Synthetic Fuels vs Electric Cars: Can Old Cars Stay on the Road

Does it, I regularly sit in

pubs and say to people, "Oh, yeah, well,

because, you

know, the synthetic fuel."

"What?" "Where we can

make petrol." "What?

What, with oil?" "No.

You just capture carbon,

which you can capture

direct from source, manufacture.

The ethanol industry produces a lot of it.

Capture it at the chimney, you've got your carbon.

Hydrogen you

crack using renewable energy from water.

Combine it, you've got hydrocarbon.

That's petrol,

and 1.4 billion cars can stay on the road

and don't have to be remade."

And that technology's

been there for decades.

Yeah.

And at the same time,

"Oh, yeah, we've all got to go

electric." Mm,

where are the

resources gonna come

from? We're gonna cede

global power entirely to

China.

They don't work in many

applications. They

work brilliantly in some.

I'm a big fan of electric

cars, but the technology is moving at such a

rate, telling some

25-year-old who lives in a

town and does

3,000 miles a year, "You've got to

go and find 45 grand to spend on a Kia now,

electric, that you won't

be able to charge out of

your house, and that will be

worth 10 grand next year when

the technology's completely

outdated,"

is idiotic.

Yeah.

Actually saying to them,

"Best thing you could do is go and buy a

Mark II Fiesta.

It'll be really cool and retro.

Get it beautifully restored and run it.

If you can run it on synthetic, that

is the greenest thing you could do."

But the new Top Gear-

Low-carbon footprint

... should it, should, does it need to try and do that-

Yeah

... and tell that story?

It's the bit somebody,

that, that somebody needs to be...

If, if only what we

really need as a nation

is, like, a,

a national broadcaster that

can, in an unbiased sense,

gift us, the populace,

with the information we need to make

important and

informed decisions.

I wish there was such an institution,

'cause my God, it would be

useful. Right now, cars need-