Have we all gone mad? Sometimes I fear we might. There are only three cars on the Ti long term fleet and, as of right now, they’re all electric. Steve Sutcliffe has his Polestar 2, Dan the Audi S e-tron GT and now this, a BMW i5 M60 Touring appeared just before Christmas and is to stay for a few months before being swapped for something else, not dissimilar in shape, but rather more so in spec – of which more in a moment. But for now, that’s the Ti fleet and not one drop of petrol, diesel, LPG or CNC flows through any of them.
Or perhaps it’s the world that’s gone mad – the fact we have reached this, er, interesting juncture without ever having planned it (why would we?) being indicative of the way that world has changed and how EVs are now our future, and ICE cars our past. Or maybe, just maybe, no one’s gone mad at all: do the lacklustre sales of EVs say more about their shortcomings, or merely a car-driving populace that knows what it likes and likes what it knows? Are we just in a process of painful adaptation on the far side of which we’ll look back and wonder what all the fuss was about? That’s what the months to come are all about.
Even so, I’ll not hide the fact that the consecutive days on which the Porsche 911 Carrera (whose final report we’ll publish in due course) left and the i5 arrived caused me to gulp a bit. Like this site, I’ve been told I’m EV-sceptic often enough to know that is how I’m perceived by many, and the fact that in both cases it’s complete nonsense doesn’t alter that. For the record the only cars both Ti and AF are against are boring cars and those that fundamentally fail to do the job for which they were designed. But this is the first EV I’ve run and as anyone who’s taken that particular leap off the 10-metre board will tell you, the moment it happens really does make you, well, there’s no better word for it: gulp.
