Welcome to BamfordRose and another forum chat. This week is the subject that I’ve seen discussed quite often. It’s the potential conversion of your car, maybe an early V8 or DB9 to full electronic. What a hideous thing that would be.

It always brings out quite an interesting debate. I’ve picked this up because at this moment in time it’s quite timely with legislators reckoning that by 2035, we’re going to be petrol and diesel-free on new car sales. It’s a bit optimistic. Pretty sure that’s not going to happen. Not my concern because I’m not in the industry. I don’t really care about that. All I care about are the cars that already exist and we combine petrol and parts for them. But anyway, there’s quite a lot of stuff, interesting stuff said in the particular chat about this one. I just wanted to bring one angle to it which no one has commented on in this particular chat and it doesn’t get commented on a lot generally.

But people doing electric conversions, so putting in a full-on battery pack. Now these battery packs are massive. They’ll be the whole underfloor of the car with their cooling and everything in on them. I worked at Jaguar Land Rover hybrid section and before you could even touch a car, you needed to go on several courses of electrification, so that you don’t fry yourself when touching one of these electric cars. So, pictures seen someone’s done at home conversion, they’ve got the battery pack, they’ve got the motors, the inverters, absolutely everything for it. They go barreling down the motorway. They’re involved in a hideous crash where the car is crumpled to pieces and then the emergency services people come along touch the frame of the car and get fried to death themselves. Now this is going to be a reality.

The first time this happens, unfortunately will happen, then there’ll be legislation out there that prevents the change of fuel type from petrol to electric and you won’t be able to at home convert which you seem to be able to do at the moment. It’s quite a huge conversion. I’m surprised there isn’t legislation already stopping it. Because people can go out and create all types of Mad Max creations that when they go wrong, they will kill people.

So, yeah, it’s amusing at the moment. Not least because electric vehicles have got their problems, I mean their problem is power density, the amount of energy per weight that is possible from each type of fuel. You take a liter of fuel, the weight that that takes, you take then an electric battery pack and the distance, in batteries, that you can go, that the one liter of petrol went and what weight that is in batteries. It sort of does not make sense in a passenger car at the moment. Petrol is still the clear winner.

But when you get out to trucks, now if we’re talking a car transporter that’s got umpteen cars on it, that is running at a maximum weight limit anyway. If the fuel source was going to be electric, then they’re going to have to sacrifice cargo for battery packs and they won’t be towing anywhere close to the amount of cars or weight that they tow now. And the whole idea of Airlines haulage going electric is just absolutely ludicrous, meaning that they’ve made the passenger car market go electric when all along it was all these forms of shipping, freight, aviation that was causing the biggest problems anyway.

But anyway, that’s not our concern because we just want to hoon around in Astons on petrol for as long as we possibly can. But I’m sure it won’t be an electrically converted one when that unfortunate first time, not in an Aston, when someone converts it and has an accident and it all goes horribly wrong.