Listen to green Mr Bean: Rowan Atkinson’s talking sense about electric cars

Given he’s a trained engineer as well as a brilliant entertainer, when the Blackadder star says he feels ‘duped’ by electric vehicles, we should listen, writes Sean O’Grady

In the coming clampdown on motorists, Rowan Atkinson, like Captain Blackadder, is one of the first to go over the top (PA Archive)

All things considered, it’s just as well that it’s Rowan Atkinson, rather than, say, Jeremy Clarkson, who has cast a sceptical eye over the case for the electric car. Atkinson is, after all, a trained engineer as well as a brilliant entertainer, chooses his words carefully, and is universally appreciated. Jezza is far easier to dismiss.

More to the point, Atkinson is right. Just because a car is driven entirely by battery power, and thus doesn’t belch out tailpipe CO2 or any other emission, doesn’t necessarily mean it’s always going to be the greenest method of personal transportation.

The point Atkinson makes is a perfectly fair one: that a proper environmental accounting has to take in what you might call the total “well to wheel” factors in using a car with any new technologies – biofuels, synthetic fuels, the hydrogen fuel cell, solid-state battery electric vehicles and so on.