Transport designer Paul Priestman thinks the way we use cars now is basically mad. “Imagine going on to Dragons Den with this highly explosive fluid and telling them you’re going to use it to run controlled explosions centimetres from people’s legs to propel them around in objects designed to go faster than the law allows,” he says. “They’d never let you near a big city.”
For Priestman, “The car model is broken in London.” He believes the way to fix it is to do everything possible to accelerate the use of electric transport, not by adding thousands more public charging points, as is the prevailing idea, but by creating battery swapping hubs out of shipping containers, newsagents or even old phone boxes.
