Chemistry lessons

Another day, another breathless press release arrives giving details of an experimental battery showing great promise on a bench somewhere in the world. What is it today? Lithium and jam? Bakelite and penguin?

Invariably the gush is that these cells are going to revolutionise the technology, recharge in a single shake of a lamb’s tail, last forever and cost peanuts.

It’s enough to make you want to cancel your order for a Taycan, or just give up on EVs for a few years yet until these whizzy new technologies come on stream. Many have already come to that conclusion, and the widening disparity between heavily subsidised EV fleet sales compared with those to private individuals shows a worrying disenchantment with battery technology as folk wonder whether there’s something better just round the corner.

So should you put off buying an EV? Like most rhetorical questions posed by journalists, it depends.