Ginny Smith interviews Robert Llewellyn
Electric cars? They're rubbish aren't they?! Nothing but glorified golf carts that take forever to charge and then run out of power on the way to the shops. Try finding somewhere to charge them. They cost a fortune to buy and another fortune to replace the battery when its range drops to half after 500 miles. You don't want to believe all that nonsense about them being environmentally-friendly. They are actually worse than petrol-powered cars because the batteries are made from dirty lithium and use electricity made from dirtier coal. There isn't even enough lithium in the world to make all the new batteries we'd need anyway. Electric cars are just rubbish. Aren't they? - Robert says no. This evening he'll tell us why he thinks we need to put away our prejudices and think seriously about electric vehicles as the future of transport.Robert Llewellyn is an actor, writer, comedian, TV presenter and self-described wishy-washy liberal best known for playing the android Kryten in the long-running BBC sci-fi sitcom Red Dwarf. He presented Scrapheap Challenge for 10 years and these days he can be seen on TV presenting the shows CarPool on Dave and How Do They Do It? on Channel 5. He is probably the UK's most prominent advocate of electric vehicles (EV) and presents a YouTube-based show called Fully Charged that documents current developments in the electric vehicle industry. In February 2012 he debated the motion "This House Believes Electric Cars are the Future of Transport" at the Oxford Union. The motion was carried.