicle performance is dragged down by a big battery or you have a small battery with very limited power and range.
So, all I would like to say to the Councillors who dreamt up this plan is there’s a far better chemical store of energy that many Edinburgh councillors have: a layer of fat around their middle (and between the ears), which a bit of regular exercise on a cheap, green, cost effective, none-of-the-green-spin cycle would help to shift.
