Over the summer I visited a friend in Canada who now drives a Nissan Leaf electric car.
He explained that he rarely drives more than 50km a day and as the car has a 200km range he generally only charges it overnight once or twice a week.
He is saving a substantial amount of money in petrol costs and the driving experience is almost no different than a petrol car except that it has much faster acceleration than the equivalent petrol car which would be a Tiida.
This got me thinking. Here in Bahrain we are a small island about 50km top to toe and about 20km wide that means that almost everybody who drives a car will rarely do more than 100km a day (school run twice) and most will hardly do more than 50km a day.
Bahrain is therefore ripe for a mass switch from petrol to electric cars. I doubt if anyone except a handful of young petrolheads would even notice the difference in how their car was powered.
Countries in the West have made bold statements recently about no more petrol cars to be sold after 2040. That is still over 20 years away and to my mind far too long a run-up period. It would be a tremendously bold and visionary decision if the Bahrain government were to decree that no petrol cars be sold by 2020.
The effect on the driving public would be minimal but the effect on the country would be enormous. Bahrain at present subsidises each and every litre of petrol sold to the public. All these litres of petrol could then be sold onto the world market at the full price therefore earning Bahrain a lot more money.
Perhaps they could use some of this money to offer a scrappage scheme to get the old gas guzzlers off the road and into the crusher where they belong.
Since we are not talking about reducing the actual number of cars on the road we will still have all the traffic jams at all the usual places at all the usual times. But instead of sitting pumping out fumes into the atmosphere there would be no usage of power at all while at rest, except for the power used to run the AC and radio.
And while Bahrain does not suffer as much as Dubai does from smog, it would still be a significant improvement in air quality.
There will be an issue of the increase in electricity demand but Bahrain is now in a much better position regarding power generation than it was 20 years ago when we regularly had load-shedding.
As most of these cars would be charging overnight when power demand from offices and air conditioners is at its lowest then it would not be a problem. More far-sighted people would put solar panels on their roofs and a bank of batteries which would charge the cars for free.
There are of course many other implications of such a momentous decision but think how it would make little Bahrain look in the eyes of the rest of the world.
A whole country switching to electric vehicles before anyone else and not just any country but a Gulf oil exporting country. It would provide the world with leadership in this much debated topic.
Let us please start a discussion about this so that we can assist the leadership to make this great bold and brave choice.