Against the Whir

I want to begin, as one always should, with a confession of interest. I am not a neutral party. I have stood at the edge of a racetrack and felt, through the soles of my shoes and the base of my spine, the arrival of twelve oversquare pots in a state of magnificent fury, and I am not prepared to pretend that this was morally equivalent to being overtaken by a refrigerator.

That, at bottom, is what we are being asked to accept. The electric car, that mobile sanctimony, that four-wheeled sermon, that appliance with pretensions, is presented to us not as one option among many but as the inevitable, the inescapable, the mandatory future. And the central fraud of the entire enterprise, the lie at the heart of the lithium, is this: that a machine which makes no sound when you demand everything of it can be called, in any meaningful sense, a car.

Floor the accelerator of an electric vehicle and what do you get? You get speed, certainly. Prodigious, vulgar, unearned speed — the speed of the lottery winner, the speed of the man promoted over your head for reasons nobody will explain. And you get it in silence. A faint whine, perhaps, as of a dentist’s drill approached from a great distance, or a milk float with ideas above its station. The thing simply… proceeds. It accelerates the way an email is sent. One moment you are here, the next moment you are there, and at no point in between has anything happened.

Compare, if you can bear the disparity, the internal combustion engine. Here is a device that operates by means of continuous, contained, rhythmic explosion. Thousands of tiny detonations per minute, a controlled riot, a permanent revolution under the bonnet. It is Promethean in the most literal sense: stolen fire, harnessed and made to sing. When you press the pedal of a proper car, you are not submitting a request to a battery-management algorithm. You are issuing a challenge, and the machine answers. It clears its throat. It gathers itself. It roars. And the roar is not an accident or an inefficiency, whatever the bloodless bureaucrats of the transport ministries may tell you. The roar is the point. It is the sound of matter being persuaded, of resistance being overcome, of physics being taken by the lapels. Man has been making fire shout on his behalf since he first crouched in a cave, and I decline to be told, at this late stage of the human story, that the shout was the problem.

And do please notice what the manufacturers of electric cars have been reduced to doing about this — it tells you everything. Aware that their products emit all the aural drama of a filing cabinet, they have taken to piping artificial engine noises through the loudspeakers. Synthesised growls. Digitally confected thunder. There are luxury electric saloons that will, at the touch of a button, pretend to be the very machines they were designed to abolish. One scarcely knows where to begin with this, except to say that it is the automotive equivalent of the vegetarian sausage: a product whose entire marketing proposition is its resemblance to the thing its purchasers claim to have renounced. If the roar is so primitive, so dispensable, so beneath the evolved sensibilities of the modern motorist, why fake it? A movement that must counterfeit the voice of its enemy has already conceded the argument. The prosecution rests, and indeed could have rested some time ago, but is enjoying itself.

Because, and here we approach the nub, the campaign for the electric car has never really been about transport. It is a religious movement, and like all Puritan religious movements it is principally concerned with the mortification of pleasure. Note the vocabulary. One does not merely buy an electric car; one converts. One is “saved”: a certain number of tonnes of carbon per annum, the modern indulgence, purchasable in advance and displayed on a dashboard screen like a papal receipt. The charging station is the wayside shrine, where the faithful congregate for a sacramental interval of enforced contemplation, sipping dreadful coffee and radiating the serenity of the elect. And, as with every faith worth the name, the true product is not salvation but superiority: the ineffable pleasure of gliding silently past a petrol station and pitying the sinners queuing within.

The silence, you see, is not incidental to this creed. It is doctrinal. The roar of an engine is exuberant, assertive, faintly disreputable — everything the new piety cannot abide. The electric car is quiet in the way that a Calvinist parlour is quiet. It is the Puritan’s carriage: it gets you to the meeting-house without the vulgarity of enjoyment en route. Its very torque delivery is sanctimonious: instant, frictionless, and utterly without narrative. A great petrol engine builds its case like an orator: the low muttering introduction, the gathering argument of the mid-range, the shattering peroration at the redline. An electric motor simply states its conclusion and sits down. It is the difference between Cicero and a man holding up a placard that says “PERSUADED YET?”

I shall now be accused (I can hear the tapping of keyboards, themselves suspiciously quiet) of not caring about the planet. Allow me to spoil the fun by conceding the obvious. Yes, the climate is a serious business. Yes, the age of oil has filled the coffers of some of the most poisonous despotisms on earth, and no one who has watched theocratic tyrants grow fat on petroleum revenues can be sentimental about the stuff itself. If the electric car’s partisans confined themselves to these arguments, they would have my respectful attention. But they do not so confine themselves. They insist on the further claim — the faintly totalitarian claim — and yes, I realise we have travelled some distance from the showroom — that we shall not only drive their appliances but love them. That we shall discover the whir to be superior to the roar. That the deletion of passion is itself a form of progress. It is not enough, with these people, that you comply; you must be seen to rejoice. Winston Smith did not merely obey Big Brother, you will recall. The requirement was that he love him. I can, at a pinch, be regulated. I cannot be compelled to applaud.

For the roar is not noise pollution. The roar is biography. Every man and woman of a certain age can summon it at will: the first time an uncle dropped a gear on an open road and the car seemed to inhale; the borrowed keys; the engine turning over on a cold morning like an old dog deciding, once again, to be loyal. Nobody — I want to insist upon this — nobody will ever stand misty-eyed in a garage and say to a grandchild, “Listen… she still hums at exactly the frequency of a router restarting.” The internal combustion engine gave the human race a century of song: the flat-plane shriek, the V8’s baritone, the two-stroke’s disgraceful cackle, the diesel’s honest labour. The electric future offers us instead one note, and that note is the dial tone.

They tell me resistance is futile, and here at last they may have a point, though not the one they intend. Resistance is precisely what is being abolished: the resistance of the gearbox, of the pistons, of the crankshaft, of the citizen. The electric car is merely the first appliance of a world in which everything works perfectly and nothing means anything; in which all our thunder is synthesised, all our fire is battery-safe, and all our journeys are emissions of pure compliance.

Very well. Take the pistons; history, that ironist, is probably on your side. But let the record of the proceedings show that one voice, at least, declined to call the silence music. When the last petrol engine is finally switched off, in some museum, no doubt, before a small crowd of the mildly curious, listen closely to that terminal cough and rumble. It will be the sound of the twentieth century clearing its throat for the last time, having been asked, politely but firmly, to keep it down.

And then the whir. Forever the whir.

The defence, your honours, does not rest. The defence revs.