Alan Rusbridger, editor of The Guardian, drives a car made in India because he wants to save the earth. (And because he doesn’t have to pay road tax for it and gets free parking.) “It does a steady 25 miles per hour, drives like a milk float and might have been designed by six-year-olds,” he says.
Actually, the G-Wiz — that’s what it’s called — was designed in California and made in Bangalore.
I have never seen it in Calcutta (Kolkata), India.
But the editor of the “best daily newspaper on the world wide web” likes this tiny electric car because “it is the greenest car available”.
And it was made by Reva Electric Car Company. That I found out from the website of the car’s British retailer, GoinGreen.
Rusbridger writes he bought it after being nearly run over by a double-decker bus when he fell off his bicycle in London. He must have slipped on a solid metal drain cover, he writes. He didn’t want to commute alone in a Volvo or travel 45 minutes on a tube or a bus. His elder daughter then pointed him to the GoinGreen website. And he is happy with his “up-to-date version of what Noddy and Big Ears might use to nip around the inner congestion charge zone of Toytown”.
The 2.6-metre-long two-door hatchpack actually has room for two adults and two children, says the GoinGreen website. But the editor of The Guardian can make you fall in love with the car.
A pity he had to give up his bicycle, though. The great CP Scott also used to ride a bicycle to work when he was the editor of what was then the Manchester Guardian.
