What the Super Bowl told us about where we’re heading
If the tens of millions of Americans who spent Sunday afternoon watching the Super Bowl learned anything from the continual advertising breaks interrupting play it was that the future of the automobile industry is electric. Almost all the car brands trying to get their message over did so with vehicles powered exclusively by batteries: gone is the nonsense of hybrids, plug-in or not, which were never anything more than a sop to the consciences of guilt-ridden petrol heads.
The fact that just about every automotive manufacturer in a country like the United States is advertising EVs has greater significance than it appears when seen from from Europe: the country that has clung the longest to the internal combustion engine has finally given up the ghost. Until now even players like Nissan, which has already announced it is going fully electric, did so with the caveat “except in the United States”.
In Spain, where I live, some ill-informed people still insist that EVs are no good for long journeys; this is a country where you are unlikely to cover more than six hundred kilometers in a single stretch, meaning that recharging an electric vehicle is no problem thanks to the only brand that decided to invest in superchargers, and that now allows the competition to use them. The network was created by a single person (admittedly, a very…
