A new report out from the Concerned Consumer Panel makes interesting reading, not least because Populus (the research house that conducted the survey) seem somehow to have found an unusually optimistic group of people to question. Up to 61% of people think that in a decade they will be driving an environmentally friendly car of some kind. Most of those who think this have visions of themselves cruising around in an entirely new model – a car driven by electricity, liquified natural gas, or some kind of fuel cell.
Most of them are likely to be wrong. I asked an auto analyst this week, who has been covering the global industry for a decade, what he thought the car of the future might look like. “Much like the car of today,” he said, just with a diesel engine (see MoneyWeek’s report on why and how to invest in the diesel boom). The truth is that the odds of all of us driving around in carbon-neutral fuel-cell cars in 2017 are about the same as the odds were in 1997 of us all driving ‘sky cars’ today – much exaggerated but not really very high.
Of course, if the car drivers of the West really were going green, added my analyst friend, the car of tomorrow would look precisely like the car of today, just a little grubbier. Unless a car is emitting truly awful amounts of carbon (ie, it is more than around 15 years old), buying a new one is worse for the environment than continuing to drive the one you’ve got, once you’ve taken into account the mining, smelting and transport that goes into making a new one and getting it to you.
The other interesting statistic thrown up by the survey is that 27% of people think that in ten years’ time they won’t have a car at all. This, again, is pretty optimistic – to think you could get away without a car in a decade would be to think the next decade will be kinder to the public transport network than this one has been. Given the state of the public purse Gordon Brown has bequeathed to himself, I can’t see that being likely. The only reason why most people might find themselves without a car in 2017 is that they won’t be able to afford one.
According to accountants Grant Thorton, interest payments as a proportion of household income have hit a ten-year high. We have £1.325trn of personal debt on which we pay over £100bn a year in interest (that’s £1 in every £8 the average household spends on goods and services). Bankruptcies and house repossessions have soared over the last few months and there is increasing evidence that, with the odd exception, the middle classes are cutting back on big-ticket items (from horses to new carpets). And this miserable situation is on the verge of getting worse: most analysts see interest rates ending the year at at least 6%, something that isn’t going to do much for our struggling housing market. None of this is good news. I’m glad I’m not moving into number ten this week.