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Post by RedMoon11 on Jul 13, 2018 10:17:12 GMT
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Post by RedMoon11 on Feb 6, 2019 7:04:32 GMT
DRIVING James May
The May Review: Alpine A110
The mountain goat with turbo hooves
Double take: the new Alpine 110 harks back to the 1960s-70s version, below
The Sunday Times, 3 February 2019
Every time I open the garage door and see my Alpine A110, I feel a slight frisson of annoyance. I’ve never liked retro styling on modern cars, simply because it never quite works.
The design language of a former era doesn’t square with modern legislative requirements — crashworthiness, mainly — so, like other retro cars such as the Ford Mustang, Fiat 500 and Alfa Romeo 4C, the Alpine looks a bit like a classic car that’s been turned into a novelty computer mouse. Or perhaps a car-shaped comfort blanket for people who can’t move on.
But move on we must. I never drive old cars — by which I mean anything made before this century — because on the whole they are a huge disappointment, except in two regards: they are smaller and lighter than modern equivalents. Famous examples include the Volkswagen Golf, the Porsche 911 and the “entry-level” Rolls-Royce.
While it is true that smallness and lightness in old cars tend to translate into instant death in an accident, when combined with 21st-century engineering these attributes confer remarkable benefits. We’ll come on to those in the “physics bit” in a minute. The French-made Alpine is, per se, not a radical idea. It’s a mid-engined, two-seat sports car. The layout has obvious disadvantages, most notably in rear visibility and luggage space, but it immediately renders a car magical because of the way it enhances driving dynamics. In that respect, the Alpine bears comparison to my Ferrari 458 Speciale. The Ferrari is more beautiful, because the maker has always styled cars for their day, which is why they become classics. It is also a lot more powerful, with almost 600bhp against the French upstart’s 248bhp. The Fezza has a V8, the Alpine a hot-hatch four-pot. The 458 is naturally aspirated, but the Alpine is turbocharged, which immediately elicits cries of despair from those people who can’t move on. More important than any of this is that the Alpine is almost 300kg lighter than the Ferrari, which in layman’s terms is like removing a Harley-Davidson Fat Boy from the boot. It’s interesting to note that the weight difference between the Alpine and the Ferrari is greater than the weight saving achieved by the 458 Speciale over the standard 458 Italia, which just goes to show that a truly lightweight car has to be designed that way from the start. It can’t be properly achieved with a few changes of material and throwing away the nice bits of interior trim. This brings us to the optional physics bit.
THE PHYSICS BIT
Most people accept that low weight improves acceleration and fuel economy. What is less well understood is that the effects of excess weight are compounded in corners, which is where we seek our fun.
The best way I’ve devised for explaining all this is to imagine you’re holding a ladder, horizontally, at a point in the middle, and you try to turn round, as if you were in a rubbish Laurel and Hardy sketch and the far end of the ladder were going to clout the buttocks of a lady bending over to smell a flower.
Instinct tells you that it’s harder to turn around with a heavy old wooden ladder than it is with a lightweight aluminium one. This is because of so-called rotational inertia, which can be thought of as the reluctance of things to turn. Reducing the car’s weight is like swapping the wooden ladder for an aluminium one.
I could go on — and shall. Imagine you hang a large pot of paint at each end of your aluminium ladder. It becomes harder to turn again. But now hang the same two pots of paint in the middle, where your hand is holding the ladder. Now it’s easier to turn. The combined ladder and paint pots still weigh the same, but you are now feeling the benefits of mass centralisation, which is why the mid-engined layout exists: it moves the heavy bits (engine and occupants) towards the centre of the ladder, which is now a sports car and more wieldy as a result.
NORMAL ARTICLE RESUMES
Having achieved the low weight, we can now, to bastardise the famous Colin Chapman quote, add smallness. The Alpine is almost 15½in shorter than the Ferrari and, more tellingly (since the width of the road is the issue, not the length), 6in narrower.
It’s a sad fact that most current supercars are too wide to be enjoyed in the environment where they should be at their best, which is a winding back road. Too many times the reverie of Ferrari ownership has been spoilt by having to wince my way between a medieval stone wall and an oncoming lorry.
But 6in is half a school ruler’s worth of extra space, and it’s all in the middle of the road, because you still drive with your nearside wheels in the same place relative to the kerb. The observed effect of the Alpine’s compactness is that the road is bigger, rather in the way that Richard Hammond has a larger house than most of us because he’s smaller.
From here on, the benefits of the Alpine’s ruthless size and weight paring come thick and fast. Less weight means a smaller engine, which takes up less space, aiding compactness. The tyres can now be more modest, which improves steering feel and makes the loss of grip more progressive. The brakes don’t need to be too big, so unsprung weight is reduced and the ride is improved. The fuel bills plummet and so do insurance costs. It goes on and on.
The net result, as they say in the army, is a genuinely delightful car. It feels faster than it really is, because it’s so responsive. The interior is not as plush as a Porsche Cayman’s, but it avoids that depressing track-special aura felt in cars where weight-saving has been a desperate measure. It’s fully equipped and connected.
It’s also good humoured, despite being French and therefore a bit philosophical. My favourite feature is the digital gear display, which at night is anointed with tiny stars. As you change gears, the new numbers rush forward from deep space, like the Starship Enterprise coming out of warp drive.
Look, the 458 Speciale will mince the A110 round a circuit. Its top speed and 0 to 62mph figures are better. But the real world of blind bends, unknown roads and stuff coming the other way reminds us that cars are not spreadsheets; they are performative events, like music.
Of course the 458 is more magical — it’s a special-edition Ferrari, after all. It’s ultimately more exciting. But the Alpine is exciting more of the time.
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Post by RedMoon11 on Jun 4, 2020 7:34:02 GMT
CYCLING
James May: scrap HS2 and buy us all a bike
After several blissful weeks riding along car‑free city streets, May has come up with a plan: take the billions being spent on the new rail link and use it to start a proper two‑wheeled revolution
James May
Sunday 31 May 2020
May with his Giant TCR Advanced 2 bike
As a teenager, my dream bicycle ride was probably a typical one. I would be taken, in a van, to somewhere like the top of the Cairngorms to enjoy a whole sublime day of exclusively downhill riding on my five-speed, pig-iron Raleigh racer. We thought about this, me and my mates. It would be, as Philip Larkin said, “everyone young going down the long slide / To happiness, endlessly.”
It never happened, of course. The memories are all of screaming calf muscles and the dull report of a back tyre, already worn down to its canvas, finally unburdening itself of its inner tube and stranding me with a flat. But I still love a bike, and haven’t been without at least one since I was three.
I maintain the bicycle is one of humankind’s greatest inventions, because all it really does is empower the pedestrian. It transforms the pummelling ugliness of walking into smooth and unstressed rotary motion, just as the pistons and crankshaft of a car engine do, and improves the efficiency of the human machine.
As individuals and societies, our thirst for geographical liberty starts with bicycles — the history of many of our car companies is rooted in them — and riding one immediately reunites you with the innocence and optimism of childhood.
As a younger man, I could easily ride 70 or 100 miles in a day, and did, all over Britain and France. These days, it’s more like riverside jaunts to rewarding pub suppers, and probably not enough of them — the bike rides, I mean — if we’re honest.
Then something interesting happened. The lockdown came with a qualifier: you could go out walking, running or cycling, once a day. So I immediately bought a new bike, which was a bit self-indulgent, as I already had one.
But this is the best bike I’ve ever had: a Giant TCR Advanced 2, which has a frame designed by Mike Burrows, who also designed the Lotus bike that carried Chris Boardman to victory in the individual pursuit at the 1992 Olympics. It came highly recommended by Cycling Weekly magazine and, more importantly, in a really good metallic red.
This is not a cheap bike — it’s got a carbon frame, you know — but neither is it in the you-could-have-had-a-decent-car-for-that range. It’s more in the bottom bracket of posh bikes. I’ve ridden it every day since, except one, when I was laid low by chronic gut rot bought on by isolation cooking experiments with Thai-style spicy lime prawns (the recipe for which is in my upcoming cookbook, although I’ve just realised that’s a very bad plug).
I’ve devised a series of round-robin local routes of between six and 10 miles, which I try to ride vigorously, and I have to admit I haven’t felt so healthy in years. Cycling really is good for you.
It’s also fascinating for a driver, because many of the concepts we find difficult in understanding cars — the difference between power and torque, the point of gearing, centre of gravity, unsprung weight, blah, blah, blah — are thrown into perfect clarity out on a ride, as no machine engages with its user as feverishly as a bicycle does.
After a month or so of this, I experienced the greatest bike ride of my life; better, even, than the imagined Cairngorms descent. I was required to report to a studio in Soho, central London, for voiceover work on the upcoming Grand Tour special (something we genuinely can’t do from home).
It was an odd experience: I entered the building and the recording booth alone, spoke to the producer remotely, only vaguely glimpsed the sound engineer through 2in of germ-proof glass and never even saw Richard Hammond or Jeremy Clarkson. Maybe we should always do it like this.
I made the six-mile journey on my bike, and that was an even odder experience; the capital at the quietest I’ve known it, and by a long, long way. By the time I left, the sun hung in view, and I decided on a wantonly circuitous route home, taking in much of the West End, Park Lane, various monuments, the park, Buckingham Palace and a couple of famous bridges.
It was utterly idyllic, the whole fabulous cityscape sluiced in sunlight, uncorrupted air and almost complete silence, seemingly there for the pleasure of the hundreds of cyclists exploiting an unprecedented and unrepeatable opportunity.
Off-the-shoulder number: James May with a Peugeot racer
To save you the bother in the comments section, I’m aware of the piquancy here. I’ve spent 25 years making a living writing about driving and I’m admitting that this was a joy mainly because there were hardly any cars.
This, though, is the dream of the government, which is committing £2bn to “deliver” improved cycling and walking, but only £10m to create infrastructure for electric vehicles, which seems about as significant as a fart in a pandemic.
I’m unsure about how to improve walking, which seems to have been sorted for a long time, and I remain cynical about convoluted attempts to build bicycle lanes, because they often end up confusing and ignored. I’m also unclear about how a bicycle lane can “pop up”, though I wish to boast that my idea — first posited 20 years ago — of turning London’s Tube network into an underground bike super-highway is starting to look prescient.
We must also acknowledge that bicycles have their limitations in a fast-paced, competitive and recovering economy. They’re great for short commutes and local light shopping; less good if you work in a city but are forced to live 30 miles away because the houses are too expensive. They’re also not good if you have to pick up a new vase, or in January.
But it’s a lovely vision, and it should start — like most things — with a mindset. That means it should start with bikes. All this talk of bicycle repair vouchers is encouraging; bliss it is in this extraordinary dawn to own a bicycle repair shop (I know a man who does, and he’s looking very happy), but how about a new bike?
This got me thinking: £2bn is a lot of money. To that, we can add the £80bn projected to be spent on the HS2 high-speed rail link , which is going to be even more unpopular now only four people will be allowed in a carriage. All that cash could buy every adult in Britain a carbon-frame bike.
Numerous politicians and philosophers in recent history have said that when an insurgent group or rebel nation emerges, we shouldn’t call in airstrikes. We should drop crates of brand new Cadillacs and televisions on them.
People are restless. They want change. So come on, Boris Johnson — you’ve long been known as the bike man. Bomb us with bicycles.
★ MAY’S TOP BIKE TIPS
Buy the right type
I like so-called road bikes, but you might be better suited to a mountain bike, a hybrid or even something that will allow you to moonlight for the local butcher. You won’t enjoy cycling if your bike doesn’t suit you, your build and your riding style (see our guide overleaf).
Maintain it properly
I’m constantly dumbfounded by the number of smart bikes I see being ridden in an appalling condition, grinding and clunking like a toolbox in a spin-dryer. Bicycle maintenance isn’t difficult, and can be achieved with a handful of tools and 10 minutes’ research on YouTube.
Pump up the tyres every few days
If your tyres are soft, you’re wasting energy, which means wasting food and time. The bike will be faster and handle much more crisply with properly hard tyres.
Learn to use the gears
In technical terms, the powerband of the cyclist is very narrow, like a really bad diesel engine. That’s why modern bikes have lots of gears. If you don’t use them, they’re excess weight.
Wear a helmet
I resisted this for years, thinking it was the first step towards the back-door regulation of cycling, which I oppose vehemently. But helmets are now so universal that not wearing one makes you look like someone making a tiresome point.
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Post by RedMoon11 on Sept 1, 2020 7:07:31 GMT
The James May Review: Ferrari F8
Forget what the kids say, this is top banana
James May Sunday 16 August 2020
Some of the cars in the nine-model history of the mid-engine two-seater V8 Ferrari look good in the default Rosso Corsa (Racing Red); the original 308 GTB, for example, or the 360. Others have looked much better in dark blue — the F355 and the 458 in Blu Tour de France. Every single one of them, however, in any iteration, has looked absolutely knockout in yellow. Perhaps it is because yellow is Ferrari’s brand colour, while red is merely Italy’s racing colour. Or it may be because my first car was yellow, but since that was a Mk 1 Vauxhall Cavalier with no hubcaps and a stoved-in offside rear door, I doubt it. Admittedly, my current Ferrari is orange, but only because the previous one was yellow and I wanted to make sure the neighbours recognised that I had a new one. Anyway, I maintain that it’s impossible to be glum when driving a mid-engine Ferrari, especially a yellow one. And such it was, the new F8 in Giallo Modena — and the Spider at that. Then something odd happened. 
I stopped at a zebra to let a group of young lads cross. One of them paused midway, his face a mask of astonishment, and proclaimed to his mates: “Hey, look, a yellow Ferrari convertible! That’s sh*t!” He continued to the other side and said it again. “That’s so sh*t!” I had the roof down and I think I was meant to hear.
Now I have some difficulty keeping up with youth-speak, and it may be that “sh*t” is now employed antonymically, just as “wicked”, “bad”, and “sick” are if you’re still a bit last Wednesday on the argot calendar. But I wasn’t convinced.
Could it be that we have reached a point in the continuing reassessment of the world that a 10-year-old boy — the mirror of my former self, right down to the obviously home-built bicycle and domestic haircut — thinks that a yellow Ferrari is bad (accepted meaning)?
I resolved to remain unglum. I thought it was top banana. What we have here, although Ferrari wouldn’t want me to put it this way, is an elaborate facelift of the 488. Very successful it is too, despite the initial fear that the whole thing is now too angular. The profile of the nose is especially pleasing, as are the concave rear light lenses, which invoke some forgotten confectionery and which I fondled, unwaveringly, for a good five minutes.
The interior is also a step up, with nicer finishes on the switchgear. The number of buttons has proliferated and there is even more fantasy Formula One nonsense on the steering wheel, while the arrangement of, and access to, the information on the two screens remains faintly illogical, though in a rather knowing way that makes owners feel as if they are members of a secretive decoding cell — a sort of Bletchley Park of supercar expertise.
If we must henceforth live in bubbles, this is as good as any. Smells nice too. But, and as in every Ferrari I’ve driven, the radio is rubbish (by which I actually mean “rubbish”).
The roof bothers me a bit as well. The way it unfurls is a masterpiece of whatever the reverse of origami is, and this can be done on the move at town speeds — if you want the starving post-apocalypse mob to pelt you with fruit and veg too putrid even for it to consider.
Also, the roofless Fezza reveals itself, on some roads, to be a lot less than perfectly rigid. That little shudder through the aluminium chassis and the squawks from the upholstery are, in a surgically honed instrument of driving precision, a bit like fitting a fresh scalpel blade to a rubber handle. I’m unmoved in my long-held view: you should have a convertible, or you should have a Ferrari. I’d have the latter.
Still — and as the company founder himself once protested — all this stuff is thrown in gratis. You’re paying your £220,000-plus for the engine, and the twin-turbo 3.9-litre V8 suggests the world of internal combustion will end with anything but a whimper.
This, now the “standard” V8 engine, is actually the one from the track-focused 488 Pista, which remains my favouritest Ferrari. In fact the F8 can be considered a more civilised route to owning that car. Excellent. Although there is a caveat.
The engine produces 114bhp more, and tops out 1000rpm lower, than the clapped-out old atmospheric donkey in my 458 Speciale. That means, in simple terms, that more energy is being crammed into a smaller box, which must mean a bigger explosion. And so it turns out.
Despite Ferrari’s meticulous efforts to manage the torque electronically in each gear — which, to be honest, has been done largely to placate an old guard wedded to normally aspirated engines — the delivery is pretty brutal.
What I’m trying to say is that I’d be wary of giving it maximum wellington in the damp at something like the exit to a small roundabout — as I did — because then you will arrive at another usage of “banana”, as a verb, oft heard in the discussion of penalty shoot-outs. Actually, it was more like several bananas arranged end-to-end in alternating directions of curvature, and then the bigger boy cried “sh*t!” and definitely meant it.
It’s utterly intoxicating, though. The delivery is completely linear, with absolutely no lag, no ugly peakiness; in fact, nothing that has historically defined the high-performance turbo petrol engine. The enormous butt-kick is accessible everywhere, and adds to the general joy.
Complaints? Only the regular one about size, and especially width. As usual, the V8 mid-engine Ferrari is an inch or two wider than its predecessor, but it is a trend that has been going on over nine models and 45 years, and, as with compound interest, it now adds up to quite a lot. You’ll understand this if you’ve still to pay off a bank loan you took out when the 308 GTB was launched in 1975.
I just wish Ferrari would make something like this but a bit smaller. The scenic and inviting B-roads around my West Country hobbity bolthole haven’t been widened since Thomas Hardy was wandering around them with his I-Spy book of birds. The excessive width, and the occasional tramlining from the overfat tyres, quite simply spoils it.
But that’s it. I hope I was wrong about the boy on the zebra crossing, but if I wasn’t, well, I’m prepared to suspend my efforts to be in touch with the sensibilities of the young. This is still a yellow mid-engine Ferrari, one of the most enticing artefacts humankind has produced, and we should enjoy it while we can, either from within or gazing upon it from without, and in any colour.
Relax, everyone. It’s well bad, innit.
The Mayometer
Ferrari F8 Spider
Engine
3902cc, V8, twin turbo, petrol
Power
711bhp @ 8000rpm
Torque
568 Ib ft @ 3250rpm
Acceleration
0-62mph: 2.9sec
Top speed
211mph
Fuel / CO2
21.7mpg / 296g/km
Weight
1,400kg
Price
£225,897
Release date
On sale now
James’s rating
★★★★☆
● Head to head
Ferrari F8 Spider v McLaren 720S Spider
Price
Ferrari F8 Spider: £225,897
McLaren 720S Spider: £237,000
Power
Ferrari F8 Spider: 711bhp
McLaren 720S Spider: 710bhp
0-62mph
Ferrari F8 Spider: 2.9sec
McLaren 720S Spider: 2.9sec
Top speed
Ferrari F8 Spider: 211mph
McLaren 720S Spider: 212mph
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Post by RedMoon11 on Nov 22, 2020 8:32:58 GMT
James May on the Tesla Model S: ‘It’s polite, the costs are low and it feels progressive’
Sunday 15 November 2020
James May, 57, presenter of The Grand Tour, drives a Tesla Model S COURTESY OF JAMES MAY
I’m not one of those Tesla evangelists. I like mine — a Model S 100D Long Range — and electric motoring has much to commend it. It’s polite, the day-to-day costs are low and it feels progressive, even magical. But I’m not blind to its shortcomings.
The S is nothing like as robustly built as my Toyota fuel cell car, and at times it feels something of a novelty item. It’s also a bit too big for UK use (the Model 3 is much better in both these respects) and, even by present standards, comes in a dreary range of colours. But it does have the longest range of any electric car now on sale, which is why I bought it. There are millions of reasons for choosing a conventional car, but electric cars are bought because they’re electric, and range is what worries people.
Should it worry us? It’s not actually the main issue, which I’ll come on to. The Teslerati maintain that most people don’t drive very far, so can enjoy the convenience of charging at home overnight, which is cheap and removes the need to stop at petrol stations. If you drive for 300 miles, as mine can on a full charge, then you’re ready for a break and can replenish the battery with one of Tesla’s excellent superchargers while you use the loo and have a cheeseburger. This is good logic, but actually nonsense.
It presupposes you will reach 300 miles as you arrive at a supercharger, which is highly unlikely. Despite the figures bandied around, Britain has very few superchargers and they might not be where you want them. Conventional public chargers are woefully slow. And there aren’t that many of them, either.
So, regular commuter with off-street parking? Go electric, because it’s the logical choice. Travelling all over the country selling encyclopaedias? I urge caution. You will end up recharging because you can, rather than because you’ve exhausted your range, and if you stray from the main roads you will find yourself going the supercharger route, rather than directly.
For example, even when I am allowed into Wales, I will have difficulty touring the country by Tesla. I should also point out that if you have to resort to a conventional domestic socket, a full charge of my S takes two days. That’s not lovely.
A short-range electric car would not be a problem if it could be recharged quickly and everywhere, but this isn’t yet possible. So we look for long range. But range is not the real issue, and neither is the capacity of the grid or the origin of the electricity. The issue is the charging technology and infrastructure.
There was a similar problem with petrol in the early days of the car. Demand and supply have to chivvy each other along. Cars driven by electric motors are definitely the way forward. But we mustn’t kid ourselves about the readiness of the battery electric car to take on the world. Driving one still feels like being part of a beta focus group.
TESLA MODEL S
Paid £86,150
Miles driven 7,000
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Post by dit on Jun 15, 2022 19:06:02 GMT
14th June 2022
James May loves his e-scooter but admits it’s not the urban mobility revolution some claim
They're a great advert for the bicycle, it seems
James May has, for the past year and a half, been breaking the law by riding his privately-owned electric scooter on the road, on footpaths and in cycle lanes, and in doing so feels like he’s “beating the system”.
Writing in The Sunday Times Magazine at the weekend, the host of The Grand Tour said that he bought his electric scooter (a Xiaomi Mi Pro 2 from Halfords) on the strict understanding that it was for use only on privately owned land, but because he didn’t have any of that and because riding it around the house annoys his partner, he’s been doing it on the public highway anyway.
Spin policy chief says Britain could be a world centre for e-scooters
“But you would, wouldn’t you?” he said. “Because it’s little more than an adjunct to walking, and very much, as has often been said of small urban buses, hop on, hop off. It feels like beating the system and it is, because it’s a powered vehicle and therefore should be registered.”
May believes trying to police the use of e-scooters is futile (“you may as well legislate against people trying to say words when burping” and pointed out that the government is getting on-board, with trials of rental scooters and with legislation changes that may soon make it possible to ride private e-scooters on the road.
At present in the UK, an electric scooter can only be used on the public road (but not a footpath or motorway) if it’s hired from an approved company such as Lime, Spin, Voi, Wind or Bird, and covered by the company’s insurance.
Flagrant criminality notwithstanding, May enjoys e-scootering, claiming it’s something akin to using one of the futuristic inventions — such as hover boots — the public was promised back in the seventies.
“The electric scooter is one of the things — along with the iPad, streaming TV and internet porn — that I’d like to gather up from my adult life and take with me back to my teenage years,” he said.
Referring to the computer pioneer whose 1985 electrified C5 tricycle was once hailed as a revolution in personal urban transport only to rapidly become a by-word for corporate flop, May said: “I’d show it to Sir Clive Sinclair, to reassure him that his vision of simple electric urban mobility was spot on, and that he’d just got the vehicle wrong,”
History of electric cars - sinclair c5
He admits, however, that, like the C5, his e-scooter is not quite as practical or drawback-free as the seamless experience might lead onlookers to believe. Riding it, May said, feels precarious.
“The wheels are very small and some of the holes are quite big. There’s no front brake, only a bit of regeneration from the motor mounted in the front wheel, and the cable-operated rear disc is snatchy. The wheelbase is obviously short and those with an understanding of motorcycle geometry will recognise from the picture that there’s a bit of rake but no trail worth talking of, so steering does not feel as natural as it does on a bike. A ‘get-off’ always feels imminent.”
One such “get-off” occurred for May one evening after a visit to his fellow Grand Tour host, Richard Hammond.
“At some point I met a ridge or kerb that my Brompton [folding bicycle] would have handled easily, going at a fair lick, and for several yards I continued the journey sans scooter and relying entirely on one of Monty Python’s silly walks, with added jazz hands. I was lucky not to knock myself out on a tree.”
May isn’t alone either — in 2021 the Metropolitan Police reported 510 casualties involving e-scooters in London with nine deaths in England, Scotland and Wales last year.
Transport Committee launches e-scooter enquiry
Added to its lack of stability is a general lack of practicality, which limits its use somewhat and is one of the reasons why May believes that a rental, rather than ownership, model works best.
“A backpack full of groceries doesn’t help stability, and it’s difficult to secure when parked. It folds flat, but it’s a bit too heavy to carry around the shop with you at 14kg — the weight of a kitted-out hybrid city bike. This is why the rental idea works so well. You swipe your card, hop on, scoot to your next tourist attraction or whatever, hop off and it’s immediately someone else’s problem.”
May does concede, however, that few are claiming the electric scooter to be a genuine revolution in urban travel and that really “they’re a bit of a laugh and yet another obvious application of the recent advances in battery and motor tech. This is fun, first and foremost, with usefulness as a bonus.” Even living in London, he said, he uses his a lot less than he expected.
James May: spend the HS2 money on bikes
For everyday use, he said, the bicycle represents a better bet for urban use.
“Ah, the bicycle. Did I ever mention that it was a brilliant invention? It still is — and it’s making more sense than ever.”
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