Youre pretty much up to date. Its about 3 30am. Now its time for click. Is 2019 the year petrol met its match . Is the italian stallion a pony . The lambo now lame . Are todays best cars electric . Is now the time for us all to switch . Hello, and welcome to a special edition of click. Not top gear, although there are shades of that, i have to say, but this week, were not talking petrol cars like these, were talking about electric cars like these. Not hybrid, not hydrogen or anything else. This week, it is pure electric. Sure, there are other ways to power your car which are good for the environment. Go check them out by all means but this is the year that all electric has really ta ken off. More people are thinking about evs than ever before so in this show, were asking, is now the right time to switch . This week well look at the cost of buying and running them, how far they can go and ask if theyre as clean and green as they might seem. Mark is going to be going for the ride of his life and he is going to be help track down what happens to batteries when were done with them. And dan is going to be reporting on the shiny new models coming to a showroom near you soon. But first, heres lara with a reminder of how we got here. In recent times, all electric took off with the rise of tesla. 2007 saw its first car, the roadster, and yes, thats dan in the passenger seat. 2011 saw nissan and mitsubishi create much more affordable all electric cars, the leaf and myev, and yes, thats spencer in the driving seat. But since then, its been a bit stop start for all electric. Ford killed off its focus electric last year and General Motors had limited success with the chevrolet bolt. And although renault launched the popular zoe, many other big european carmakers have been quieter than an electric motor, until this year. History lesson, done. 0k, dan has been to see europes all electric fight back at this years frankfurt motor show. There was really only one big question for the big execs at the huge german Car Companies at the worlds biggest motor show. Why are they ten years behind tesla in offering us an all electric car . Not each time the fastest or the earliest but if we come, we come, we come very strong. Tesla, a company that has been solely focused on electric vehicle production, you have to give them credit for blazing the trail, but if you look at other entries on the marketplace, from other companies that also do normal cars, so to say, this is really the first time youre getting long range, fully usable, everyday usable electric vehicles coming from mainstream manufacturers. Right, so they wanted to ace it. Well, the stakes are high. Electric may only represent less than 3 of all new car sales last year but vw have taken a close look at them and reckon its the future. Well, its obviously not real. These cool designs actually for the future, maybe. Each car manufacturer brings out some concept ideas. Interestingly on the volkswagen stand, they were all electric. The real car they were launching was the id. 3, a sort of electric golf, with a 205 to 340 mile range depending on the exact model, with prices starting from a competitive 30,000 euros. And a first from vw. They will guarantee the battery for eight years, meaning that if it loses more than a quarter of its full charge when new, they will replace it. But will car buyers trust a firm that swindled the world when it lied about the illegal level of harmful emissions its own diesel car spat out . We invested a lot, really to fulfil our commitment to the c02 targets and its notjust only the c02 targets during driving. For example, the battery cells after a normal life cycle of a car, which is mainly eight years, nine years, the battery cells are still healthy and you can use them, for example, for a second life. We will offer the customer in, not all, but most of the european countries, we are able to offer contract to use green energy also during the driving. Audi hasnt done much in the way of electric for the past 10 years either, although now they have this. Sorry, thats another concept car. Now they have this. Theyve started with the popular style family suv but at more than £70,000, can many families afford it . Yeah, i think there is this perception in the market that i have to pay more of the electric version of the same size vehicle than i would for gas or diesel. I think what you are going to see is, at least at audi, were going into a lot lower segments in order to make electrification much more affordable. There arent many families that could afford 90,000 euros for a car. Sure there are. The e tron started selling this year and has a range of 320 miles and will be joined by a sportier, more expensive electric gt model next year with a mid range suv, think sort of q3, slated for 2021. Over at mercedes, i found something much more affordable. The new smart e042 cabrio blows your hair rather than the budget at a smidge over £25,000, but will struggle to do a 90 mile round trip without plugging in. Itjoins their eqc offering which im told will be joined by over half a dozen more all electric models next year. But surely some things will never lose the roar of a Combustion Engine. Now, when land rover decide to make the defender electric, well, then you know theres a trend going on. It also updates its own software over the year. Overthe air. Even the good Old Fashioned black cab, here seen in white, has made the jump to electric, with 20,000 expected to sell across europe next year, costing drivers less to run. I wonder if taxi fares will fall too. And then there were the sports cars. Lamborghini told me they have no intention of releasing an all electric model any time soon. Ferrari, who werent showing, have a hybrid plan for 2022 but not all electric. So it fell to porsche to take everyones away, and they did. The taycan is porsches first all electric car and it shifts. 0 62 in 3. 2 seconds, with a range of up to 279 miles and a guarantee on the battery. Ok, its £115,000 but thats a 12k saving on its petrol performance equivalent, the 911 actual turbo. Good value, maybe, but i have a feeling that its that vw thatll turn out to be super competitive as an entry model for most. Talking of competition, we saw porsches entry into the electric car market in dans report there but we wanted to test for ourselves just how quick an electric car could be. So weve set up a race. This is a lamborghini hurricane super trofeo. Its v10 petrol engine delivers over 600 horsepower. Its up against a saloon car from tesla, the model s. It sports all wheel drive but its twice as heavy as the lambo, and it sells for about a third of the price. 0ur short drag is just enough for both cars to reach 62mph, the Industry Standard for measuring acceleration. Both cars are in their fastest set ups and whatever happens today, we recommend you dont try this at home. We have several Safety Measures in operation. Most of all, johnny is a professional racing instructor here at drift limits. He does this day in and day are to scare the living daylights out of members of the public. In the passenger seat will be mark, ensuring fair play and probably screaming his head off. And who can we get to give one of the finest sports cars a run for its money in a tesla . Its only top gears the stig im sorry, the stig wasnt available so im standing in. Is that 0k . Its only. Clicks lara lewington. Drivers, start your engines. Ready im a passenger here. Myjob is really simple. Ijust have to observe. Whoa i did brake a bit early but i so clearly won. Im no expert but that was no contest. Thank you, i was not expecting to beat you. Oh, my word what . i know i cant believe it, absolutely smashed me. That was so much fun. That was brilliant. Congratulations. Johnny, commiserations. Listen, youre a professional racing driver. In your opinion, why did that beat this . I know, its absolutely mad, isnt it . I couldnt believe it. It all boils down to the fact that that is electric so the power band is completely linear, its always there, its instantaneous. To be fair, in the lamborghini, ive got three gears to travel through but that, straight line, boom, all the way. Over this kind of a distance, doesnt stand a chance, to be honest. Its always going to be the tesla, hands down. Johnny, thanks. Did you see it . Did you miss it, did you blink . Here it is again. Three, two, one, go hello, and welcome to the week in tech. It was the week that twitter admitted it let Third Party Advertisers see personal details provided by account security. The firm said its addressed the problem but did not say how many users had been targeted. Apple approved and then blocked a controversial hong kong protest app following mounting pressure from china. The crowd sourced app tracks Police Patrols and teargas use amidst political unrest in the region. And the brains behind the lithium irn battery won the nobel prize for chemistry nearly 30 years after their invention first hit the market. The battery tech created byjohn b goodenough, M Stanley Whittingham and Akira Yoshino today powers everything from mobile phones and laptops to electric cars. Global professional racing club the Drone Racing League unveiled its first ever autonomous tone. This features four cameras, four propellers and an nvidia processor. Programmers are set to battle their ai systems, with the winner taking on a human pilot. And finally, how about a spot of lab grow space meet . Israeli cultured steak start up aleph farmsjoined partners to help astronauts on theinternational space station grow the first ever space meat 248 miles from earth. This isnt ready for human consumption just yet but who knows, it could taste out of this world. Light bulbs in our homes, planes that take us on holiday navigating the modern world leaves a lasting impression on our planet. In the uk, a third of emissions are produced by gas guzzlers on the ground and in the air. So the move to electric vehicles should help reduce our carbon footprint. Power stations rather than petrol pumps provide the fuel for electric vehicles but is this enough to help us save the planet . The mixture of fuels used in National Power grids varies by country. Poland for instance gets most of its electricity from burning fossilfuels, whereas frances power stations are nuclear, leading to a much lower carbon footprint. The uks power stations are fuelled by a mixture of fossil fuels, nuclear and renewables. So there is still work to be done to reduce carbon emitting power stations. It is not simply about switching to electric cars. But even when you account for that, and even when you account for all the energy and materials and resources that are going into manufacturing the batteries, the total footprint, the life cycle footprint per kilometre of an ev is on average lower than an internal Combustion Engine vehicle. As long as you are charging vehicles when there is plentiful wind, and nuclear and sun generating on the system, actually electric cars get cleaner and cheaper by their very nature. But if everybody scraps their fossil fuel burning motor in favour of an electric set of wheels, would the grid really be able to cope . If we make the assumption that people plug in their vehicles when they come home, then what we find is that peak requirement means that we need Something Like 15 20 large power stations having to come online for that area. If we move to a system where actually we shape when the charging actually happens within the vehicle, we can more than adequately cover the total Energy Required for you to do your dailyjourneys, it just happens slightly later in the evening or early in the morning. If we are really going to embrace a cleaner, Carbon Emissions free world, we may have to think about transport completely differently. There are some things that are still true even in a world to electric. It is better to walk, better to cycle, better to take public transport. If youre going to take a car, take a small car. If you are going to take a small car, take a small electric car. These things all still apply. Of course, a big part of the green equation is about recycling. So marc has been investigating, what happens to the batteries when they fade, or when the car is headed for the scrapheap . Most of the major Motor Manufacturers are guaranteeing the life of the batteries in their new evs for eight years or 100,000 miles. Some researchers suspect the lithium ion batteries used in electric vehicles could last much longer than that, though. Ultimately we are going to have to deal with the batteries at the end of their useful life. Not only will we have to deal with the batteries as a waste problem, the batteries themselves contain valuable materials, critical materials, and so it really is very much in our interests to try and recover these and reuse them as many times as we can. The uk government has tasked the faraday institution, an independent National Battery research institute, with exhilarating ev growth through innovations in battery technology. Birmingham university is leading a project on Battery Recycling in partnership with faraday. There is every reason to think that we can actually improve and make these processes a lot more efficient, and that is important because the whole point, of course, of the electric revolution is to stop co2 emissions. At the moment there are only a few places in the world that are able to recycle ev lithium ion batteries. Umicore in belgium has the capability to recycle batteries from devices like laptops and mobile phones. It has added ev batteries to its repertoire of recyclables. It is basically a combination of hydro and pyro metallurgy, it is a unique in house built process and actually we are able to refine cobalt, nickel, lithium and copper and also residue of rare earth elements. And these metals, they can infinitely be recycled, they dont lose any of their qualities and can be easily reused in new applications. Recycling old electric car batteries might seem like the most obvious thing to do with them. Butjust because their days out on the open road might be over, that doesnt mean that the batteries themselves cant still be useful. 0ld nissan leaf batteries are helping to power parts of this stadium in amsterdam. The same kind of technology could be used to power homes or even be used as Power Supplies in disaster zones. Many of the batteries, once they come out of a vehicle, that is quite important if you are actually trying to drive a car. But they are still perfectly good for another ten years in other Energy Storage applications. Whether it is recycling or reuse, all of these technologies could help make motoring considerably more environmentally friendly. That was marc on the huge amount of work that still needs to be done to recycle the batteries inside electric cars. Right, this is Vicky Parrott, hello, Vicky Parrott is a long time motoring journalist and now you specialise in electric cars, and you are here to answer some of your questions, so letsjump in the jag. So vicky, earlier we heard that battery warranties are eight years, which i guess is good news, but do you think it should be the worry of the owner that these batteries might not last much longer than that . Do you think in the future we might start leasing cars instead of owning them . Uh, no moreso than we do already, a lot of people lease cars, whether they are electric or not these days, and i would add, most electric cars have battery warranties of eight years or 100,000 miles, but that does not mean you have to throw the car away after that. Battery life is proving to be very good in electric cars, and the warranty is there for peace of mind, it does not mean that after eight years your car wont work any more. We received quite a few questions from reviewers saying they live in apartments or blocks of flats, they dont have private parking, they park on the street, how do they charge an electric vehicle . If you cant charge at home, if you dont have offstreet parking, or some apartments do have hubs these days being built in, then im afraid you just have to check. Zap map. Com is great for telling you where chargers are, and you just have to decide whether you can rely on those public chargers are not. Here is a popular question, i want to know the answer as well, how much does it cost to fill up an electric car compared to a petrol tank . On average a 50 kw h battery, it will cost about £7 to fill up, at a normal domestic charger at your house. How many miles would you get for that . It depends, the new renault zoe will do about 200 miles in real world driving, and that has a 52kw h battery, so that works out at about 3 lip per mile, and an equivalent diesel or petrol car will look more like 11 15p per mile. So it is usefully cheaper, it is half, if not a third cheaper. Do we have enough charging stations in the uk . We have a lot of charging stations in the uk, i think it stands at about 10,000 station and 26,000 charging plugs. I think we need more, certainly in rural parts, but it isnt that bad an infrastructure these days. A petrol car will drive further if it is motorway driving than it will if it is open driving. Is that the same with electric cars or is one milejust one mile regardless of where it is done . No, its flipped actually, it is one of the things that can catch people out with electric cars. Electric cars are less efficient in the motorway than they are around town, you get less brake regen and the electric motor is spinning much faster on the motorway, because it doesnt have gears. So you get less range on the motorway than in town. Vicky, thank you for your time, and some of the ride, thank you for the info. Pleasure. We just have time left to check out a brand new set of charging stations. Dan has been to see europes fastest in milton keynes. Beware, spen, not all electric cars charge up at the same rate. Not so important right now, as most of the 10,000 or so charging stations in the uk after a fairly slow fill up time. But a new set of chargers promised to fill your batteries at a stupidly rapid pace if you bought a car that can handle it. Most of the uks fast charging stations operate at about 50 kilowatts. Thats enough to fill a family car up to about 80 in roughly 45 minutes, depending on conditions. These new superchargers, though, promised to cut that time to just eight minutes. We are saying that high power charging will be identical to petrol engine cars. There will be no difference, it will be easy, simple and seamless. But there is a catch. Not one of these new electric cars released this year are built to take charge that quickly. Although the pump will automatically reduce the power to match what the vehicle can manage. This current car on sale now will charge at 150 kilowatts in around 30 minutes orjust under. Further down the line, in about a years time there will be another vehicle that comes that will sell, which can do that in under ten minutes, with this much faster charger. A0 of these souped up charging stations will roll out across the uk between now and the end of next year, offering many ev motorists a much quicker charge, even if it will take a year or two before they can be used on full power. And im afraid thats all the time we have to talk electric. Are you convinced it is time to switch, or do you still have some doubts . Lets continue the conversation on social media we are on youtube, facebook, instagram and twitter at bbcclick. Thank you for watching this special programme, and we will see you soon. Hello, good morning. Wednesday started on a dull and damp note for many parts of the country. Once that rain cleared away, though, we did see some sunshine. A chance to dry off, though, although a lot of the ground is still saturated, and there are a couple of flood warnings still out there. But following the sunshine, the clearer skies have meant its turned quite chilly, particularly for the eastern side of the uk. Where we had that cloud earlier on, weve now got the clearer skies, but looking out to the west, you can see that swirl of cloud there. Its producing showers or longer spells of rain. It marks the position of what is at the moment quite a deep area of low pressure. Thats drifting towards the uk, already arriving in western areas. Further east, though, with those clearer skies, temperatures may be low enough in eastern scotland to give us a touch of frost. Further west, it will be milder, but youve already got a few showers. The breeze is picking up, and well see more and more showers arriving across the western side of the uk, blown in by some strong and blustery winds, which will also push the showers through the English Channel and then move them inland, into the south east of england and the midlands. But i think, for north east england and north east scotland, it should be largely dry. Should be some decent sunshine. A much better day in north east scotland than it was on wednesday. 13 15 degrees, thats near normal for this time of the year. So, through thursday, increasing numbers of showers. Those showers will continue during thursday evening and thursday night, some of them heavy, accompanied by some rather blustery winds, which will keep the temperatures a bit higher. It should be a milder night, typically 6 8 degrees. We may stay in double figures across more southern parts of england. More sunshine and showers to come on friday. A good deal of them around coastal areas to begin with, but well see them developing inland, and some fairly frequent showers getting blown in on the strongest of the winds in the south west of england and wales. 12 15 degrees, so those numbers at the moment not really changing a great deal. Lets head into the weekend, and remember, at the moment, low pressure is about here. But, as we move into the weekend, the low pressure is moving right across into the uk. Its not as deep an area of low pressure, but it will continue to bring sunshine and showers or longer spells of rain. Longer spells of rain certainly blown in across scotland. The bulk of the showers further south, around coastal areas, developing inland, and with the low pressure right over england and wales, some slow moving heavy and thundery downpours possible. Quite windy and feeling cooler, i think, for northern scotland and for northern ireland. The highest temperatures in the south east of england. So a lot of showers to come on saturday. Through sunday, the showers become fewer. But, with that northerly breeze, it will turn a little bit cooler. For many of us, though, the start of next week should be dry, with some sunshine. This is bbc news. Welcome if you are watching here in the uk, on pbs in america, or around the globe. Im mike embley. Our top stories details emerge of a threatening letter President Trump sent to his turkish counterpart, as the us house of representatives votes overwhelmingly to condemn his decision to pull American Forces from northern syria. Meanwhile, the fighting in syria continues. Russian and Syrian Government forces have advanced into positions once held by the American Forces. Frantic efforts are still under way to reach a last minute brexit deal, on the eve of an eu summit in brussels. The Pro Independence leader of catalonia condemns violent protests by fellow separatists that have rocked the spanish region for a third night in a row