Yesterday (April 16), the British Government officially announced that it plans to subsidise the purchase of an electric car to the tune of between £2,000 and £5,000, in an attempt to prize punters away from their planet killing internal combustion engines.

The subsidies won't come into affect until a few decent electric cars are available - the Government estimates that to be 2011 at the earliest, about when the Chevy Volt hits showrooms - and we're not sure quite what qualifies someone for the cash, nor how the amount will be set. We do know that it's coming from a £250m scheme to 'deliver a green motoring transformation', but quite how that money will be divvied up is a bit foggy too. Oh, apart from the £20m that will be taken from it to help set up an electric charging infrastructure... and that's where it gets really messy.

What we now have is a situation in which makers with electric cars on their books already (like Smart, whose 'ed' was the electric best seller last year), or who are about to (like BMW, whose plug-in MINI E is undergoing trials in Germany and America) have jumped on the unique marketing opportunity to support the plans, which were outlined yesterday by transport minister Geoff Hoon and business secretary Lord Mandelson.

We've also got Elektromotive and JJAD rubbing their positive anodes together (well, trying to) because they'll benefit directly from any kind of cash incentive. The latter company is maker of the P1-E electric supercar, now sensing even more scope to flog its electric powertrain to all and sundry. The former is a company that makes electric charging points, and was yesterday bounding with glee, releasing a press statement that said it envisioned "an Elektrobay on every street in the country." Of course it does. And it's ironic that while most of the scheme's detractors seem to be lamenting the mere £20m on offer to set up an adequate electric infrastructure, the one company well versed in actually making it happen seems to think £20m is a great idea.

Those detractors are, of course, the political opportunists who, never ones to miss out on a golden name-calling opportunity, have come out in force. Conservative Shadow Chancellor George Osborne was first out of the blocks, claiming the plan is like "giving people a grant to buy an internal combustion engine, without bothering to set up any petrol stations." Ouch. The Liberal Democrats were even angrier - and evidently have a sharper set of scriptwriters - because spokesman Norman Baker claimed that the policy was "like adding a small dab of green paint to the rusty hulk of the Government's failed transport policy." Take that, Gordon.

And all this is without considering the wider issues of the transport sector's actual effect on the carbon debate, which will very possibly form the basis of round two of this particular scrap. According to the UK committee on climate change, road traffic actually accounts for no more than a quarter of the country's total carbon emissions. Therefore, there's a school of thought that in reality the car is an environmental scapegoat that nowhere near merits the negative attention it gets, and that the extolled electric vehicle is by no means the saviour of the planet it purports to be.

That's because generating electricity is often a dirty business, especially when coal is used to do it, and negates the overall environmental benefit of electric power. Nuclear power is cleaner to generate, but it too is controversial for different reasons. Then there's the battery issue: mining the lithium needed to make car batteries is energy intensive, and is contentious for the negative effects it has on the surrounding landscapes. It is also labour intensive, and expensive, to actually make electric cars - estimates put it at double the cost of a conventional car in some cases - because the technology is so new, and it's a small-scale business.

But then, it won't be a small-scale business if more of us are encouraged to take up the electric gauntlet and ditch fossil fuels for good. And, fundamentally, that's why many are demanding more from the Government. The RAC's Stephen Glaister, for example, made the point that "if the whole £250m were divided up so £5,000 is allocated per person, this would only put an extra 50,000 electric cars on the road - out of an annual total of some 2.7 million cars sold in the UK." And that proves two things: that nobody actually knows what the Government is planning to do with this money, and that it's probably not enough anyway.

But, as glass half full types would say, something is better than nothing. And if the reality of electric cars ends up anything like the reality of the Tesla Roadster or the MINI E for surreal excitement, bring on the charge, we say.

Mark Nichol - 17 Apr 2009