► The BS-free thinking of Sir Jim Ratcliffe
► Talking common sense on car tech
► Mark Walton applauds no-nonsense vision
Please can we have Sir Jim Ratcliffe as our next transport tsar? Admittedly, the 71-year-old billionaire is busy at the moment, overseeing his chemical giant (Ineos), creating a car firm (Ineos), running a cycling team (Ineos) and buying Manchester United (soon to be renamed Ineos Rovers). I hope he’ll find the time.
If you’re an anti-capitalist neo-Marxist don’t worry, Ratcliffe hasn’t just announced he’s running for office. No, I’m just musing, after watching him in action at the launch of the Ineos Fusilier, Ineos Automotive’s new electric SUV. Interviewed by TV presenter Richard Hammond, Ratcliffe offers the kind of BS-free, Lancashire-born plain speaking that we all long for in public life.
Example: Ratcliffe is asked what he drives in his home city of Monaco. His answer: an electric Smart. And what if he is driving to Courcheval in the Alps? ‘I’d probably take a Grenadier or a G-Wagen,’ he replies, super casual. Yeah, he’d probably take the Mercedes G-Wagen… Wait, what?! The boss of a car manufacturer saying he’d drive a direct rival? Ratcliffe is just being honest and he couldn’t care less.
And then, there he is, Sir Jim, launching a brand new electric car – and does he trot out the usual platitudes? ‘Electric cars are the future of mobility!’ Nope. ‘If I had the choice of a fully electric car or one with a range extender, I know which one I would take, because then you don’t have the range anxiety.’
Ratcliffe seems to have come to the same conclusion as Akio Toyoda, chairman of Toyota, and every other sane person on the planet who looks at battery cars with a cold logic instead of wishful thinking. ‘There are two huge failings of electric cars,’ Ratcliffe says. ‘You cannot always get from A to B and you can’t fill them up.’
The Fusilier (above) started life as a pure battery car but then common sense intervened. ‘We got a long way down that road developing it until a few months ago and then paused for a bit,’ he says. Ratcliffe doesn’t like to just ‘follow the sheep’, he tells us. So a range extender (with a small petrol engine onboard, working as a generator) is being developed, due in showrooms in 2026 or 2027.
Ratcliffe is also scathing about the UK government’s EV-only approach to reducing emissions: ‘I think ultimately they [the government] can’t force a solution down the consumer’s throat that the consumer rejects. Ultimately, they need to find a solution which is acceptable to people, because otherwise they’ll talk with their feet… You can’t sell an electric car at the moment, people don’t want them.’
Ratcliffe goes on: ‘We’re international. We see what’s happening in places like America – there, there’ll be a range of options. In America, the projections for electric cars in 2050 are [that they’ll make up] about 20 to 25 per cent of the [US] car fleet – not 100 per cent, which it is in Europe obviously. The best engineering technology for combustion engines is here in Europe. All these European car companies have been forced to go down the electric route. What we don’t want to do is abandon all that fantastic technology.’
Exactly – but try making these points to the mandarins in Whitehall. The UK’s blinkered, don’t-question-it, single-tech solution is madness. I live in a small market town, with mostly on-street parking, and there are currently six public charging points for the whole town. Six! No one wants to buy an EV you can’t charge and the infrastructure won’t improve until there are more EVs. No wonder electric car sales were down 25 per cent in January 2024 compared to January 2023. Meanwhile, the manufacturers are now looking for more government subsidies to twist consumers’ arms. What a mess.
Meanwhile, I drove the BYD Seal this month. It’s brilliant, a great looking electric sports saloon, like driving a Chinese Alfa Romeo. But is this really what we want? When we’re all sitting there in our Chinese hatchbacks, queuing up for a charging point (like the Russians used to queue at petrol stations), the government will probably think, ‘DOUBLE THUMBS UP!’
God, even I’m believing in conspiracy theories now, politics has become so dystopian. Ratcliffe for president! ‘Wait, what?! The boss of a car manufacturer saying he’d drive a direct rival?’