Perhaps it will be pretty ‘cool’ to drive electric cars

Most of us have grown up around cars and trucks that use petrol or diesel. In fact, many of us, especially those of us who consider ourselves petrolheads or gearheads, find it hard to imagine a ‘real’ car running on anything except fossil fuels.

After all, just how are we supposed to get our thrills if not by applying our right foot to generate forward motion, smoking tyres and an exhaust roar? At the moment, most people will struggle to imagine a time when we all enjoy cruising about in electric cars, especially as they make so little noise.

Part of the excitement of motorsports is the loud roar of high-performance, fire-breathing engines. Entire industries have been built around the need to produce exhaust notes that please, titillate or just plain terrify.

Electric cars have nothing inside to produce that noise. You just get in, switch on and go. There’s no fire or burning (hopefully) and there’s no noise of combustion to be routed from the engine to a tailpipe.

Another thing missing from electric cars is induction roar. Heard most clearly on older cars that use carburettors but also on higher-performance fuel-injected vehicles, induction roar is a mixture of sound from the rushing of air into the intakes and noise coming back out from the engine.

It’s a key component of the heady experience in sports cars and it’s missing from electric cars. So, it would be normal to wonder if we could ever get truly excited about driving an electric car.

Actually, it may well be possible. For decades, we’ve learned to live in ways that are greatly dependent on caring little or nothing for the environment.

How cool will it be finally to have the chance to cruise around in a high-performance vehicle that doesn’t pollute the environment with chemicals or noise? This might finally be the chance to drive something that resembles the swoopy, silent vehicles depicted in so many science-fiction books and films over the last few decades?

Two years ago, it might have seemed totally unrealistic. Last year, Electric Cars started to look like they might be kind of practical for a small group of people.

This year, the production of both hybrid and all-electric vehicles has really taken off, with new models being launched or announced by many of the world’s automakers.

Already, customers of car hire companies in North America and Europe have an impressive range of choices when it comes to hybrid and electric cars. This is helping to support the expansion of networks of charging points.

The easy availability of public charging points is incredibly important at the moment, as most electric cars can only drive for between 70 and about 100 miles on a single charge. In Europe, where average driving distances are much shorter than in North America, we’re likely to see faster, wider adoption of electric cars.

This is being helped by the rapid roll-out of public charging networks both in major European cities and in some inter-city areas. By next year, we might even begin to see teenage boys sticking posters of Electric Cars on their bedroom walls, replacing the old posters of Ferraris and Lamborghinis.