The Richard Spooner Column: Watt a week�
It 's been an electrifying week in every sense of the word. First we had the news that car manufacturers are moving to all-electric; then the City of Coventry announces it 's hoping to build a huge gigafactory; then, on a rather smaller scale, my own car announces that its battery is going flat.
The very name gigafactory sound as if it 's going to be ginormous and Coventry realise they are going to need a pretty damn big piece of land to build this monster. So they are proposing to build it at their airport.
We haven 't been told if there will still be room for planes to be able to take off and, more importantly, land. But there is bags of room there since they sadly had to end commercial scheduled passenger flights for various reasons.
First opened in 1936 as Baginton Aerodrome, Coventry Airport has a great history. It has been used for general aviation, flight training, and commercial freight and passenger flights, as well as being a World War II fighter airfield. And in 1982, Pope John Paul II celebrated Mass there with a crowd of around 350,000 on his only UK visit.
So should Coventry be lucky enough to become the home of one of these gig-factories, they need look no further than Tesla 's factory near Reno, Nevada, for a few tips on what it should look like.
This giant factory makes lithium-ion battery and electric vehicle components and is owned and operated by Tesla Inc, supplying battery packs for the company's electric vehicles (except for its made-in-China vehicles).
What a marvellous asset this huge plant would be should a similar plant in Coventry become reality. It could create around 4,000 jobs.
Back to my own battery experience. I recently bought a new car. New to me but about 12 months old. Lovely British-built vehicle that even has a heated steering wheel, probably the clincher when I was thinking of buying it. Not quite all-electric but full of gizmos operated electrically and very eco-friendly.
Among a mass of information delivered to my dashboard, the car started telling me my battery was flat and that I should re-start the engine. Now when I bought my first British car hundreds of years ago - a Triumph Spitfire Mark II, since you ask - you should definitely not try to start it if they battery was dodgy. It would just get flatter and wouldn 't start an electric razor. .
But today 's cars are so clever, they tell you well in advance if there is a chance of your battery going flat and it did behave perfectly when I re-started it. The only trouble was you had to keep the engine running to have enough power to open the tailgate.
When I called, the dealers could not have been more helpful and the problem was fixed in a trice when they fitted a new battery. The vehicle is only giving me positive information now.
Long may that be so�
All of this reminded me about that Spitfire. It was red, had wire wheels and a hard as well as a soft top. The only difference between it and a Triumph Herald was the lovely body shape and twin carburettors (not sure if today 's cars still have them. A bottle of cheap plonk for the first person to tell me. Normal ChamberlinkDaily competition rules apply).
It did have a habit of stalling when you stopped at traffic lights. But unlike today 's clever vehicles, this wasn 't a planet-saving piece of engineering. The engine just stopped and you would frantically try to re-start it as drivers queuing behind you became increasingly angry.
And the result? Yes, a flat battery�