The getaway car

You can learn a lot about my dad's approach to car maintenance from the time it was found the car wouldn't start because the starter motor had fallen off. It was hammered back on with a mallet.

Job done.

Never particularly flush with cash my parents would buy crap cars, to be honest they were probably borderline scrap, and then spend a small fortune adding seat belts - these were 70s cars and they were knackered. I remember a blue Peugeot 504 with an engine so noisy when my dad started filling it with petrol a guy ran across the forecourt shouting "NOoooooooo" because he was convinced it was one of those exotic French diesels.

But the car that looms largest in my childhood memory was a Ford Cortina Mk4. I recall it as being a bright metallic green with a tan interior. KVY 550S was born the same year as me and given my memories I was probably about eight when we got it - I could check... I haven't. Apart from the dutifully installed rear seat belts it was the typical late 70s Ford and on anything other than the perfect day it contributed to the unmistakable suburban sound of engines turning over and failing to start.

We used to call it "the getaway car" on account of the bloody thing never starting.

With me and my brothers in the car, and my parents arguing about whether they'd flooded the engine again, we'd sit in uneasy silence before commencing further attempts in the desperate hope the battery would hold out. We'd threaten the it with the scrap yard and then it would start. A car with proper personality. 

I remember alternators and exhausts being annual consumables. A trip to a tiny auto parts shop that stocked, clearly badly, reconditioned alternators was a delight.... so filled with fascinating oily things. Early on my dad had bought a new exhaust from Charlie Brown's that came with a lifetime warranty. That warranty did for the next few years when, without fail, part of it would drop off.

Once, with everyone strapped in, my mum went to start the car but the key wouldn't fit the ignition barrel... because it was the front door key for the house. Yet she was sure this is what had unlocked the car. Later, for science, I tried a few other implements such as a discarded lolly stick. Yep, that would unlock the drivers door. In fact anything strong enough to turn what Ford referred to as a "lock" would open the door. We didn't bother fixing that.

Eventually rust ate through the scuttle panel and front bulkhead. This was structural and difficult to fix so spelled the end of the car. 

Before the final drive of doom to the scrappy, my dad stuck a for sale sign in the window. A chap came along and offered £150. Not bad... scrap was about £25. Done.

It was a few weeks later we were sat round the dinner table when the doorbell rang. A policeman. "About your car sir, KVY 550S". In the days when the DVLA was notified by the new owner of the car they hadn't bothered which, it turns out, wasn't a great surprise.

The car that would never start had been used, as the getaway car, in an armed robbery in Leeds. 

A week later, the same again. Same officer even.... Our old Cortina had been used for ram raiding in Halifax.

This family car, which can't have been more than 11 years old when terminal rust dealt it a death blow went out in a blaze of criminal glory

I was so proud.

Cars cars cars

Whilst there are too many cars on the UK roads and we all need to drive less, I still bloody love cars. I've never been one for the flashy motor though. The bigger, brasher, noisier, faster.... the less I'm interested in it. 

It's been a lot of years since I really visited this part of my psyche and it's been awoken by EVs. The possibility that I can have a car that's fun to drive, doesn't literally stink and at least has the potential to be propelled by carbon neutral energy is really damn exciting.

I've also been sucked into the world of the CarPervert, Jonny Smith. He's an engaging presenter and I enjoy that he isn't chasing the extreme, outlandish super car nonsense. The man's doing up an Austin Allegro for goodness sake. His love of cars in infectious and really all embracing. He's as interested in the cars of the everyman, the cars with stories behind them, as the engineering marvels that outperform everything else.

All of this has got me reminiscing about the cars I grew up with. The fascinating Volvo Amazon estate owned by the woman at number 10 who never drove it, ever....  but kept it on the road. The VW camper a neighbour had that burnt more oil than petrol - something he seemed to be proud of, but mostly its the cars my parents owned.

I can vaguely remember a few of them. There was a Reliant Robin they had when I was really tiny.... the radio didn't work. A Renault 4 with it's weird gear stick. A Peugeot 504 with deeply questionable brakes and maggots under the rear bench seat because me and my brothers had dropped so much food down there. An awful Talbot Alpine Minx that was just the worst sounding thing every created. A white Cavalier Club special edition thing with a tiny little spoiler. Once, with my grandmother in that car, we were parked at MFI. She piped up that we were parked next to a car that was exactly the same..... It was a 911.

The car I remember most from my childhood was the Cortina. That deserves its own post.

My granddad had better cars. I think there was a Datsun Cherry, definitely a couple of Nissan Sunnys. He bought Japanese cars that worked.

My parents didn't buy Japanese cars that worked, they bought old DAF automatics and had their mechanic friend stick some second hand washing machine belts on when they'd fail.

The first car I drove was a Peugeot 205 1.8 diesel. It was great. Much better than the 1990 Cavalier my parents owned at the time. I once drove that through a puddle and it completely died.

My first car was a 1986 Golf MKII. My dad taught me everything he knew so I chose badly. It was knackered. Something like 60k on the clock and it hadn't been given an oil change in at least half that. But I loved that car and another Golf has always been on my desired list. Never happened because I've always been too practical or poor... my god I really wanted a MK5 when they came out.

Apart from that Golf.... oh and the cut and shut Volvo 340 I replaced it with, my car ownership has been fairly uneventful. They've just all worked. I do find myself craving some originality though. The Citroen Xantia estate I owned was great. Yes the boot leaked so badly the rear foot wells filled with water, and the stupid plastic clutch clip failed and left my wife stranded among rowdy football fans, but it was an interesting car and I loved it.

I'm hopeful the move to EVs will see some interesting cars come back. I may even get one.

NRG

As a bleeding heart lefty-liberal snowflake, how I use energy matters to me. More specifically where the energy I use comes from matters to me.

Like most people in the UK I use electricity from the grid to power things in my home. I have a gas powered combi boiler for the hot water and central heating and I drive a car. We're a two car household by necessity.

Bottom line is I want to reduce my carbon footprint as far as I can (without selling all my possessions and going to live in the woods). I suspect a lot of people thing the same way, so what can we do?

The easy wins are efficiency gains. The loft of our house was insulated, about 30 years ago, with approx 20cm depth of fibreglass. That's better than nothing but not by much, so a small amount of money spent on some nice wool insulation has improved things. Worth noting that although it's more expensive, the wool insulation is nice to handle and means in the future anytime I venture into the loft I'm not left all itchy from disturbing the fibreglass insulation.

Our heating system was also about 30 years old and had started taking a long time to heat the house. A new boiler wasn't so cheap, £2300 to be precise. The replacement uses considerably less gas for the same heat output. Perhaps more importantly it actually works to heat the house quickly. It isn't going to pay for itself and it isn't going to save the environment, but it reduces our gas usage and makes for a warmer home. Thing is, I'm not sure I did the right thing there....

All our lighting was long ago replaced with LEDs. They're just better. It makes absolutely no sense not to do this.

Our car purchasing decisions were influenced by carbon emissions and air quality concerns, so the diesels went and we bought the most efficient petrol cars available to us at the time.

So what next?

Other small changes include making sure the radiator is turned down in our guest bedroom when it isn't in use. I've also installed Hive heating controller - whilst I don't like or recommend Hive, it does mean we can easily turn off the heating if we're out of the house. This is beneficial as our schedule can be unpredictable.

Some years ago we visited Cruachan power station, It's a stunning feat of engineering that can provide a huge amount of electricity to the UK grid, very quickly, on demand through hydro storage. Unleash the water to drive the turbines when you need power, and then pump it back up slowly overnight with surplus electricity. It was a clever way of meeting peak demand without building huge excess capacity. The example given was balancing the grid during the ad breaks in Coronation Street when half the country turned on their kettle at the same time.

It's brilliant, but... turn it on its head. Rather than attempting to have generation meet demand, instead regulate demand to the available generation capacity. It's the principle behind the old Economy 7 system that remotely turned on electric heating at times of lower demand, and charged less for that electricity.

In the past I've always switched to the cheapest energy provider, this time I looked at who I thought was the best and went with Octopus Energy (yes that's my referral link).

Octopus are at the innovative end of domestic smart-grid development and it's really exciting. If you have a compatible smart meter and know what you're doing, for the true nerd they have an agile tariff that tracks the wholesale electricity price and updates what you pay every 30 minutes. It won't surprise you that wholesale prices are high at peak demand and lower at other times. So if you have a load you can shift around such as heating water or charging an electric car, not only can you save money but you can help reduce the load on the grid. Right now I don't have the big load I can shift, but if it cost me much less to move my cooking time back by 40 minutes, I'd be likely to do that.

Another increasingly viable option is battery storage. Tesla were in the headlines a little while ago for their work installing the world's largest on-grid battery in Australia. The headline purpose was to provide power continuity on that part of Australia's grid - which is stretched out pretty thin. Worth noting however is Tesla make money from this by storing electricity when it's cheap, from renewables, and selling it when it's expensive, from fossil fuels.

We all ripped out old hot water tanks in favour of gas combi boilers, but they're going to make a come back. New, highly insulated, mains-pressure hot water tanks will become the standard. Heated by solar where possible and topped up with cheap off-peak electricity.

The next big change we're all going to make is the switch to electric vehicles. Right now they're either too expensive, not available, don't have the necessary range or a combination of these negative attributes but, crucially, they're being built and in increasingly large numbers.

I expect one, if not both of our cars will be fully electric in the next 18 months.

Lots has been said, mostly by those with a finger in the fossil fuels pie, about how electric vehicles will devastate our electricity grid and require new power stations and lots of nuclear and they'll make everything worse. This is designed to spread Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt among the public. It's all about holding back the inevitable.

Here's what's going to happen.

Everything will become electric. To heat our homes we'll eventually move from gas to heat-pump systems, though this will take a long time. Faster will be the return of the hot water tank, heated with off-peak electricity from the grid, or solar from your own roof.

Every daily driver vehicle will be electric, and these batteries can also provide buffer to the grid.

Those with room will install domestic battery systems to make the most of their roof solar.

Energy companies (Tesla has just applied to become a UK energy supplier) will build grid battery systems.

All this electricity will come from renewables.... eventually I really do think all of it will. Every last bit. We'll have enough generation capacity between solar and wind coupled with enough storage to make that work through the night and on the quiet days.

It's going to take time to get there, but I rather suspect it's going to happen quicker than most of us suspect.

Meanwhile I try to use as little energy as I can. I turn the heating down, I insulate (myself and my home), I don't drive unless it's necessary and I use an energy supplier that invests in renewables and at least lets me offset my gas use.