Alternative Powered Vehicles

Most MK citizens will be familiar with the Smart Car. The Smart Car was designed as a small city car, capable of carrying two adults and their shopping in comfort. Conceived in Switzerland by the people who gave us Swatch watches, it was intended to appeal to the young at heart and environmentally aware.

Of course, the watchmakers soon discovered that building a car wasn't quite the same as assembling a watch, so sold their designs to Mercedes-Benz, who are putting them together in a smart new factory in Eastern France. But if the Smart Car was the latest thing at the end of the twentieth century, now there's a new arrival for the twenty-first… the Th!nk Car from Ford. This looks much like the Smart Car and was designed as a small city car, capable of carrying two adults and their shopping in comfort. Conceived in Norway, it was intended to appeal to the young at heart and environmentally aware.

So both have catchy 5 letter names and come from countries with mountains, very few large cities and no history of making cars. So what's the essential difference between the Smart and the Th!nk? The Smart Car is conventional in one respect – it uses a lean burn petrol engine which should be capable of 47mpg around town (and rather more it you get past the city limits). It is designed to offer excellent fuel economy and to be easy to park in small spaces in European city centres. The Th!nk car is about the same size, and anything but conventional as it relies on water-cooled Ni-Cd electric batteries that can be charged up from a normal power point.

The makers of the Th!nk claim it will travel for 53 miles on a full charge, which should take about 8 hours (overnight would be ideal). By our reckoning that will get you from Stony Stratford to Tesco's in Kingston and back twice in a day – which should be enough for anyone. And the Th!nk costs just 40p in electricity compared to around £3 to drive the equivalent distance in a Smart Car.

So are both cars the answers to all Milton Keynes's environmental problems? Well, no, if we're being quite honest. Both are certainly better than rushing to the City Centre in your old Sierra, swallowing petrol at 30mpg. And the Th!nk is also remarkably quiet at its top speed of just 56mph, with just a swish of tyre noise (think of that milk float without its rattling bottles). But neither is pollution-free. In terms of Carbon Dioxide (CO2), the main contributor to Global Climate Change, the Smart Car will emit 113g per kilometre and the Th!nk about 35g per kilometre (we think: despite UK car taxation being based on this measure, the Company's documentation fails to mention an exact figure). In contrast your old Sierra is likely to be pumping out about 200g of the stuff, so the Th!nk is clearly better. But a half full MK Metro bus, chugging along on smelly old diesel, also ends up at about 35g per kilometre and a bicycle is responsible for almost no emissions. And environmentalists are very concerned about those Ni-Cd batteries, as Cadmium is potentially a very nasty pollutant. So it is no more than two cheers for the Th!nk, if you could find one.

For there's another problem: at the moment you can only buy the Th!nk in Norway or, if you are very quick and can snap up one of just twenty available, in London. Ford will not be selling any Th!nk cars in Milton Keynes for the foreseeable future. You could just about drive one here from London, but it would run out of power as you arrived. Which we think is a shame, as we'd like to be able to compare them to the Smart Car at first hand.

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