Here is something we bet you never knew! The first commercially successful internal combustion engine was created by Étienne Lenoir around 1859 and the first modern internal combustion engine was created in 1876 by Nikolaus Otto.

Yes, they have been around that long!

However, the fact is that family cars didn’t really come into fashion until the 1940’s – and that’s only 75 years ago, which is simply one lifetime. Indeed, if you had a family car in the 1940’s you were regarded as rather rich! Today of course, most families have at least one car, and some have two, three, or four - one for mum, one for dad, and one for each of the two kids.

Unfortunately, of course, what we didn’t know back in the 1940’s was the appalling effect on the climate that these beasts would have. It simply never crossed the minds of those who owned a car that it would cause damage to the environment. And that might not have been the case if cars had been only the prerogative of the rich, so that there were not that many of them.

However, as with many things, the motor car became something to which every family aspired, thanks, largely to Henry Ford – and that is in no way meant as a criticism. Nobody, including Ford, could have foreseen the damage that the internal combustion engine would do to the planet.

If you think about it, virtually none of us realised the damage that plastic would do to our planet until – what – five years ago? You picked up a plastic bag from the supermarket and never gave it a second thought. Why would you? It was just something in which to carry home your purchases, and which you threw in the bin when you got home. So what?

Today, we have learned more. There is no criticism of anybody: it is just that we simply didn’t know, and it had never occurred to us what damage motor vehicles could do to the planet. Heck, it was less than ten years ago that our government was persuading us to buy diesel cars because they caused less environmental damage than petrol!

Erm. Yes. Right.

There is an old saying that we live and learn, and it is absolutely true.

Now we understand the damage that we are doing to the planet by using fossil fuels and driving petrol and diesel vehicles – even though we have been doing that for over 100 years and never given it a moment’s consideration. Now that we know better, we are changing over to electric vehicles and this is going to happen sooner than you may think.

One of the reasons is the development of battery techniques which are going to allow electric vehicles to travel for further distances on a single charge than they can do today. Another is that our government has realised that it s essential to wean us off petrol and diesel and has taken steps in that direction, by introducing the OLEV grant.

If you don’t fully understand what that is, it is a grant that the government will give you to enable you to install an electric vehicle charger in your home, and it is a considerable amount. How does £500 sound?

Not only that, in Scotland, the Energy Savings Trust will give you a further £300 on top of that, which combined means that almost all of the cost of installing an EV charger in your home is covered by the grants. Add to that the fact that the cost of running an electric vehicle is about half the price per mile of a petrol or diesel one, and why wouldn’t you?

On top of that, an electric car doesn’t need oil changes, new spark plugs every ten thousand miles, and so on, because it doesn’t use spark plugs or oil. So an electric car benefits the environment and your pocket as well.

In addition, if you run a business, you can also get an OLEV workplace grant to install electric vehicle charging points at your office, factory, or whatever, so that your staff can come to work and charge up their cars during the day. What’s not to like?