SO, let me see if I've got this straight. [...] And what about all the guff we get in the world of motoring from the electric car lobby? The American government has pumped billions of dollars into research and every year the scientists roll up for more, saying they're nearly there.

Oh no they're not. There was a huge fanfare 10 years ago when BMW rolled up at some motor show with an electric car. But the trumpets soon turned into violins when, on a simple test drive, it shorted out and caught fire. Then there was General Motors and its absurd EV1. It'll do a million miles an hour, they said, and you need to recharge it only every 4,000 years.

Five hundred Californians were taken in and leased one, having been told that when the second-generation cars were available a year down the line, they would be upgraded at no extra cost. But when the new cars were launched, only 350 took up the offer. The rest went back to their Buicks.

* Electric cars are slow, ridiculously heavy, they run out of juice every 40 miles and, despite all the promises, there is still no infrastructure anywhere in the world for charging them up again. You have to trail a flex out of your sitting room window and across the pavement to wherever you've parked.

Imagine if everyone had to do that. Every road in London would be a cat's cradle of tangled cables. Old women would trip up. Prams would get stuck. Burglars would come through the window you'd left open overnight.

[...] It boils down to this simple fact. Give a scientist cash to spend and he'll get nowhere. But tell him that, if he solves the problem, he'll earn enough to buy an island and he'll come up with the solution in 20 minutes flat.